Oudt Leyden has occupied the same 17th-century building on the Steenstraat for over a century — the pancake house downstairs has been serving its menu of forty-plus pancake variations since 1953, and the upstairs fine-dining room (Restaurant Koetshuis) has been a Leiden institution for almost as long. The combination is unusual and enormously charming: ground-floor casual feasting, first-floor proper Dutch fine-dining, both housed in the same dramatic historic building.
The pancake menu is famous and famously good. The classic boterhamspek (with bacon) and the apple-and-cinnamon are the order-every-time choices, but the kitchen happily produces savoury and sweet versions in unusual combinations — pancake with smoked salmon and crème fraîche, pancake with caramelised onion and Dutch farmhouse cheese, the elaborate Pannenkoek De Sjef with seven separate toppings that has its own page in the menu. The portions are large, the laughter is loud, and the staff are entirely at ease with the pancake-feast format.
Upstairs is more serious. Restaurant Koetshuis offers a four-course menu of traditional Dutch and Franco-Dutch cooking — North Sea sole, slow-cooked Dutch beef, an excellent rabbit terrine, a properly French wine list that takes the room more seriously than its downstairs reputation might suggest. The dining room is dressed with original Delft tiles, a proper fireplace, and the kind of historic-Dutch atmosphere that has become rare in modern restaurants.
For a team dinner in Leiden — an after-conference celebration, a department outing, a family birthday for any age — the combination of the famous pancakes and the genuinely atmospheric room makes Oudt Leyden the city's most reliable choice for groups of six or more.
