Tweede Kamer

The name is a joke about the Dutch parliament — the Tweede Kamer is the lower house — and the shop has been trading on the pun since 1985, from a narrow alley off the Singel a minute from the Spui. It has a claim to a genuine first: this was the shop that began weighing and packaging cannabis in front of the customer, letting people smell and inspect what they were buying before handing over money. That's now standard everywhere.

Inside it's a traditional Dutch brown bar — dark wood, low light, small, and often full. Two dozen people is a crowd. The reputation rests on the menu rather than the room: old-school Dutch strains alongside Amsterdam Genetics stock, a well-regarded hash list, and space cakes that come up in review after review as unusually strong. Prices are fair for the location, and it draws a genuinely mixed crowd of locals and visitors despite sitting in the middle of the tourist grid. It's part of the same family as Original Dampkring.