Vegan Guide to Michelin Restaurants: De Librije in Zwolle, Holland

Dearly beloved, we’re gathered here to discuss East London’s relatively new fancy joint named Plates. I know, it’s getting hard to keep up with all the new vegan dishes, stalls, and restaurants in London, with something exciting seemingly popping up on our radar every day. I’m not that hungry guyzzz can we take it down a notch? My husband thinks I’m weird because I prefer cooking my own food or eating salads (and he thinks I’m extra weird because I’m okay with calling just a bowl of lettuce a ‘salad’ and he says that’s not okay that’s just lettuce anyone have an opinion on this nope okay moving on). But then on the other hand, well on my other hand right now I have a cut from where I knifed myself while making some of my aforementioned ‘own food’ which I guess is a point in the column for ‘going out more’ but ANYWAY, on the other figurative hand, I do want to try everything because as I recently explained to aforementioned husband about why I was forcing him to watch the worst movie ever written, “Sex & the City 2”, you can’t complain about things you haven’t seen. Applied to the topic at hand: you can’t recommend things you haven’t eaten. The former argument is more my speed because y’all know how much I loves complaining (LOVES IT) but the latter is nice to do too, and although I have some caveats about my recent dinner at Plates, I do recommend trying it for yourself.

You need some background info before just rocking up to this place, because well you can’t do that. To build off of the uncanny and undeniable feeling of exclusiveness that most of Shoreditch and the near surrounds gives off (not to mention the ‘you can’t sit with us’ vibe that seems to emanate from the invisible pores of most of its inhabitants), Plates is open to plebeians like us only on Saturday nights, only at three seating times, and of course only by reservation. From the sibling duo of Kirk and Keeley Haworth, Plates is one of the few places that is entirely vegan and doing fancy tasting menu dinner, the kind we see usually at Michelin starred places. That makes sense, because head chef Kirk (“God bless Kirk!”) and artistic director Keeley clearly learned something from their father, renowned Michelin-starred chef Nigel. Plates is also one of the many places nowadays that doesn’t use the word vegan, because it scares people, and instead calls themselves ‘plant-based’. I despise the phrase plant-based for many reasons, and while I do understand that it’s less intimidating to the ignorant masses, it also is unclear, weaselly, and ripe for corruption. In fact, I’ve seen corruption already. Companies have learned that ‘plant-based’ has the healthy allure of veganism without the aura of strictness that turns some idiots off and so I have seen goods and products with the ‘Plant-based!’ stamp on them that happen to have a plant ingredient but aren’t vegan. Like they’ll contain apples or spinach or oats or something but then also milk and egg or whatever, so they are technically based around a plant –> plant-based. I KNOW! God I hate people. Luckily Plates is entirely vegan so this rant is unfair to put in a review of their food but I just really want that phrase to stop being such a little bitch. Well most of all I want people to stop being afraid of the word ‘vegan’ but let’s try to keep our wishes realistic. 

Anyway so we heard about Plates and we were like we love fancy dinners (see e.g. the Vegan Michelin series) we gotta go! We booked our table via their website, which as you can see is the type where you book your table by paying for your dinner in advance. I know that sounds terrifying (what if you can’t go after all and you’ve already paid ahhh) but it is really awesome to finish eating and then just get to leave, especially in London where customer service is hilarious and you can wait for hours trying to get someone’s attention just to be able to GIVE THEM MONEY. Anyway, so I approve of the pay-in-advance system Plates is doing. We ironed out details with Keeley, who is very responsive over email which makes a nice change from well everyone else in the world, for their first offered seating – 8pm. I know, I had to eat dinner like a normal young-ish person living in a big city and not like I already moved to Boca.

