Green Planet
Restaurant, Coffee/Tea/Juice, Bar
$$ - average
American
Environmentally-friendly Restaurant
This environmentally-friendly restaurant is also vegan-friendly. 90% of all the ingredients used here are organically grown AND it boasts to be the only restaurant in the city that uses all biodegradable packaging for its take-out items. Green Planet even marks vegan items with a ¨V¨ next to them in the menu.
- (Mostly) Organic
Added by Eric Purdy on Sep 2 04 (updated May 6 05)
Reviews
Friendly staff. The daily special is great value at €9.99, and delicious too.
Green Planet is a casual yet elegant vegetarian restaurant in the center of the city that dishes up some of the best vegan food in the city. The Spuistraat location is an easy walk for us, but we'd travel farther for it. Recently the restaurant has added an inexpensive daily special, which includes a small salad and a dish of the day; sometimes this is naturally vegan, sometimes not. I haven't inquired yet if obviously nonvegan daily specials can be veganized. The restaurant helpfully codes its regular menu items as vegan - (V) - or available vegan on request - ((V)) - and the menu, like most places in this part of the city, is in English and Dutch.
The strudel is worth the trip, and remains after several trips my favorite dish there. Back in the US I didn't see European flavors translated to vegan dishes very often, so it is always a treat to run into this. I'd always written off German cuisine because of its nonveganfriendliness, but this single dish is making me reconsider. Potatoes and tofu flavored with caraway fill the flaky strudel, which is served alongside an applesauce made dinner-worthy with horseradish. The presentation is elegant and the atmosphere is peaceful. The lemon tofu cheesecake is not the best, but the apple pie, whipped cream withheld, (apple desserts are a common dutch specialty, but it's a special treat to be able to find vegan ones) was excellent. Another favorite, which has since disappeared from the menu, was a pumpkin coconut soup. I hope they bring it back come fall! The vegan crostini, while perhaps less food than might be expected for the price, are a delicious starter to an elegant meal.
Green Planet is located down the block from one of the locations of the University of Amsterdam. It is a pretty small restaurant and meals take a long time to be served (the signs on the walls even say "Slow Food," warning customers that "quality takes time").
The signs were right - it took us roughly 2 hours to get in and out of the restaurant, but the meal was pretty good. I had the vegan crostini (toast with a humus spread and grilled vegetables on top) and the Thai sweet potato coconut basil soup, both of which were excellent. For dessert, I had a slice of lemon tofu "cheese"cake, which did not taste quite like cheesecake but was still good. One caveat: I'm pretty sure that they drizzled honey on the plate next to the cheesecake for decorative effect, so if you are strict about honey I would recommend asking the waiter to leave that off.
As for the menu on the whole, there are a number of vegan appetizers and soups, but there are only two or three vegan main courses, one of which is the masala of the day and another which was a Thai noodle dish, so you have to be in the mood for East Asian food to go there if you're vegan.
Extremely friendly staff - I went for the apple pie based on one of the other recommendations, and they were right! The best apple pie a vegan can get (outside of my wife's homemade...) Definitely worth the wait, but there was a wait... But as was mentioned before, Good Food Takes Time.
I only wish they were open for lunch.