All the Best Coffeeshops of Amsterdam – Rated!
Lilly Likes have gone to exhaustive lengths to rate and review all of the coffeeshops of Amsterdam, for your reading pleasure. Right here on our site, you can find all manner of places to eat, drink, smoke, and generally have a good time, nestled calmly within our pages, just waiting to pounce on your eyeballs.
With that ghastly greeting out the way, let’s show you around. If coffeeshops aren’t your thing (haha) then head to the King’s Cross cafe/bar for some real snacks and less smoke. What if you have been in Amsterdam a hundred times and you have seen everything? Then head out of the city with our guide to things to do there, too. We really have been about a bit.
Now that’s sorted, let’s put the Atlas Cafe under the microscope to see how it measures up to the other coffee shops we have reviewed.
Atmosphere and Vibe
Atlas coffeeshop is in the north of Amsterdam, so it’s a fair walk out away from the centre. Not only that, but it is situated in a quiet, residential area of the city, where boisterous tourists pretty much never go. These factors combine to make a friendly, local-feeling cafe, where everyone knows everyone else by name.
While this is great for the natives, it has the potential to make any tourist feel a bit like an outsider here. Nevertheless, the welcome is friendly, the staff are knowledgeable, and the weed is good. Atlas have a small menu with fantastic prices as a result of being off the beaten track. Throughout the Covid crisis, they have managed to stay open for takeaway only.
When you go inside, it is colourful and inviting. There is local art on the walls, as well as the traditional wooden wall effect. We give them 4/5 for atmosphere and vibe. It’s pleasant ,calm, relaxed, and the opposite of everything we associate with the city. We’re not quite sure how they did that.
Munchies and Drinks
This is a small Amsterdam coffee shop with a limited client base and not much in the way of food. It has the obligatory coffee machine of course, and will sell you the full range of espresso options as long as they are simple, but other than that, it isn’t somewhere you go to have lunch.
The munchies are confined to whatever edibles have been baked that week and a few other products. You might get some crisps and some cold juice, for example, but don’t expect a chef to cook for you.
All in all, we have no choice but to give them a 3/5 for munchies and drinks. This is a local place with little going on in coffee shop terms. It reeks of a marijuana dispensary where coffee is an after thought. There’s nothing wrong with this, except if you like a good mocha… like Lilly.
Products/Edibles (420)
This might be the area where other coffeeshops make their scores back, but again, the Atlas leaves a little to be desired. Why? Because it was never aimed at tourists to begin with. It is for the people of Amsterdam to come to and get their weed at good prices, without having to pay for ridiculous tourist add-ons.
So the choice in weed might be limited, but you get good rates. Where you might pay 14 euro in the city centre for a gram, here you will pay ten. It’s still expensive when compared with smaller towns and Rotterdam, but it’s cheap for Amsterdam North.
The most up-to-date menu we have says the weed choices are:
- Amnesia, Lemon, and Silver haze are their cheapest products.
- Blue Diamond, G13, and Enemy of the State are their more expensive ones.
- Pure weed joints, Hazegruis and Sheeva.
- Hashish of Atlas own grow and Super Polm.
It’s a limited menu with a big heart and a lot of local love in it. We give them a 4/5 because we love everywhere that sells smoke out in the open. Are we allowed to say that? When compared with the other operations in the city, they leave a fair amount of wiggle room for improvement.
Cafe Merchandise
Honestly? The Coffeeshop Atlas doesn’t even have its own webpage, just links to it from other sites. Of course, there are laws in Amsterdam to prevent coffee shops from advertising their menus etc, but we still expect to be able to find a place.
As such, they have no way of shifting any merchandise across the seas. This is doubly bad for them in Covid times, because they don’t have that extra revenue stream. Nevertheless, they do have the ability to put their logo on a lighter if they want to… we just haven’t seen them do it yet. Actually, we don’t know what the logo looks like and we have been digging for two hours now.
They do sell the roaches, skins, grinders, and other paraphernalia you would expect to find at a coffeeshop in Amsterdam. It just seems to be that they never bothered to brand it all. Why would they? Branding is for the tourists, after all.
3/5. If the Atlas wants to attract more business, they need to up their marketing game. By the same token, we don’t think that’s the overall aim of this place. We see it more as a local dispensary for when you can’t be bothered catching the tram to the town centre. It’s good to have one close by.
Lilly Likes Verdict
When all things have been taken into account, what does Lilly make of all this? Lilly loves a good coffeeshop and a good smoke, she particularly loves edibles, thought, and there doesn’t seem to be any here on any kind of regular schedule. It’s disappointing when you don’t smoke, although they do the pure joints for those who don’t like tobacco, at least. Be warned, they will take you three days to smoke.
Lilly has been all over Amsterdam and tried many different venues, and she couldn’t help but feel a little disappointed with Atlas. It’s not that it’s bad, it’s not that it’s under stocked, it’s not even the staff… it’s just missing that “meet your friends and smoke all day in front of the TV” feel that other places have. We kind of miss that in a place, ya know?
