Cafes and restaurants in Assen

Assen has 227 places, of which 173 publish opening hours, 76 per cent. Of those, 74 per cent open on a Sunday and 33 per cent work past eleven. A website or social account is held by 78 per cent, while 21 per cent cannot be found online at all.

As a town, Assen is young. An abbey stood here from 1258 and the government of Drenthe sat here by about 1600, but town rights came only in 1809, granted by Louis Bonaparte. That late start still shows: a compact core with a great deal of green around it, and a population of 70,769 of whom roughly a fifth have roots outside the Netherlands.

The town’s name hangs on a racing circuit. The Dutch TT was first run in 1925, and Assen is the only track in the world to have held a Grand Prix every year since the world championship began in 1949, with 2020 the single exception. TT week at the end of June is the commercial peak of the year for the hospitality trade here, and it explains a good part of those late closing times.

Assen has no dish of its own, and Drenthe carries no protected European name. What shapes the cooking is the sand and heath around it: game from the surrounding woods in autumn, plain farm food at the market, and a terrace culture concentrated around the Brink and the Drents Museum.