ADE 2026 by Day: What to Do in Amsterdam Between Sets
Amsterdam Dance Event turns 30 this year. From Wednesday 21 to Sunday 25 October, the official programme takes care of the nights, and the ADE Pro conference takes care of the people who are here for work. Hardly anyone plans the hours in between. You wake up at one, your friends are still asleep, and the city outside is just a city again.
This is a guide to those hours. Most of it is not on the official programme, all of it is a ferry or a short ride from the clubs, and it is written for people who will not see a morning until Monday.
Breakfast is whenever you wake up
Most of Amsterdam’s breakfast places are winding down by the time you are ready to eat, and most kitchens are closed by the time you head out again. Maoz keeps a clubber’s hours at both ends. It has been making vegetarian falafel in the centre since 1991: hot falafel in a pita that you fill yourself from a salad bar of more than fifteen salads and sauces.
The branch on Haarlemmerstraat (no. 42) is open every day from 11:00 to 01:30. The one on Damrak, a few minutes from Centraal Station, opens at 11:00 and closes at midnight, or 01:00 on Friday and Saturday. The same pita works as breakfast at two in the afternoon and as dinner at one in the morning.
Dig before the shops close
Record shops keep shop hours, not club hours, and that is the trap: by the time you are ready to dig, they are closing. During ADE the two big ones are venues as well, with free sessions in the afternoon, so it pays to be up.
Rush Hour on Spuistraat is the shop of the Amsterdam label and distributor of the same name, and the internationally known one: deep on electronic music, deeper still on everything around it. It opens at 11:00 most days (12:00 on Monday, 13:00 on Sunday) and closes at 18:00, or 19:00 on Friday and Saturday.
For ADE it has something on in the shop every day: Louie Vega in the basement on Wednesday, back-to-backs and listening sessions from the Technics Vinyl Club on Thursday afternoon, eleven hours of live radio with Refuge Worldwide on Friday, ex_libris & friends with Sassy J on Saturday from 18:00 to 21:00, and a Sunday brunch session led by Kevin Saunderson. Wednesday and Saturday are reservation only, and Wednesday’s list is already full. Details and the RSVP address are on Rush Hour’s ADE page.
Concerto on Utrechtsestraat has been selling records on the same street since 1955 and now fills five buildings in a row, with its own coffee bar inside. It is the shop for everything around the lineup: jazz, soul, Dutch oddities, the record your parents had. It opens every day, from 10:00 Tuesday to Saturday and from 12:00 on Monday and Sunday, and closes at 18:00.
On the last day of ADE, Concerto is on the official programme. Sunday Selectors, hosted by Dave Clarke, has Louisahhh, Marcel Dettmann, Joost van Bellen and Clarke himself each bring five tracks that shaped their careers and talk about why, from 15:00 to 18:00, with drinks and a DJ set until 19:00. Entry is free and space is limited, and Concerto asks you to sign up for its in-store events.
Listen sitting down
A listening bar is a room built for hearing records properly: a serious sound system, a selector, and nobody shouting over it. After four nights of standing up, it is the most civilised thing you can do with music.
The easy one is on the same street as Concerto. CUE, at Utrechtsestraat 30A, is a restaurant with a listening bar that takes walk-ins only, so you can finish digging at 18:00 and be sitting down with a drink further down the same street a few minutes later.
The serious one is across the water. murmur, in Amsterdam Noord, is a listening bar and art space built around a custom four-point sound system, known for vinyl sessions that run around six hours. It does not stop for ADE. On Friday 23 October it hosts yusu invites champion, which it bills as “an ‘UNofficial’ ADE event”, and on Saturday 24 October groundsoun, a night of Caribbean underground sound. Tickets are on murmur’s own site, and the programme is worth reading even on the nights you are booked elsewhere.
One street in Noord, from sauna to six-hour set
murmur sits on Aambeeldstraat, a short industrial street in Noord’s Hamerkwartier whose name means anvil street. It happens to do an entire ADE recovery day on its own.
