Johannes van Dam

Johannes van Dam 2012

Johannes van Dam (* 1946 in Amsterdam ; † September 18, 2013 in Amsterdam) was a Dutch journalist and gastronomy critic. Van Dam regularly wrote restaurant reviews and other culinary articles for the Amsterdam daily Het Parool.

Career

Van Dam studied medicine and psychology and was from 1967 to 1981 a. a. works for Het Vrije Volk and Haagse Post . He then ran a bookstore in Amsterdam that specialized in cookbooks. From 1986 he wrote articles for the Dutch magazine Elsevier . In 1989 he sold his bookstore and devoted himself exclusively to writing culinary columns for Het Parool and the Belgian daily De Morgen, next to Elsevier. Mediocre or even devastating restaurant reviews by Johannes van Dam in Het Parool sometimes meant that the restaurants in question had to close their doors because the readers generally fully trusted the judgment of his reviews. Restaurants with very good reviews, on the other hand, could trust that there would be an extreme rush of visitors. Many restaurants even posted copies of the positive reviews in the entrance areas of their establishments. In recent years he has been rumored to write much milder reviews. He himself attributed this to the fact that, thanks in part to his efforts, the gastronomic level in Amsterdam was now significantly higher than in previous years. Johannes van Dam published a culinary reference work entitled De Dikke Van Dam in 2005 (he was quite corpulent himself, but the book was more than 850 pages). Together with Joop Witteveen, he has built up a huge gastronomic library with 60,000 titles over the years, which is gradually being transferred to the University of Amsterdam. He suffered from heart and kidney problems as well as diabetes for a long time and finally died on September 18, 2013 in an Amsterdam hospital.

Web links

• Restaurant critic Johannes van Dam (66) has died