The Snacks Survive
Fig. 1 - The last snack bar in the neighborhood, whereas there used to be many in the area – Photo by Alicia Schrikker.
If you want a tasty snack, you can visit snack bar De Smulshop on the Morsweg. Especially at night there are many customers.
The snack bar is a relatively new phenomenon in Leiden. Already in the ‘20s and ‘30s, the phenomenon blew over from Belgium to the southern provinces as a cheap alternative for eating out. But snack bars started to appear in more northern Dutch cities only after the war. The first mention of snack bars in Leiden newspapers dates from 1950. On the Morsweg and its side streets too, snack bars started to pop up. At its peak there were four on the Morsweg alone!
Now the Smulshop is the last remaining traditional snack bar. But if you look closely at the other two remaining shops on the Morsweg, you can see that they sell snacks there as well. We walk over to the other side of the street: to the Gulcan bakery.