My husband and I are looking for a good place table. As this will be our splurge in Amsterdam we're trying to find a very good restaurant. We're also looking for inexpensive, good Thai, or other Asian food (or, for that matter other good inexpensive food) for the rest of our visit. Any recommendations will be very much appreciated.
Here's a thread from last year with some recommendations: https://community.ricksteves.com/travel-forum/netherlands/indonesian-restaurants
Live bold and take chances. I often use Goggle Maps to locate walking distance restaurants. Search for "Asian restaurants" or "Thai restaurants" etc near your location. Some restaurant websites will have sample menus. Take reviews with a grain of salt (or splash of soy sauce). Serendipitous restaurant experiences can be the most interesting.
Kantjil & de Tijger is where our tour guide on our Belgium/Holland tour took us in Amsterdam. I have never had Indonesian food, it was excellent!!,
For inexpensive Asian food, I really like Golden Chopsticks about a 5 minute walk from Dam Square. 1st found them in 2012 and then went back in 2014. Thought they were very good, Here's their link. Going back there myself this Summer.
We had good luck with Kantjil and Tijger --- IMHO you get better food if you are selective. The rice tables are full of bulk i.e. lots of cheap cabbagy dishes with some stars. We did that once and then after that would order just half a dozen dishes we really liked. It was easy to do that at K&T where many of the other touristy restaurants made it prohibitive to do this.
I know this may seem terribly old fashioned to many of you in these days of the internet Facebook, Google maps, etc, but I typically ask for restaurant recommendations at the reception/front desk of my hotel. This is not a 100% sure fire method, but people who live in a city and are in the hospitality business tend to be a good source of such information ...
We have had mixed results with concierges and desk clerks. Often they give bog standards touristy places because they think this is what the clientele wants e.g. in Petersburg the guests who went with the concierge recs got fancy tourist restaurants; we ate better for half as much by finding our own places a bit off the beaten track. We had the same trouble in Paris with fancy standard recs rather than local hidden treasures. However in Prague, we got a great recommendation from the driver who brought us in from the train station. It was a place HE frequented and tasty and inexpensive.
This has led us to ask locals other than the concierge who may be getting kick backs or have some corporate list of approved recommendations. They don't like to run the risk of sending a rigid tour group type traveler to a place that they find gritty or too 'foreign'.