Johannes van Dam

Johannes van Dam ( born 1946 in Amsterdam, † September 18, 2013 in Amsterdam) was a Dutch journalist and food critic. Van Dam was a regular restaurant reviews as well as other culinary products for the Amsterdam newspaper Het Parool.

Career

Van Dam studied medicine and psychology, and was from 1967 to 1981, inter alia, working for Het Vrije people and the Haagse Post. Then he ran a bookshop in Amsterdam which specializes in cookbooks. In 1986 he wrote for the Dutch magazine Elsevier. In 1989 he sold his bookstore and devoted himself exclusively to writing culinary columnist for Het Parool and the Belgian daily De Morgen, next Elsevier. Mediocre or even scathing restaurant reviews by Johannes van Dam in Het Parool led sometimes happens that the relevant restaurants have had to close their doors because readers fully trusted the judgment of his reviews universally. Restaurants with very good reviews, however, were confident that there would be an extreme number of visitors. Many restaurants even hung copies of the positive reviews on the entrance to their establishment. In recent years, it was said that he would write a lot more lenient reviews. He attributed this to the fact that the gastronomic level in Amsterdam, also thanks to his efforts, meanwhile, was significantly higher than in previous years. Johannes van Dam, published in 2005, a culinary reference book titled De thickness Van Dam ( he himself was quite corpulent, but the book also had more than 850 pages). Together with Joop Witteveen he has built over the years a huge gastronomic library with 60,000 titles that will be gradually transferred to the University of Amsterdam. He suffered long from heart and kidney problems, diabetes, and eventually passed away on September 18, 2013 in an Amsterdam hospital.