A Perfect Saturday in the Jordaan

The Jordaan rewards people who make no plans. Its pleasure is the wander: slim canals, leaning gabled houses, antiquarian shops, and the occasional plain door that turns out to hide a centuries-old courtyard. Still, if you want a shape for the day, here is the one we give new members.

Start at the market

Begin at the Noordermarkt before ten. On Saturdays the square under the Noorderkerk fills with an organic farmers' market: farmhouse cheeses, just-pulled vegetables, mushrooms, bread, and flowers. Buy nothing in particular. Walk the two narrow aisles twice, once to look and once to commit, and let a stallholder talk you into the thing you did not know you wanted.

When the morning asks for something sweet, the answer is a hundred metres away.

The apple pie argument

Winkel 43 sits on the corner, and it settles every Jordaan debate the same way: with a warm slice of appeltaart under a collapsing mountain of cream. It is not a secret, which means you may wait for a terrace seat. Wait anyway. The pie is the city's benchmark, and the corner, with the market spilling past, is one of the best places to sit and do nothing in all of Amsterdam.

Lose the afternoon on purpose

Now drift south and west into the lanes. A few things to keep an eye out for:

• The hofjes. The Jordaan hides almshouse courtyards behind anonymous facades. Push a door that looks like a private entrance and you may find a hushed garden. Be quiet; people live there.
• The cross streets. The dwarsstraten, like the Tweede Egelantiersdwarsstraat, hold the best concentration of small shops, galleries, and tiny lunch spots.
• The water. The Egelantiersgracht and Bloemgracht are the prettiest canals in the quarter, and far calmer than the famous ring.

You are not trying to get anywhere. You are trying to be here.

A drink as the light turns

End where Amsterdam does its best work: a bruin café, a brown cafe, so named for a century of tobacco on the walls. Two of the finest stand a short walk apart.

Café 't Smalle has a tiny canalside pontoon on the Egelantiersgracht. If a table is free as the sun drops, take it and do not move. If it is not, walk to Café Papeneiland on the corner of the Prinsengracht, pouring since 1642, all Delft tiles and worn wood, and order a small beer. Brown cafes are not for events. They are for the slow middle of an evening, which, if you have done the day right, is exactly where you now are.

If you want dinner

Book Toscanini ahead, well ahead, and let the night run long over proper Italian cooking in an old coachhouse. It is the Jordaan's special-occasion regular, which is to say it is special and a regular at once.

That is the whole secret of the neighborhood: nothing here is in a hurry, so neither should you be. Save these spots to your map, and the next Saturday is already planned.