Amsterdam Foodie

Most of you know I’m a big fan of porky goodness. Chorizo, bacon, pork chops, saucisson, beenham… these are a few of my favourite things. So when a food-writer friend invited me to a vegetarian restaurant she was reviewing, I thought she was having a laugh. If it hadn’t been free I might not have gone. In fact, it’s a good job that wine is vege-friendly or she’d never have got me there.

The décor is suitably green. In that it’s orange. With painted flowers, dodgy artwork and activist stickers imploring you to ‘Go Vegan!’ and other such unlikely eventualities.

The menu was a celebration of tofu and mushrooms, insofar as they’re worth celebrating. Which they’re not. Mushrooms I can forgive. I want to like them – I really do – but I just can’t. Tofu, on the other hand, is just fake processed protein. The menu screamed out for a red pen to cross out ‘tofu’ and replace it with ‘chicken’.

So I did what every self-respecting meat eater would do: I chose dishes that are vegetarian by definition, rather than meat dishes with no meat in. (I ask you, what is the point of ‘Vegetarian Chilli’ – presumably Senza Carne? Not that this was actually on the menu, but given the meaty clue in the title, it’s exemplary of this type of exercise in misnomer… Ok, tangential rant over.)

My hummus came with whole-wheat pitas. Well it would, wouldn’t it? As my vegetarian-but-not-in-an-annoying-way colleague Michelle says: ‘why do people assume that just because you don’t eat meat you always want the healthy option?’ My writerly friend had some obscure warm, red-bean paste made palatable by the addition of melted cheese. Actually I do it a disservice – it was quite tasty really, it just didn’t look very nice.

Next I had the enchilada, again because an enchilada with beans and cheese and sour cream and tomatoes seemed like a genuinely vegetarian dish, and not something that had just been deprived of meat. It came with wholemeal tortillas, of course, but I was over that by this point. It wasn’t super hot (meaning it had probably been re-heated) and it may not have been particularly Mexican, but it tasted good. And even I can’t knock that.

We really were surprisingly full by this point, but being good little reviewers we shared a dessert – all in the name of research. The vegan chocolate cake was crying out for dairy products. It might have been made with 100% cocoa solids, but its dry texture was an advert for the redemptive power of butter and milk.

Incidentally, ordering dessert meant studying the cakes-and-pastries fridge, which was possibly the highlight of my evening. There, at the bottom of the fridge, neglected by even the veges, was a pile of triangular-shaped recycled cardboard with a sign saying:

‘Vegan Ragu Croissant filled with Tofu and Seaweed’.

I laughed for a full two minutes before retreating to a corner in fear of the wrath of undercover Greenpeace activists.