Nieuwe Haring

It's always puzzled us why NYC doesn't have or can't sustain a Dutch restaurant. We've had so many great Dutch foods that we think people would embrace, like pannekoeken, frites, herring, ossenworst, poffertjes, croquettes. (Seriously, a FEBO in the East Village makes perfect sense to us.) For a while, we thought we might have to do a rijsttafel for the Dutch portion of the World Cup challenge, but even though that's a hallmark of cuisine in the Netherlands, that's really more Indonesian cuisine, so we were hoping for something else. Luckily, before the World Cup started, the perfect idea hit me - we could go to the Grand Central Oyster Bar and get some of the herring that they specially fly in from the Netherlands every summer!

We visited Amsterdam back in 2010 and it was there that we had our first taste of Dutch herring. We went in the fall so it wasn't the season for "new herring" (nieuwe haring in Dutch). New herring is the first catch of the season, the newly matured fish, and we've been going to the Grand Central Oyster Bar every year for the past few years to get our herring fix. Although the Oyster Bar has lots of varieties of seafood, this definitely counts as Dutch for us since they fly the herring in daily from Scheveningen in the Netherlands (a seaside area near the Hague that we thought about visiting except the day we visited the Hague we were running late and it was raining).

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We prefer sitting at the counters at the Oyster Bar (instead of the dining room), so we headed over there and placed our order for some Dutch herring. After ordering, they gave us our complimentary plates of bread and butter. Those flatbreads are crisp and tasty.

We each got an appetizer of nieuwe maatjes herring filet ($7), which comes with one piece of herring (split), some egg crumbles, grated raw onion and chopped chives.

Before our first visit for nieuwe herring, we had only really had it in sandwiches in Amsterdam. It's quite good on a plate like this, very refreshing and light. The fish is so fresh and doesn't have an overpowering fishy flavor at all. Eggs, chives and raw onions are a great accompaniment. The traditional way to consume this is to lift it by the tail and eat it. A tried that method one year, but we usually just eat it piece by piece with fork and knife. Lasts longer and we can savor every bite.

We didn't want to get main courses after our herring plates so we decided to split another appetizer. We got the grilled Spanish cuttlefish (sepia) with lemon oil and French gray sea salt ($11.95). That was really good. It had a delicate flavor and the cuttlefish was grilled just to the point of tenderness. It was almost like being back in Barcelona with their amazing grilled seafood tapas (other than the price tag).

We initially decided to go to the Oyster Bar for our World Cup visit, but we're also going to count this visit towards our WorldEats challenge. We've been talking a lot about WorldEats and our slow journey through the Caribbean, and we've decided yet again to evolve the challenge a little bit. Instead of attempting to do it geographically (but allowing ourselves to go out of order), we can jump around freely, but we'll still try to do each country we pick as a single unit so we can really get a taste for the cuisine. Since the new herring is the only thing we know of at the moment for the Netherlands, I guess WorldEats for the Netherlands is done for now. We would definitely go back and visit more places if any should come up in our journey. We'd love to have a FEBO here!