Travel Report from Amsterdam - Andaz, Mercure Arthur Frommer, De Kas and Senses

From Germany, we made our way by train to Amsterdam.

It was my first time in the city of canals and bicycles (not counting getting stuck overnight once at Schiphol airport due to an Italian airline strike).

As I mentioned last month, whenever I travel I try to look for eco-friendly accommodations. In Amsterdam, that meant picking the Mercure Arthur Frommer, which has made a commitment to recycling hotel waste and using green cleaning products.

In fact, the entire hotel represents a sort of large-scale recycling project since the guest rooms are packed into 19 former weaver's houses that were built in the 17th Century. That's adaptive reuse!

As you can imagine with such an old building, the Mercure Arthur Frommer is right near the center of town, while still being on a quiet side street that allows for a good night's sleep.

I liked the artistic touches in the rooms:

The decoration in the sink at the Mercure Arthur Frommer reminded me both of Delft pottery and also of Amsterdam's nautical heritage. 

The headboard of the bed at the Mercure Arthur Frommer was covered with a large scale reproduction of a work of art. Just the inspiration you need to explore the marvelous collection at the nearby Rijksmuseum, with its famous "Night Watch" painting by Rembrandt.

The other hotel where we stayed in Amsterdam was the Andaz, a fancy Hyatt property with a marvelous Alice in Wonderland themed garden. Only, in this case, as you can see it's actually Alice in AMSTERDAM. :)

Here's a real bed of herbs in the Alice in Amsterdam garden!

The Alice in Amsterdam garden has some big ducks.

Nothing particularly whimsical about this patch of perennial geraniums (I presume) in the Alice in Amsterdam garden, but it sure does look pretty.

A fireplace, a wrought iron bench and a chessboard-motif floor? These are just some of the quirky elements that await you in the Alice in Amsterdam garden.

A pretty hydrangea blooms alongside the fireplace.

The Amsterdam Press Office kindly arranged for me to sample the fare at De Kas, a restaurant built around the appeal of ultra-fresh produce. We took a tram from the center of town to get to De Kas. When we disembarked from the tram, we had to walk on a bridge across a pond. Looking down, I spotted this water bird with its young. I believe it was a Eurasian Coot!

(The Press Office also furnished me with a complimentary 72-hour I amsterdam City Card, which was super helpful not only because it provided free public transport and a free canal cruise, but also because it gave free entry to a number of the most popular Amsterdam attractions including the Van Gogh Museum, Hermitage Amsterdam, National Maritime Museum, Hortus Botanicus and Dutch Resistance Museum.)

Eurasian Coot feeding its young.

Approaching De Kas, the first thing you notice is a large greenhouse. This is where the restaurant grows some of the produce for your meal. Many of the vegetables not produced in the greenhouse are grown (in season) at a farm the restaurant cultivates not too far from the city in the Beemster Polder (land reclaimed from the sea),
All those bicycles outside the greenhouse? Many of the restaurant patrons probably arrived there by bike. That's Amsterdam for you.

A tray of the restaurant's apples greets you when you walk through the door.

In the greenhouse, you'll find cucumbers...

And lots and lots of tomatoes, beans, eggplants and other healthy fresh produce.

I found these melons, persimmons and nuts in the greenhouse near the kitchen. According to the founder and owner Gert Jan Hageman, the restaurant only harvests enough food each morning for that day's dishes, so you know your vegetables and fruits are as fresh as can be!
The restaurant has won praise and attention from international media such as The Telegraph.

Continuing to explore the greenhouse, I came upon these great looking beans. Everything seems so lush and healthy. 

The De Kas manifesto, printed on its menu.

De Kas knows that not all tomatoes taste (or look) the same! 

Not only are the fresh ingredients delicious at De Kas, they're also given the artistic presentation they deserve.

Kicking it old style - traditional Dutch wooden shoes at the entrance to the De Kas greenhouse.

 In addition to De Kas, I made a point to seek out other eco-friendly restaurants during my time in Amsterdam. This search led me to Senses, an aptly-named restaurant inside the Albus Hotel that features organic, local and sustainable ingredients.

I thought Senses did a great job of engaging all the senses - nice relaxing lounge music, sexy decor, plush materials and of course delicious food. I'll be honest - I can't recall whether the fish served here was herring or sardine, but either way, it was fantastic. Being so close to the sea, you can find some wonderful seafood in the Netherlands.

I don't know if I'd ever eaten goose before, but the version that Senses served was fantastic. And as you can see, it was a feast for the eyes as well as the mouth. In fact, the colors and arrangement on the plate are truly a work of art.

Senses did not skimp on the details. Notice the high quality tea and the fair trade honey. That's a sweet deal.

Full disclosure: 

The Mercure Arthur Frommer hotel provided me with a two-night complimentary stay and two additional nights at a discounted media rate in exchange for this review. I did not receive any special treatment from the Andaz hotel.

As mentioned, the Amsterdam Press Office arranged for me to have a complimentary lunch at De Kas. The management of the Albus Hotel was kind enough to provide me with a complimentary dinner at Senses restaurant. 

