Luna, bold company out of De Pijp

De Pijp does not do hushed. It is the busiest, youngest, most argumentative part of Amsterdam after dark, market stalls giving way to small kitchens and wine bars where nobody lowers their voice, and Luna fits it exactly.

She has lived there long enough to know which places are worth the wait on a Friday and which ones are coasting on a reputation earned in 2015.

At 22 she is already entirely her own person. Bold is the obvious word, independent the more useful one: she has opinions, states them, and is completely unbothered if yours differ. She is 171 centimetres, curvy, with long dark auburn red hair and brown eyes, and a bold modern take on glamour that photographs well and works even better in person.

Wine is the interest she will not apologise for, tasted properly and discussed at length, and Bianka is the one she argues with about Italian bottles. Theatre is the other, the stranger and more experimental end of it, and she will take a chance on a production that half the audience walks out of. Photography sits underneath both, a camera in the bag on most days, mostly aimed at strangers and bad weather rather than at herself.

She departs from De Pijp, which puts her minutes from the centre and an easy run along the southern ring out to the airport hotels. She is direct in English and will not soften an opinion to make it easier to hear. An evening with Luna has weather in it; she is warm, she is sensual in the way a confident person is, and she will leave you with at least one opinion you did not walk in with. Twenty two is young for that kind of self possession, and it is the thing guests remark on afterwards more than anything else about her.

Book the wine bar first and the restaurant second, because Luna knows which rooms in De Pijp are worth a Friday wait and which are living off a reputation they earned long ago. She will pick the bottle, explain the choice without apologising for it, and be entirely unbothered if you disagree.

Theatre is the other half of her night, and she leans toward the stranger end of the programme, the productions a third of the audience abandons at the interval. She will take you to one and enjoy your reaction either way. Dinner sits between the two, busy rather than hushed, somewhere with noise and argument in it. She is 22 with the self possession of somebody twice that, and you will go back to your hotel holding a view you did not have at eight o'clock.