Café 't Mandje, Amsterdam

About Café 't Mandje

Café 't Mandje has been on the Zeedijk since 1927, when 25-year-old Bet van Beeren took over a bar called the Amstelstroom from her uncle and renamed it after the basket, 't mandje, her mother used to bring her food in each day. Bet, an out lesbian known as the queen of the Zeedijk, ran a famously tolerant room where sailors, sex workers, and queer women mixed at a time when that simply wasn't done elsewhere; on Queen's Day the billiard table came out so men could dance with men and women with women. It's often called Amsterdam's first real gay café. After Bet died in 1967 her sister Greet kept it going until 1982, then preserved the interior intact for a quarter-century before the bar reopened in 2008, which is why the walls, the bric-a-brac, and the neckties hanging from the ceiling still read like a living museum. It's small and unpretentious, more a working brown café with a century of queer history than a nightlife stop, and worth a drink for anyone who wants to stand inside the actual room where Amsterdam's gay scene started.