Cafes and restaurants in Enkhuizen

Enkhuizen has 94 places, of which 67 give opening hours, 71 per cent. Of those, 81 per cent open on a Sunday and 34 per cent work past eleven. Some 30 per cent have neither a website nor a social account.

Both figures are written into the municipal rules. Sunday falls under a tourism exemption: shops may open every Sunday all year from eight until eight. And in the harbours and the historic core, hospitality may carry on until four in the morning on Fridays and Saturdays.

The town was once far larger than it is now. From 1602 it had a chamber of the East India Company of its own and the largest herring fleet in the country; around 1650 some 22,000 people lived here, by 1850 only 5,400. The railway of 1885 brought the first recovery, and the Afsluitdijk ended the herring fishery in 1932.

What remained became a museum. The indoor museum opened in 1950, the open-air one in 1983, and in 2025 it drew 300,000 visitors for the first time since 1999.

There is also a genuinely local product: the biscuit works that has stood here since 1920 and still produces here, some 400,000 jodekoeken a day. That baking carries no protected European name, and the firm has been in Belgian hands since 1998. Of the 18,738 residents, 24 per cent are over sixty-five.