Vegan Eats | Amsterdam: De Bolhoed

It is no secret that I'm a big foodie and that one of my favourite things to do when travelling to places I haven't been before is eat myself through the city. Especially since I've moved to the UK, I've discovered new cuisines and having transitioned into veganism at the beginning of the year, I am even more passionate about finding good food without any animal products. Naturally, this means that I am more than happy to try out vegetarian/vegan or even fully vegan restaurants and cafés. I've already been to one or two such cafés/restaurants on trips or here in Brighton itself, when I decided to create a new category on my blog revolving about food (surprise!), vegan food in particular. While not everyone will be finding themselves at the same destinations I'll be featuring in this new blog post category, it might still work as some kind of inspiration. Having said all this, this post will be the first in my new category: Vegan Eats! I will mostly cover vegetarian/vegan places I ate at whilst on a trip in another city but I'll definitely also include the one or other good spot in Brighton. Let me know if you like this idea of the new category and of course don't forget to tell me if you end up at one of the places I wrote about on the blog! Enough blabbering now, here's the first Vegan Eats post...

After googling and reading numerous reviews of different vegetarian/vegan restaurants and cafés, my friend and I decided to try out a restaurant called De Bolhoed. It is located in the city centre of Amsterdam, very close to the Anne Frank House and near the famous canals, making its location very practical. It seems that they have a more or less fixed menu and at least half of the meals are marked as vegan, featuring a lot of hummus, quinoa and colourful veggie combinations. They also have daily specials, such as red lentil soup and vegan lasagna on the day that we went there. Unfortunately, the lasagna was quite pricey at the price of 17€, so we decided to go for something cheaper (the meals on the menu were between 6 and 14€) as we wanted to have a slice of cake for dessert. We ended up getting the vegan ragout croissants which were filled with tofu, curry, seaweed, leek.. it was a very interesting and special but nonetheless tasty combination of fillings! Having not eaten a lot of vegan cake, (or desserts in general) we couldn't leave the place without trying one of their desserts - more than half of them were vegan, again. We opted for a slice of the vegan cheese cake and the mocha cake and we were transported to heaven. I can honestly say that the cheese cake was better than any 'real' cheese cake that I've eaten and the mocha cake was just one big chocolate dream. The cake was 5€ a slice, so it wasn't exactly the cheapest there is, but it was so filling and worth it! There was an overall slightly hippie, laid back atmosphere in the restaurant and the lady that served us answered with a smile when we asked what the cheese cake was actually made of. We left the restaurant with full, happy bellies and not too poor, so I reckon it was a success. Here's the link to their Facebook page.