Plates is located in a lovely little upstairs room on Kingsland Road right near the Hoxton overground station. The entrance is down a little alley off of Kingsland, actually, but luckily a waiter was at the entrance and saw us looking into a salon confusedly and saved us. There’s lots of steps up to the dining room, and I forgot to ask about accessibility but given how most of this city is, I doubt it. It’s a clean and simple space, as you can see in the picture above. Everyone eating there seems a whole lot cooler than you, as is usual in this area. One girl was literally wearing a long thin black robe like they give you when you get a haircut and I was like um hon but then it had a designer name emblazoned across the back and so I was like ‘oh I bet she’s an artist’ and I bet long thin black salon robes become the next big thing. 

Because of the whole pay-beforehand thing, you also pay for whatever drink pairing you want in advance. Husbo P had a wine pairing and I had a soft pairing. Although I am content to always be drinking water, I forking love it when restaurants offer a soft drink pairing for those of us who don’t  drink and/or think wine tastes off. They brought us tall glasses of yellow juice to start, I think mine was pineappley and Z’s was the same but with alcohol, and it was nice and refreshing. Most important, they brought this:

THAT’S RIGHT BITCHES I GOT A PITCHER OF WATER! My favorite thing. I don’t know why some restaurants think it’s fine to give a thimble of a water glass and then disappear for the entire meal but luckily Plates is doing things the smart way. And they were very good about replacing it, so huzzahs are in order.

Our first course was what I think is called their Plates Slammer – a sharp shrub-like beetroot shot with a tiny wedge of pineapple and basil salt. You’re supposed to eat the pineapple and then drink the vinegary juice…or maybe you’re supposed to drink the juice and then sweeten down with the fruit. We both heard different things so we ate this in different ways so one of us was wrong but we both liked it. It’ll definitely wake you up, which at 8pm I needed. 

This intro course also contained little potato bites – it was heritage potato (yes thank you my heritage is potato), pickled shallot, avocado, and nori. I definitely got potato and I definitely got pickled shallot, and while I definitely don’t get why these two items were paired together when they don’t really go together, they were all pretty good! As you’ll see, the plating was beautiful and even more, the plates themselves were gorgeous. When we mentioned this to each other Z was like ‘well yeah in a place called ‘Plates’ the plates better be good.’ True true.

Next was a mixed up little dare I say salad of young leeks, green grapes, and cress. I love the addition of tiny little sour grapes here to offer some bite. It was a lovely little light green pile, my favorite kind of food pile. 

Next came my other favorite food, bread. Actually, it was licorice bread, with a subtle hint of that flavor, just enough to make things interesting but not enough to be weird. It was really nice and it was still warm. The bread came with a carrot puree, which I love using instead of butter or oil because why not get another vegetable in there, and some crackery flatbread jawn that was fine but nothing special and I would have eaten more licorice bread instead if poss. 

As you can see, the drinks in my soft pairing were beautiful in color. This one was probably my favorite although I can’t tell you much about it other than it was pink. And it probably had beet? 

Next was their take on the soup course. We had a bowl full of peas, mint, and spring leaves, and the waiter came over with hot dashi (a seaweed) broth and poured it into the bowls. I love table-side theatrics! We both really love fresh peas so we were pretty pleased when we realized that there were more than just the few that floated up to the surface, there were a ton in the bottom of that bowl. Yay peas! It was a very tasty, very simple, kind of refreshing little soup to have before the heavier main. 

The main was a ‘pot roast cabbage’, braised and cooked into a meat-like hunk of…hunk of…burning love served with a crispy little layered potato and various purees. The white chunks on the side are I think turnip, which this country forking loves, or parsnips maybe, one of those nips. The green sauce was great and though you can’t see it under that awesome crispy purple latticework, the cabbage was really good. If I’m at a restaurant and they tell me my main was going to be a giant slab of cabbage I’d probably be concerned or angry but this was surprisingly delicious and satisfying. We were both impressed. The little potato jawn was the best part because was the exact size and shape of a Kit Kat, complete with the similar thin little layers. Lots of attention to detail there. The menu says there is ‘butterbean’ in this dish somewhere but I’m not sure where. In the sauce? 