All of that being said, all of the opinions expressed in this blog post are my own and I stand by them wholeheartedly. I would not hesitate to suggest De Kas or Senses to a friend visiting Amsterdam. They were two of my favorite meals from my entire three weeks in Europe - both for their eco-friendly qualities and in terms of taste, ambiance and service. 

As for the hotels, frankly I preferred the Andaz to the Mercure Arthur Frommer, but the Andaz can literally be almost four times as expensive. For a three-night stay around the Christmas holiday, for instance, you might have to pay almost $400/night at the Andaz, but only a little more than $100/night at the Arthur Frommer. For the location alone, that makes the Arthur Frommer a great value in pricey Amsterdam!

Can / Should Botanic Gardens Lead the Way to a Healthier Diet?

The shady, enticing patio of the new Hive Garden Bistro (photo courtesy of Denver Botanic Gardens)

I was excited to read the news from Denver -- the Botanic Gardens there recently unveiled an expanded and upgraded cafe called The Hive Garden Bistro.

Why the excitement? After all, I don't live in Denver.

I guess it's because I think botanic gardens can help lead the way to showing America how to eat a healthier, more local and more wholesome diet.

The part of the press release that really caught my eye was the idea that some of the produce for the dishes served in the cafe would be sourced from the adjacent Le Potager Garden and the Chatfield CSA.

CSA = Community Supported Agriculture. In my own part of Tennessee, I've seen CSAs offered by vendors at farmers markets, where customers pay a lump sum upfront at the start of the season in exchange for weekly deliveries of fresh produce chosen by the farmer. Farmers benefit from a reliable income stream. Customers develop closer relationships with the producers of their food, and they also get a first-hand idea of the risk involved in farming. If a heat wave or drought wipes out a crop, they might have a meager harvest some weeks.

The Chatfield CSA, I've just discovered, is a CSA that's actually run from a 5-acre working farm inside a 70-acre nature preserve and garden owned by the Denver Botanic Gardens in the Denver suburb of Littleton. Very cool!

But I might even be a little more excited by the idea that some of the produce that shows up on the plates at The Hive Garden Bistro comes from Le Potager edibles garden growing right next to the cafe. I'm hoping that will open the eyes and minds of some of the visitors to the garden - adults and children alike - who may have come to see beautiful flowers or dazzling Chihuly glass sculptures, but who will walk away thinking about a delicious meal they had at a cafe that was flavored using ingredients that they could actually see growing alongside the restaurant.

Le Potager edible garden (photo courtesy of Denver Botanic Gardens). Even though my own gardening style is much less formal and ordered, I love how Denver Botanic Gardens is showing that edibles can be ornamental too -- which of course is part of the essence of a potager!

(What sort of dishes will incorporate Le Potager ingredients? I'm sure the menu will change with the season, but right now I've been told that chard from Le Potager shows up on the cafe's hummus plate, lettuce from Le Potager and the CSA gets used in cafe salads, and there are plans to soon incorporate herbs from Le Potager into refreshing agua fresca drinks.)

I know that plenty of progressive restaurants are driving the locavore farm-to-table dining experience, and I applaud all of those efforts.

But I wonder if botanic gardens can play an especially important role in encouraging people to eat local, fresh fruits and vegetables?

After all, many visitors come to botanic gardens prepared to see something beautiful and to learn something new. Should every botanic garden have an edibles section so that visitors could how lettuce grows, how tomatoes ripen and measure whether the corn is as high as an elephant's eye?

My own experience - and I think the experience of many other folks - is that fresh-from-the-garden produce looks better and tastes better than mass-produced products that have been trucked, flown and shipped from thousands of miles away.

And when fresh food looks better and tastes better, it stands to reason people will be more likely to enjoy it and want to eat healthy fruits and veggies more often!

Simplistic? Perhaps. But I think there's some logic to that line of thought.

Of course, I believe that home grown produce tastes best. When you grow your own tomatoes and lettuce, that's when you really get excited about having salad for dinner. Again, I think botanic gardens can lead the way here, educating the public on edible gardening. That's exactly what Denver Botanic Garden is doing with a range of edible gardening classes on topics like succession planting, overcoming pest and disease problems and learning how to grow a year-round edible garden -- even in Colorado!

Finally, I hope that botanic gardens could encourage gardeners to look beyond the tried-and-true homegrown crops. Just as botanic gardens can open eyes and minds to trying new types of ornamental plants, I'd hope they could help people discover new and amazing edibles. For instance, before we visited Powell Gardens a few years ago outside Kansas City, neither my wife nor I had ever (knowingly) tasted mustard greens (Brassica juncea). We were both hooked from the first zesty bite! Now we've grown it at home several years and it's become one of our favorite salad and cooking greens. It's also easy-to-grow (our two plants volunteered this spring and we've got a bumper crop of seeds ripening in the garden) and reportedly packed full of nutrients.

What do you think? 

Should botanic gardens - which are typically strapped for space and resources - redirect some of their energy from ornamentals to edibles? 

Could this really make an impact on changing America's eating habits for the better? 

Personally, I give major props to Denver Botanic Gardens and hope that other botanic gardens - including our own Cheekwood here in Nashville - will follow in their footsteps!