I did a post a few months ago about a favorite local bar that served local beers, and I thought it was time to do a post about a local restaurant, located at Nieuwe Leliestraat 162-168 in Amsterdam. The name Vliegende Schotel is a play on words in Dutch. Schotel means plate, dish or saucer, and a common word for restaurants to use in their menus to indicate ‘dish or dishes’. Vliegende means flying, and so the name of the restaurant also means UFO.
I’ve been going to this restaurant longer than any other in Amsterdam. My first visit was 25 years ago, when I was here as a tourist. The staff got to know me from the start, and greeted me as a returning customer on every visit. I’m really happy to say last October the restaurant has been sold, and is now under new ownership — Woohoo!! As much as I continued to go there, about once or twice a year, it used to be a really bad restaurant.
I used to go there because Amsterdam is really lacking in quality restaurants, and there are only a very small handful of vegetarian restaurants. It’s also close to where I live. It had me as a captive audience on those nights I didn’t want to cook for myself.
How it Used to Be
Americans, and maybe others, will know Molly Katzen. She first wrote a vegetarian cookbook called Moosewood. It was famous first because Molly wrote the cookbook without ever trying any of her recipes first, just off the top of her head, so none of them worked properly when you tried to cook them. The other reason this cookbook became famous is it sort of defined 1980s vegetarian cuisine in America; bland, overcooked, strangely spiced, uninspired and boring. It was also a difficult book to cook from, because every recipe needed very small amounts of large numbers of exotic ingredients, so a large shopping expedition was always needed first. Anyway, this was the sort of food the Vliegende Schotel used to serve; boring, overcooked, uninspired and strangely spiced.
In the 25 years I went there, the menu hardly changed. All the dishes were all pre-planned, usually totally lacking in seasonal ingredients, and without any inspiration from the cooks. The portions were all carefully measured, so while tofu was expensive and cabbage was cheap, it was served proportionally to maximize their profits. Much of their food came from the freezer, and it was not uncommon for it to still be half-frozen on your plate.
The big changes came about around 5 years ago, when they started serving alcohol legally (they used to have it behind the counter if you knew to ask for it), and they started using organic food ‘when available’. This ‘when available’ business meant you never knew what, if any, part of your meal was organic, you knew profit was their overriding goal, so you never knew how much extra they were willing to pay for certified organic food rather that just stating it was unavailable. Also, local had little to do with their purchasing choices, rather they just served supermarket certified organic foods. They were associated with a natural foods store, that sold supermarket style certified organic foods, and presumably what was served at the restaurant was the leftovers.
They also had a ‘quiet non-smoking room’. This was a little bit revolutionary in a city which until about a year ago pretty much didn’t have any non-smoking areas in any restaurants. I guess the ‘quiet’ part about it was to somehow rationalize it for smokers as not being a room that discriminated against them too much, and perhaps at one time was full of loud non-smoking Americans, so they wanted to ask them to tone it down a bit. This was a separate room, but the door between it and the rest of the restaurant was usually open, letting in smoke. Also the staff of the restaurant used to smoke outside the window of the non-smoking room and blow all their smoke in.
You also needed to order your food at the counter which was in the smoking area, so no one was allowed to escape. I only sort of appreciated the effort they went to providing a non-smoking room.
It’s all changed now!
Steph and I went there for dinner, the first time we’ve been there since it changed owners.
It was really good!
Amsterdam has for more than a year now banned smoking in restaurants, so that’s no longer an issue.
The menu still has a lot of the old dishes on it, but I hope they will soon phase these out. There are several new and interesting dishes, including daily and weekly specials offered at a low price. There are lots of vegan choices.
I ordered a salad, and the cook not only took a great deal of care preparing it by hand, but he came out to the table and presented it with pride. It was really nicely made.
They like sprouts, everything from bean, radish, lentil to pea and more. This really gives their food a fresh taste, and is something unusual. It’s a little early to know if they will truly embrace the idea of local and seasonal foods, but their heads are in the right place and I have high hopes. Their English is excellent, I think they are native speakers, and the menu is in Dutch and English.
Time will tell if it really turns into a nice restaurant in the long run, but for now I can safely recommend it to anyone who finds themselves in Amsterdam and is looking for a vegetarian restaurant serving fresh and unprocessed foods. In fact, it’s still one of the few choices available.
Patrick! Surely you are mistaken about the Moosewood cookbooks and the restaurant of the same name. I know good food. I know fresh food- which of course often needs no embellishment. I love these books. The recipes are not bland. I have been eating delicious food every year of my 57 years and these cookbooks are great..many are the proven recipes I choose for repeat cooking. We love the chocolate yogurt pound cake, the stuffed cabbages & lots more. That I use the Moosewood pesto recipe (or very close)is not something one does casually! haha. Usually I improvise in the kitchen yet over the years & many meals, I have had time to try a lot of recipes from these cookbooks which are still being written. I do not know the background of what you have written about M.K. not trying the recipes- if this is the case, maybe she did not because they were already in use in the restaurant and she had tasted them. Some people say the recipes are not low fat enough..but I like fat & there are low fat cookbooks from Moosewood.
I just read this on the internet–“Moosewood Restaurant is known for its vegetarian cooking, and was named one of the thirteen most influential restaurants of the 20th Century by Bon Appetit magazine. It won a James Beard Foundation “American Classic” Award in 2000.” Thanks for reading!
Oh my..now I am thinking of Moosewood’s casadilla soup and the pumpkin soup…… well I won’t go on..
Hi Cynthia,
The Moosewood and Enchanted Broccoli Forest were republished with corrected recipes, after an apology from MK. I still have the original editions. For years I traded ‘corrected’ recipes with family and friends. You probably have the corrected editions.
