Albert Cuyp Market

The Albert Cuyp has run down its street in De Pijp since 1905, when the city corralled the neighbourhood's freelance pushcart chaos into a licensed market. Some 260 stalls now line the kilometre between Ferdinand Bolstraat and Van Woustraat, Monday to Saturday, selling roughly everything: North Sea fish and twenty kinds of olives, bike locks, fabric by the metre, Surinamese spices, cut flowers at half the Bloemenmarkt's prices, and socks in bulk. It's a working market for a working neighbourhood first, and a tourist attraction a distant second — which is exactly why it's worth the tram ride.

The eating is the event. The fresh-baked stroopwafel — pressed while you watch, caramel still liquid, roughly the diameter of your face — is the market's signature and worth every queue; the famous stall mid-market has the longest line, and the bakery competitors either side are 95% as good with none of it. Beyond that: raw herring with onions eaten the Dutch way (dangled by the tail if you're committed), kibbeling (fried cod bites) in paper cones, warm poffertjes under icing sugar, and Gouda aged to crystals from the cheese stalls, vacuum-packed on request for the flight home.

Go hungry, go before noon — the stalls are fully set by 10 AM and the coach-tour wave arrives after lunch — and bring some cash; most food stalls take cards now, but not all, and the ATMs on the street have queues. Saturday is the full-throttle version, Monday the sleepy one.

De Pijp around the market is Amsterdam's best graze-and-wander quarter: the Sarphatipark two streets south for eating your haul, brown cafés and third-wave coffee in equal measure, and the Heineken Experience five minutes' north when the stalls start packing up at five.