And that brings us to the main problem I had with Plates – the lack of protein. Yes they are focused on presenting vegetables in tasty, beautiful ways, but without using beans or tofu or seitan or tempeh or even really nuts, it’s clear that something is missing. This meal looked, tasted, and felt in every way like many of the Michelin-starred meals we’ve eaten over years. In fact, things were extremely similar to our latest two (which I haven’t written about yet because I haven’t written those travel guides yet), Wickens in Tasmania and Il Gallo d’Oro in Madeira. All of these were fantastic meals so this is overall praise for Plates, but at those omnivorous restaurants going out of their way to accommodate vegans, you expect that they will present plants in incredible ways but won’t be able to do too much protein-wise. (I know, I’m extremely generous with people who are forking Michelin-starred.) But when it’s a restaurant specifically for all vegan food, it seems like an obvious gaping hole to overlook that. So part of me is surprised, because this is an entirely vegan restaurant that should know better, but most of me is really not surprised because this isn’t coming from traditional vegan chefs (or, to my knowledge, even vegan people). They set out with Plates to create plant-based creative cuisine, and they really did focus on that ‘plant’ part. Maybe that’s why they are avoiding the v word and just saying plants plants plants. And they do really nice things with vegetables, but when veganism has made the leaps and bounds it has in the past decade, with omnivore-fooling sausage and pourable vegan eggs just to name things from the past week, this kind of food feels dated. It’s delicious for the most part, but it isn’t exciting in this current age of veganism. It’s what similar calibre restaurants have been doing for years.

Fortunately, dessert eased some of my disappointment at this realization. The coconut cacoa trifle was my favorite part, and it was almost like they heard my complaints and whipped up a dessert that was better than that at most of the aforementioned fancy meals. It’s not much to look at in the first picture so I’m sharing an inside look. 

You know what I usually am given, right? If you’ve read this blog you know all about how vegans are usually given fruit sorbet, or fruit AND sorbet, at fancier restaurants. (It’s not cute.) So getting chocolate cake covered in coconut cream was a real treat! And, it was delicious. It was served on a bed of rhubarb goop and meadowsweet, which I learned in Aussie is an herb, and it was good but I would have been fine with just the cake and cream. They did a really great job here, and maybe I’m just over-excited because it was not sorbet and it was chocolate, but still, ace. 

Dinner at Plates was lovely, and at only 40 pounddollars it’s a pretty good deal for such fanciness. The protein issue is a real issue for me, it being a vegan meal. But if you treat it like other similar non-vegan fancy places, it doesn’t disappoint. 

Plates, London, England, United Kingdom, Europe for right now
Water speed: They gave me a pitcher, and refilled it promptly every time I emptied it. I am happy. 
Service: Nice overall. They didn’t talk too much about the food or drinks which is fine, but sometimes seemed too little.
Bathrooms: There is one stall for men and one for women with a shared sink and it’s the tiniest sink I’ve ever seen but they were clean and nice so okay. And they had paper towels which is a nice change. I know it’s bad for the environment but sometimes I don’t want to stand for a minute at a hot air machine okay. 
Food: Very nice, creative use of vegetables, and not enough use of protein. The menu apparently changes often so perhaps if you go it will be better.
Bonus: It’s really cool to have a place like this, fancy but kind of casual at the same time, with nice food for not too much money. That they only serve people once per week makes it seem very exclusive and important to catch. 

   There’s an exciting new pop-up to look out for, London! The Vegan Nigerian, a.k.a. Tomi Makanjuola, held her first vegan pop-up dinner last night at La Suite West Hotel in Bayswater, a.k.a. west AF but worth it, and with any luck it’ll be the first of many such events, if not the prequel to a café or restaurant, although pop-ups do have the benefit of seeming so cool and exclusive and everyone knows I like to pretend I’m cool. This meal had some kinks to work out, and there is room for improvement, but it showed so much potential for the future and I can’t wait to eat more.

