Cafes and restaurants in Deventer

Deventer has 324 places, of which 243 give opening hours, 75 per cent. Of those, 79 per cent open on a Sunday and 35 per cent work past eleven. A website or social account is held by 73 per cent.

The nickname Koekstad, cake town, is earned. Jacob Bussink began his bakery in 1593, and by 1623 the guild books already noted 25 cake bakeries in the town. More important is what happened in 1910: Bussink started making ontbijtkoek, the breakfast spice cake, and with it built a category now found in every Dutch supermarket.

Two corrections belong here. Deventer koek carries no European mark; its protection is trademark law, not geography. And it has long ceased to be a family firm: since 1975 the company has belonged to a larger bakery group. For the four hundredth anniversary in 1993 a cake of nearly 28 metres was baked.

The rest of the town is Hanseatic. Deventer sat on the IJssel when that river was a trade route, and the medieval street pattern is still there. One weekend a year the book market runs through that pattern, calling itself the largest in Europe.

A quarter of residents have roots outside the Netherlands, and the municipality holds villages as well as the town, so the density is low.