Start at number 24 with Kuuma Noord, a self-service Nordic sauna on the edge of the IJ at FC Hyena. You book a 75-minute slot online (€18.50), a door code arrives by text, and you sit in the heat looking out at the boats. It is not a swimming spot, so cooling down means a bucket splash and a cold shower outside, which after a night like Thursday’s is exactly enough. It opens from 07:00 to 23:45, so it works for the afternoon or for the strange hour before going out again. If you want to actually jump into the water, Kuuma’s two saunas on the Marineterrein in the centre allow swimming, from 06:30 to 23:45.
FC Hyena itself is a two-screen cinema with a wood-oven restaurant and a natural wine list, if you need a film in the dark more than you need a sauna. A few doors along, at number 30, Hotel de Goudfazant serves French cooking in a vast industrial warehouse on the water, and is, despite the name, not a hotel at all. Book dinner ahead. Then walk up to number 60, and murmur.
Getting there is half of it: take the free ferry to Buiksloterweg from behind Centraal Station, then head east along the water. Read on for why the ride home is the best part.
Walk past the ghosts
ADE is 30. Amsterdam’s club history is older than that, and most of it now survives only as addresses. You can walk three of them in an afternoon, on a rough line from the canal belt out to Oost.
Singel 465 was RoXY, open from 1987, one of the two clubs where Amsterdam first heard house music week in, week out. It burned down on 21 June 1999, during the farewell for its founder, and was never rebuilt. Today it looks like any other canal house.
Amstelstraat 24 was iT, the other one. In 2021 the building reopened as Our House, a museum of dance music, which went bankrupt in 2024. It is a short walk from Rembrandtplein, and worth a minute of standing still.
On Wibautstraat, the old printing works of the newspaper Trouw housed the club of the same name from 2009 until its last night on 3 January 2015. For five years it was the city’s reference point for techno. The team behind it went on to open De School, which has since closed too.
It is not a tour, and there is nothing to buy. It is three doors, a reason to walk off Friday, and a reminder that every room you are dancing in this week will one day be somebody’s address too.
See something that is not a DJ booth
If you have one afternoon for a museum, make it the Stedelijk. Its major Yayoi Kusama retrospective runs until 17 January 2027, and a body that has spent four nights in strobes and smoke may appreciate an artist who has spent her whole career on dots, light and repetition. Book a timed ticket online; the queue outside is for the people who did not.
The free boat home
The ferries that cross the IJ from behind Centraal Station are free, and the short Buiksloterweg crossing runs all night. After an evening on Aambeeldstraat, or a night at one of the Noord clubs, the three-minute crossing back is the best nightcap in the city: low on the black water, the station lit up in front of you, nothing to pay and nothing to say.
During ADE, GVB puts on extra ferries. On the weekend nights the Buiksloterweg ferry sails every six minutes, and the NDSM ferry runs all night as well; the exact nights are on GVB’s ADE page. The city asks festival-goers not to bring bikes on board, so more people fit on each boat.
Saturday is an hour longer
One last thing a calendar will not tell you: the clocks go back during the last night of ADE. At 03:00 on Sunday 25 October it becomes 02:00 again, so Saturday night gets an extra hour. Your phone will handle it. Your plans for Sunday should too: Sunday Selectors at Concerto still starts at 15:00, new time.
The honest limit of a guide like this
This is the free version, and every place in it was checked before we wrote it down. What a guide cannot know is your week: which nights you are out, where you are sleeping, who you are with, and how much of Amsterdam you want beyond the clubs.
If you are here for ADE, take five Amsterdam spots for free, and ask for three more picked for your dates, by hand, within 48 hours. If you are coming back when the city is quieter, read how to spend a day in Noord or the three days a local would plan, and when you are ready, build a whole plan around your dates.
ADE gets the nights. The days are yours, and the city is better at them than the lineup suggests. Sleep in, eat falafel, buy one record you did not plan to, and take the ferry home.
