Little Collins: Specialty Coffee in De Pijp, Amsterdam

Little Collins, De Pijp

There's a particular kind of café that Melbourne does better than almost anywhere, the one where the coffee is serious but nobody's precious about it, where the food menu is ambitious without being fussy, and where you can arrive at noon and still feel like you're in the right place. Little Collins, founded by Australians and rooted in exactly that sensibility, has been running that playbook in De Pijp since 2012.

Walk in on a Wednesday evening and the room feels different from a standard Amsterdam koffiezaak. The kitchen is still firing. The bar is doing cocktails. Someone at the next table is eating 18-hour slow-cooked ribs. The espresso menu is short and executed on the same terms you'd expect from a Melbourne neighbourhood café, milk options include Bonsoy and almond, which tells you something about who the regulars are and what they expect.

The coffee itself is competent and consistent. The roaster isn't named on the menu, which is a mild frustration for anyone who wants to trace the supply chain, but the extraction reads as clean and the flat whites are well-textured. This is not a destination for filter geeks or single-origin chasers, the coffee here plays a supporting role to a food programme that genuinely earns its reputation.

And the food is worth your attention. The Turkish eggs, poached, served with chilli butter, yogurt, lentils, green beans, dukkah, and Turkish bread, are the kind of dish that makes you understand why people queue. The French toast with poached pear is restrained and balanced where it could easily be cloying. The Kimchi Bloody Mary signals clearly that this is a place that takes brunch drinks as seriously as brunch plates.

On weekends, expect to wait. The walk-in-only policy and the neighbourhood's foot traffic from the Albert Cuypmarkt mean the room fills fast. Weekday mornings are a different proposition, quieter, more local, the kind of crowd that has a usual order. If you're visiting Amsterdam and trying to understand why the city's café scene has shifted so decisively toward the Australian model over the past decade, Little Collins is a useful reference point. It's been doing this longer than most.

Not the place to open a laptop. Very much the place to order something with a poached egg and take your time.