   The dinner was held at La Suite West’s restaurant called Raw, a vegan-friendly place where I believe Tomi is a chef and they have a vegan English breakfast (the food not tea) that rightly doesn’t cost more than the non-vegan ones and so a trip there is in order. It was nice to have the fancy space available for this and not be in someone’s living room; it made it all seem very professional. A hilarious waitress came around with water and spilled mine and then told us how nervous she was, and we immediately said let’s all be friends since we’re clearly kindred spirits. A great start (not sarcasm). Then boxes of mango and pineapple juice were brought to our table (but no additional glasses; maybe they expected people to choose between water or juice, and like hell if I’m gonna ever limit my liquids!) which was kind of adorable. The wait for the first course was somewhat long, so having whole boxes of juice per table really helped the time pass/contribute to a terrible sugar rush.

   For the first course, you had to choose between the vegetable peppersoup and the okra and sweet potato salad. Me, being dumb, I thought “Oh I’ve had vegetable soup for dinner for like 3 nights in a row, who would want it again” and got the salad. It was fine, but I tried my friend’s soup and it was SPECTAC. So I chose wrongly and I’ll never forget the regret. ​No just kidding, the salad was fine, a little misleading as it was mostly warm sweet potato chunks with very nicely seasoned okra. Two foods I love, and the okra was really good, but it was mostly sweet potato, and pretty plain at that. Like a whole big steamed sweet potato cut up on a plate with some okra. I may have just gotten unlucky with my plating favoring the potato more than okra and maybe others had a more balanced mix. It was fine, but that much sweet potato needed a sauce or a marinade maybe. Or just lesser amounts. Fine, though. ​

​     But that soup was really fantastic, a stand-out. The first thing I thought was that I need to find out how to make it because I want it for my next possible dinner, and I want a lot of it and I don’t want to have to steal it from my friend. It was a clear broth, which was unexpected (you hear pepper soup, you think like pureed red pepper or something (gross), but the one-word version of peppersoup tells you otherwise or something), with a mix of some chopped soup vegetables in there (potato and zucchini I think I saw? I don’t know I didn’t eat it), and then the whole thing was freaking doused in pepper, so much that it burned my throat going down, and chili pepper I assume, and of course other spices and yes I need to do some serious research before I try to make it myself, and anyway it was glorious. I feel like even though it burned so much, people who don’t really like spicy food would still enjoy it because the flavor was so sophisticated and interesting. Or maybe that’s a dumb thing to say, but it’s also dumb not to like spicy food. I’m really joking. I really can’t believe how much I’m going on about a freaking vegetable soup like I’ve lost my mind but my goodness, it was so good.

​       We also got a little basket of bread and the bread was good. I can say bread in Russian now. In semester 2 of this $!*(#)&$%^(!#*) language and I can say bread, at least.

        Choice was over after this course, which I appreciated, having made the wrong choice so early in the game and having lost all confidence in my ability to choose from that point on. Don’t know how I’m going to get dressed tomorrow. The main course was coconut rice with efo riro, or spinach stew, with baked plantain. I tried to make coconut rice once from a recipe online. It used a lot of full fat coconut milk, and so might have been good for a rice pudding, but it was too sweet for me for savory food. Because of this bad experience, I was hesitant about the pairing here. Of course, this being a professional chef, the coconut rice was just subtle enough to tell something cool was going on and formed a great complement to the stew. I would have liked more stew to balance the stew-to-rice ratio (my plate was clean when I finished, no traces of sauce, which seems odd when you’ve just eaten a stew), but what we had was very nice. You know how most spinach stews, or curries for the most part, feel very heavy in their spice profile, like everything is dark and deep and low on the chart of some unknown quality, like just totally warm but heavy? I don’t know but anyway, this one somehow felt bright, which was really cool. It had all the interesting warmth you want from a stew yet accomplished it without the heavy tones. The plate was encircled by smears of a delicious and thick red pepper sauce, a great addition to the mix. And then the baked plantain slices were placed on top. Plantains are great, and although these seemed a little dry from what I’m used to (probably because they were baked not fried), they were still plantains, so, good. In a nice gesture from the kitchen, the kind that makes people happy because everyone likes free unexpected stuff, we also got an extra bowl of plantains for the table which I think I had more than my share of, sorry tablemates. 