MK parted ways with the restaurant after publishing her cookbooks, and didn’t give them any of the royalties. They now no longer have anything to do with one another, and the restaurant publishes their own cookbooks. I have the first one put out by the restaurant.
While I loved Moosewood at the time (even though the recipes didn’t work), I now think of it as a little old fashioned. I really prefer to eat seasonally, and do something with the best ingredients I can buy, rather than shopping for ingredients in order to make a recipe. I also prefer to use the Internet to look for recipes, rather than a cookbook. I do still have a large cookbook collection, even though I don’t use them often. They are in the same room as my record collection…
The cookbooks are in the same room as THE GARLIC. Since I might need resuscitation if I venture in there, I think we’re stuck with internet recipes for the next few weeks, longer if I can’t open the bookcase doors.
And you may recall that even the New Recipes from Moosewood Restaurant has all kinds of notes in it like “way too many vegetables for this much sauce” and the last recipe I tried for the first time just the other night for half a recipe would say “Yields approximately 18 small balls” and my comments are “Made 28 HUGE BALLS”. But at least it was seasoned correctly.
Also, forget not that if we had a good source of corn tortillas we would make Chilaquile casserole from Still Life with Menu. Lots.
Nice to hear from you Steph. Oh yes..the chilaquiles are good! Some people crave sweets but I tend to yearn for things like corn tortillas soaking up juices & flavors. Just about any thing layered with corn tortillas in a casserole is good! The recipe I am looking at has buttermilk.
I am certain I have the old Moosewoods, have for ages and I have newer Moosewoods too, I see the one I gave a daughter says NEW on the cover. I think I am good at picking recipes so maybe I just chose good ones! You are right about recipes often having random ingredients though that can work. My husband & various of my kids take great risks w/ flinging ingredients..one time guests asked of the squash dish and he proceeded to list the ingredients..2 old bagels, over ripe mushrooms, a handful of basil, several old cheese remains on & on..ending in “well just everything leftover in the fridge!” Right now his approach is scientific for the ciabatta and pizza crust he’s been honing for a few weeks. Having the pizza dough in the fridge a day or 2 makes such a difference & we have a stone to bake. So good!(I smell it now).I love the internet for recipes. I have a collection ever growing of cookbooks.. sometimes there will be 1 lone recipe that’s great in the whole cookbook but boy was it worth finding the book for that 1 recipe! But still it’s usually me sans a recipe puttering around. Bon appetit!
Wow, I had a couple deja-vus reading this article (as well as several chuckles!) I used to be a smoker during the time I used to frequent the Vliegende Schotel and loved the vibe in the “no MOKING room” (the “s” had been erased off of the chalk board and was left that way for years!)… in essence, this was a place to visit in the 80’s an 90’s. It was always full, the people who worked there were cool and if you didn’t care too much about cuisine but were satisfied with a cheap vegetarian meal, then you went for the “gezelligheid”… but in the mid-90’s this place started losing its novelty. The owner didn’t care about his customers or about his produce and he had the audacity to show it. This made many regular customers trickle away to better options, such as the many squat restaurants in town.
For me, it was a nice social hangout when I was young. I stopped eating there after my twenties, when my taste buds became more sophisticated, when my wallet became a bit friendlier and when I started expecting more from a menu that hadn’t changed in 20 years. One thing that made me never want to return is when I discovered that the owner never employed people with any cooking experience! Yes, really! I even went there to test this rumour out and sure enough, when I confessed that I’d worked at de Bolhoed, he said that he doesn’t want any cooks with talent because they would modify his recipes. In other words, he was afraid that the meals might finally start tasting good and attract customers with a palate!
As for the Molly Katzen’s cookbooks, I fully agree with you, Patrick. I also have the earlier versions and would never follow a recipe step by step because it just doesn’t work. I like MK’s style of writing and the way she incorporated her drawings into the recipes. I think her books were a breakthrough during the 70’s, as vegetarian cooking had hardly found its place in bookstores. Her recipes were a great source of inspiration for those who know how to work around them with imagination and improvisation. But they were often disappointingly bland, vegan-unfriendly and heavy on the stomach.
I once Katzen her a letter in the late 80’s correcting her that the recipe that called for falafel or hummus (I forgot which one) was not Israeli, as it is a dish that has existed in the Middle East for centuries and she responded with a really sweet card (self-made and illustrated with her drawings) claiming that she wasn’t aware at the time and that she corrected this in further publications of her cookbook. She seemed like someone with a conscience so I find it sad that she parted ways with Moosewood without giving the restaurant any of the royalties.
Hi Nihal,
Thanks for the comment!
I never noticed it was a no MOKING room. I should have looked more carefully…
It’s true too about MKs cookbooks is they were always very heavy on the butter and cream. Heavy on the stomach and not very vegan friendly. It seems like later there was a backlash with everything lowfat, but now everything is becoming more ‘normal’.
I don’t know why I never liked De Bolhoed. I guess I always thought it cost too much for what it was, and the menu was never very inspiring. Their specials were sometimes good, but also sometimes pretty bad. They also always had problems separating smokers and non-smokers, and somehow I always seemed to end up as a non-smoker sitting in the smoking section.
I agree completely with squat food. There is some really great food at squats around Amsterdam, although occasionally some not so great. The problem is I don’t live very close to any, and you always have to know what days they serve food and sometimes make reservations. I should do a post about this sometime.
I am really pleased the the flying saucer is improved. If it really is better then I would definitely like to visit again.
Perhaps we can all go sometime
L x