Vegan in Amsterdam!

Well, Amsterdam certainly is a city of everything! I was told that you could find anything for any taste. There are museums, boat trips, bars, coffee shops where you can smoke cannabis but not cigarettes, theatres, boutique shops, funfairs and then when you want to go for a meal you hunt like hell to try and find a restaurant that serves vegan food. Actually finding one that serves vegetarian food is quite a challenge.

We spent an hour walking on hour first night looking for food. We checked Happy Cow on the web to no avail – no vegan or veggie friendly restaurant for miles around. Eventually we found an Indonesian restaurant and had a great although basic meal. The first morning we went out for breakfast. We eventually found a dutch cafe which sold an english breakfast. We asked for mushrooms and beans with toast and the owner was lovely and charged us half price for the food as half the dish was missing from our order. It was a shame we tried here again two days later and the different staff charged full price – 9 euros each without a drink which I thought was a bit over the top for mushrooms and beans but there we go. Lunch was a struggle, nowhere to get a sandwich, no veggie burgers and no supermarkets that we could find to buy raw ingredients. We eventually found a pub and had the only thing we could on the menu which was tomato soup (thankfully no cream or milk – or beef as you get in tomato soup in Norwegian restaurants!). That night we went for a pizza without cheese at an Italian that was lovely but again we took about an hour finding anywhere we could eat and the last night we went back to the Indonesian as we couldn’t be bothered anymore!

Coming home was fun too, in Amsterdam airport we again could only get tomato soup so had that at 10am, then as we rushed so much to catch connecting flights we were not able to eat until much later. Nothing of course on the flight as there are no vegan or veggie options and then in Tromsø we tried the local pizza place to be told it would be an hour to make us a non cheese pizza. We had to catch the bus in 50 minutes and nowhere else caters for veggies or vegans in the city so we didn’t eat until 11pm. Thankfully Mum had made vegan lasagne for us – thanks Mum, I’m 36 years old and I appreciate you making us food when we refuse to eat dead things!

So all in all I am saying that if you are a veggie or vegan going to Amsterdam, try and do some research – we tried to little avail but maybe looking at the wrong websites – otherwise you will spend most dining times wandering around while your stomach rumbles!

By the way the pic is of some geese we walked past and had to take a pic of for Miller (our 2 year old) who loves geese and pigeons and prefers them alive – not like part of the episode I saw of an old Top Gear last night where Jeremy Clarkson ate a small bird and told us how nice it was whilst crunching the bones as he ate its body in one go….I often wonder if I am wrong at having a dig at things but then something like that reaffirms my disgust in most of the population.