The Best Coffee in Jordaan (That Locals Actually Go To)
Skip the tourist cafés on the main canals. The real coffee is two streets back, in places with no Instagram signs and no English menus.
The Jordaan is full of cafés. Most of them are fine — clean, reliable, good enough. A few of them are genuinely worth going out of your way for, and almost none of those have a presence on any platform you’ve heard of. This is a guide to the latter.
Lot Sixty One on Kinkerstraat is the one that’s usually mentioned first, and for once the reputation is deserved. They roast their own beans, the space is serious without being pretentious, and the filter coffee is some of the best in the city. It’s a twenty-minute walk from the main Jordaan drag, which is why it doesn’t get the tourist crowds.
Screaming Beans on Hartenstraat is smaller and more central, which means it does get some tourist traffic — but the quality hasn’t suffered for it. The espresso is consistently excellent, and they serve simple food if you’re looking for something to eat.
For something completely different: Café Brecht on Weteringschans is technically on the edge of the Jordaan but close enough. Named after Bertolt Brecht, it feels like a Berlin café transported to Amsterdam — mismatched furniture, good coffee, and an atmosphere that makes you want to sit for three hours reading something difficult.
The worst thing you can do in the Jordaan is pick a café based on how it looks from the outside. The ones with chalkboard signs advertising oat milk lattes in four languages are uniformly mediocre. Walk past them and find the ones where the coffee machine is the most interesting thing in the room. +++