Food and live music: Club Dauphine

‘You really have to come over sometime, it’s really fun.’ Sometimes there can be an enormous hermit living inside me, and when I was eight months pregnant with our Flo, I preferred to clean the inside of the toilet tank rather than go to a restaurant.

But this was an old party friend of my sweetheart who had been organizing nice parties on Fridays for a few months. Look, and if you throw the terms ‘separate space that almost no one knows’, ‘big artists who come to jam a bit’ and ‘the New York jazz club feeling’ at me, then you have me, pregnant or not. So there we were. At a Parisian bistro table, right at the front. I saw Trijntje, Alain Clark, Marlayne (the presenter I had forgotten was a singer and who indeed could sing scandalously well), Shary-An., Shirma Rouse, Edsilia Rombley, Marcel Veenendaal (still an unknown boy, long before Di-rect), Candy Dulfer and many more great performers.

No, not all on that one first night of course, but after that one night I felt almost like part of the furniture, I enjoyed it so much. The fixed ingredients (food, music, and a fun crowd) were always constant and of a really good level, the artists changed of course, which made it so surprising. The best part was the love for music. Trijntje who can't hold back and just does the backing vocals for another artist and Candy who after a performance still drops by Club Dauphine to play a bit more. That wonderful feeling. And, they have Bernardus chardonnay on the menu, so I grunt and purr like a satisfied little creature.

If you sign up for the newsletter, you'll stay updated on the artists and certain theme nights, like a French night coming up soon. I'll be there, you know.

Photo credits: Youssef Ben Lahcene and Nikki Born