        By this point I think we were already two hours into the dinner, which is extremely slow. I have a feeling the waitstaff just comprised friends of the chef who volunteered, and it was the first such pop-up, so delays are understandable but definitely something to work on. You don’t want people getting antsy. Luckily, they put a whole pitcher of water (cucumber water!) down for the table, so that was a spectacular move. People who work in restaurants or know people that do: ALWAYS give a table a jug of water, or at least the option to have one, ESPECIALLY if your place uses those bullshit glasses that fit about half an ounce of liquid in them and after every sip you need to flag down someone for more water but since this is London they never come. Those glasses are bullshit and should never have been made legal. So, pitchers are great, and every restaurant in the history and future of the world to ever exist should learn this.

      Lastly, we had dessert, because that’s usually when people have dessert, except for one really strange fashion editor I worked for one summer in NYC who had dessert before her meals. She was strange for other reasons. Anyway, dessert was apple and papaya crumble with malt and vanilla coconut cream. We had some disagreement at our table as to whether the coconut cream would be ‘malt and vanilla’ flavored or whether the malt was a separate ingredient. I thought the latter and I was right, which restored some of my faith in my ability to make decisions. I think the malt aspect was a tiny bit of molasses-like syrup dotted on the crumble, or it could have been the flavor of granola-like topping. We can never be sure, though, because malt isn’t actually a real thing. It’s just something American candy makers and old-timey ice cream shoppes would advertise as a way to charge an extra 5c but it was really a lie. Malt is a lie. No I’m just joking I’m sure it’s a real thing I just have no idea what it is because I never liked those malted milk balls as a kid and I would never order a malted milkshake when a perfectly good chocolate milkshake was perfectly good without it. So I just don’t know. Anyway, dessert might have been the best part of the meal. Well no the soup that I didn’t have was my favorite, but the crumble was next. We were surprised at how well papaya worked to break up the apple flavor, especially because baked papaya seemed to have a lot more flavor than raw papaya. A wonderful combination. On the side was a separate cup of perfect coconut cream, like an actual cup. It was so much! It was probably too much but I will never look a gift coconut cream in the mouth. It was so decadent and smooth and light, the perfect consistency and flavor. Coconut cream is RG.

​         Before we returned to the somehow freezing again weather, Tomi’s friend made a speech that was the cutest, sweetest thing except when he said he thought vegan food was terrible at one point in his life, before her. Get a new story, omnivores! Y’all are a broken record! No but it was really sweet and it just seemed like all the guests at this first pop-up were nice people who wanted to support this nice person. There were some flaws but for the first go, it showed so much potential and I’m excited to see (eat) what’s to come. 

VEGAN NIGERIAN POP-UP AT RAW
Water speed: Took a bit to get water, but when it came, it came in a big pitcher. That’s the way uh huh uh huh.
Service: I’ll give a pass since they were friends volunteering I think, and that’s super nice. One thing to learn next time is to bring the food for everyone at one table at once. Guy would come out with four plates, give two to the table next to us, and then two to our table, leaving another two at our table to wait for like 10 minutes for the next batch, and we aren’t heathens so we’d wait, and it was supes awk.
Bathrooms: The bathrooms are down a hall of the hotel (very close to the space) and SUPER DARK. Like, I didn’t know how to exit the first time. It was kind of scary dark, use the flashlight on your phone dark. I also got stuck in the stall once because I was pushing out but it’s a pull-in door. Dumb. 
Food: Very enjoyable and shows a lot of potential.
Bonus: New nice-seeming person to look out for!