The Best Restaurants in Eindhoven, the Netherlands

Radio Royaal is part of Eindhoven’s innovative Strijp-S quarter, a rejuvenated district of former industrial buildings that was once the hub of Philips manufacturing. Today the area is home to creative spaces such MU Artspace and the Natlab arthouse cinema. Radio Royaal itself is housed in a building that was once the site’s power station. The spacious locale has been adapted around culinary needs, but it still retains an industrial charm with vertical iron girders and some old equipment still in place – albeit now safely disconnected.

Opened in 2013, and holding a Michelin star since 2016, Zarzo is renowned for its superb food and exceptional service. The ultra-chic subterranean dining room in the basement has an airy feel as the floor above has been removed, creating a large high-ceilinged space. The exquisite dishes are created by chef-patron Adrian Zarzo, and each is a fine display of modern international cuisine, with hints of inspiration from Zarzo’s birthplace of Valencia in Spain. The wine list is also one of the city’s finest.

A little off the beaten track just outside the city centre, this friendly place is worth seeking out to experience something a little different. The chef-patron at Doyy hails from Azerbaijan, and he uses distinctive hints of his national cuisine to inject his own signature into a changing menu of stylish modern European dishes. The chic interior is dominated by a photographic mural covering an entire wall, in the form of windows looking out onto a twilight view of Baku, the Azerbaijan capital on the Caspian Sea coast.

Refined but affordable is the deal at this laidback venue with a terrace on Wilhelminaplein, a quiet square just west of the city centre. The wooden-floored interior is elegant yet simple and informal, with a cosy relaxed atmosphere. In addition to the set dinner menus, you can order soups, rolls and club sandwiches at lunchtime. High tea, wine and beer are also served mid-afternoon, and 1910 enjoys a fine reputation for its wine and food pairings.

This chic bistro is midway along central Kleine Berg, which is home to two dozen other bars and restaurants. The fashionably appointed cosy interior features booth tables with button-back leather bench seating. Welp has earned a local reputation for its constantly changing fish specials, but the steaks here also deserve attention. Between lunch and dinner, you can drop in for high tea, high wine, or high gin & tonic, or you can simply order a pre-dinner aperitif and a bar snack.

Having begun life as a squat, Effenaar has been the beating heart of Eindhoven’s contemporary music scene for half a century. The original building once housed a linen factory, but was later demolished to make way for a concert venue. The airy modern restaurant offers diners a choice of three-course menus that change on a regular basis, or you can order dishes individually. There’s an attractive outdoor terrace on the site of the original factory; only a few walls remain, but the space has been landscaped into a plant-filled pond.

A café has occupied the site where De Gaper now sits since 1917. The simply furnished, laid-back and cosy first-floor restaurant on Wilhelminaplein adds new dishes to its repertoire every two weeks in order to tailor its menu around fresh, seasonal produce. But besides the seasonal fare, it also serves signature specialities such as charcoal-grilled Chateaubriand fillet steak with triple-fried chips. The restaurant is known for its impressive selection of international beers and wines, which you can also enjoy in the Proeflokaal pub on the floor below.

This spacious building in the south of Eindhoven houses two separate restaurants. There’s a palatial ground-floor dining room offering a pan-Asian menu of predominantly sushi and sashimi, but also peking duck, Thai tom yam soup and Indonesian satay. Meanwhile, a separate dining room on the second floor features dishes that are created before your eyes on a Japanese-style teppanyaki grill.

Located in a semi-rural spot in Tongelre, east of the city centre, De Karpendonkse Hoeve was first awarded a Michelin star in 1979 and has proudly held onto it ever since, making it one of the longest-standing high-end restaurants in the Netherlands. The beautifully appointed airy interior has large windows at the rear looking out onto a park and Karpendonkse Plas, the city’s largest lake. The menu revolves around fresh, local ingredients and includes dishes inspired by French, Dutch and International cuisine.

Enjoying a prime spot on Eindhoven’s main square, long-standing De Vooruitgang was severely damaged by a kitchen fire in 2013, but it rose from the ashes in spectacular fashion two years later. The adventurous interior design makes it appear as if one side wall is a stacked series of industrial metal staircases, while the wall opposite is a vertical garden. The best place to appreciate the view is from the mezzanine above the main dining area. The menu is almost as daring and adds a modern twist to Dutch pub grub standards.

PHOOD Kitchen is a vegan-friendly restaurant that emphasises home-grown natural produce. Indoor trees bring a sense of the outdoors into the spacious high-ceilinged industrial interior – a former dairy boiler room – while a tall brick chimney dominates the outdoor terrace. Ingredients such as salad leaves and shitake mushrooms are grown on site in a waste-conscious urban farm, visible in the semi-open cellar below the main dining area. Dishes on a revolving menu are largely but not exclusively vegan, always packed with flavour and beautifully presented. PHOOD also has live music some nights.

Based on the site of a former gasworks, Fifth NRE is a sprawling complex that includes a concert venue, a coffee roaster, a cocktail bar and a function room. The main dining area, appropriately called the Main, is an airy affair with industrial-chic décor and alcove seating on one side. The menu mixes pan-European classics and modern Dutch originals, and dinners always include at least one fish, meat and veggie option. Light meals are also served in the bar area, where DJs play at weekends, and there is regular live music with an emphasis on jazz, funk and soul.

Kazerne takes its name from the fact that one of the buildings it occupies was formerly a military police barracks. The second building, once a warehouse, is now both an exhibition space where up-and-coming artists show their latest installations and an industrial-chic bar and restaurant that serves modern takes on classic Italian dishes. The adjoining ex-barracks houses a separate fine-dining restaurant, Benz at Kazerne, which offers refined Nordic-inspired dishes prepared by a Swedish chef.