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Walk into any Dutch brown café on a weekday evening and you’ll see, on half the tables, a little dish of small brown spheres with a pot of mustard beside them. Those are bitterballen, and if you leave the Netherlands without trying them you haven’t really been.
What they actually are
A bitterbal is a small, crumb-coated, deep-fried ball of beef ragout. Inside the crispy outside there’s a molten, velvety filling of slow-cooked beef, roux, nutmeg, and a little parsley. They’re served hot (very hot — careful on the first bite), with sharp Dutch mustard for dipping, and almost always with a glass of beer.
They’re close cousins of the kroket (croquette), the larger cousin of the same thing, served in a sausage shape and often eaten in a bread roll for lunch. But bitterballen are specifically the bar-snack version: round, bite-sized, and meant to be shared while you’re drinking.
Where the name comes from
The “bitter” in bitterbal has nothing to do with taste. In Dutch, bittertje is an old-fashioned word for an aperitif — specifically jenever (Dutch gin) served as a pre-dinner drink. The bar snacks you ate with your bittertje became “bitter-gerechten” (bitter dishes), and the little fried balls specifically became bitterballen. The association with jenever is now mostly gone — people eat them with beer these days — but the name stuck.
How to eat one properly
Here is the actual sequence, as practiced in every brown café in the Netherlands:
- Wait. They come out dangerously hot. The filling is liquid lava.
- Bite off the top to let steam escape. (If you bite straight in, the filling will burn the roof of your mouth and you will remember it forever.)
- Dip the exposed filling in mustard.
- Eat in two bites, alternating with sips of beer.
- Order another round.
Where to try them
Almost anywhere. The best ones in Amsterdam are at Café Luxembourg, near Spui, or Café Hoppe on the Spui itself. In Utrecht, try Olivier on the Achter Clarenburg. In Haarlem, In Den Uiver is a local institution. But honestly — the bitterballen at almost any Dutch bar will be fine. They’re one of those national dishes that’s hard to get badly wrong.