Azerbaijani, Turkish and halal shopping, and proper tea
Nobody misses Azerbaijan in the abstract. You miss specific things. Bread that tears properly. Real tomatoes. Sour plums. Tea that is not a sad bag in lukewarm water.
Rotterdam turns out to be one of the better cities in Europe for fixing this. Three places cover almost all of it, and they are all a short ride from the centre.
West-Kruiskade, for the Turkish shelf
West-Kruiskade, the shopping street just west of Rotterdam Centraal, is where you go first. Turkish supermarkets, halal butchers, greengrocers with herbs sold by the bunch, Surinamese and Chinese shops shoulder to shoulder along a few hundred metres.
A Turkish supermarket covers maybe 80 percent of an Azerbaijani pantry. Bulgur, vine leaves for dolma, sucuk standing in for Azerbaijani sausage, white cheese close enough to brynza, ayran, decent lavash.
We are deliberately not naming one shop here. The street has several, they change hands, and a name printed on this page would be wrong within a year while still sounding authoritative. Walk it once from the Centraal end and you will have your own favourite by the time you reach the other end. The easiest landmark to aim for is Amazing Oriental at West-Kruiskade 26, which is the big Asian supermarket on the street. Everything else is within sight of it.
MixMarkt, for the specifically post-Soviet gaps
For the things Turkish shops do not carry, nar sharab, feijoa jam, Baku sweets, buckwheat, smetana, the answer is an Eastern European grocery. Rotterdam has one in the centre:
MixMarkt, Hoogstraat 97A, near Blaak. It sells food from Russia, Ukraine, Poland, the Baltics and the rest of Eastern Europe. Opening hours at the time of writing are Monday 12:00 to 18:00, Tuesday to Friday 10:00 to 19:00, Saturday 10:00 to 18:00 and Sunday 11:00 to 18:00, and they deliver in Rotterdam.
An honest warning about this one. MixMarkt does not advertise itself as carrying Azerbaijani products specifically, and we are not going to promise you a shelf of home brands. What it is, is by a distance the likeliest place in the city for Caucasian and post-Soviet things to turn up, and the overlap with an Azerbaijani kitchen is large. Go and look before you order anything from Baku at postal prices.
Binnenrotte, for produce
The Centrummarkt on the Binnenrotte, the open air market beside the Markthal and Blaak station, is the second largest market in the country according to the gemeente. Produce, herbs, olives, nuts, fish and cheese, at prices that make the supermarket look silly.
The days, from the city’s own listing:
- Tuesday, 08:00 to 17:30
- Saturday, 08:00 to 17:00
- Friday, 12:00 to 18:00, with far fewer stalls
- Sundays in summer, 12:00 to 17:00, roughly late April to late September
Go near closing time on Saturday if you want the theatre of traders shifting crates of tomatoes for a euro, or go early if you want the good stuff.
Tea, taken seriously
The glasses. Turkish shops on West-Kruiskade sell çay glasses and teapots. The Turkish glass is a close cousin of the armudu, near enough until somebody brings you a real set from home.
The tea. Turkish Rize tea is everywhere here and it is honest. Ceylon from any supermarket works. Azerbaijani brands appear at Eastern European shops when they appear at all, so treat finding one as luck rather than as the plan.
Brew it properly, strong dem diluted in the glass rather than a bag drowned in a mug, and you will have converted half your housemates by November. Lemon. Jam on the side, quince if you can find it, explains itself.
Halal, day to day
Halal meat is easy in this city. Butchers along West-Kruiskade and across Rotterdam-West and Zuid, plus halal sections in the large supermarkets.
For eating out, the options are dense around the same streets. The group chat’s collective restaurant knowledge beats anything we could print here, and unlike this page it updates itself.