16/07/2025
🇵🇸 Vegan Palestinian community dinners every month at De Baarsjes! Chef Nihal aka started organizing these last year, at the beautiful . Three courses of traditional vegan Palestinian dishes (sometimes with a twist), served on one big plate for the whole table.
“I think it’s important to have community-based gatherings during this difficult time. People need a space to connect and although I don’t feel that breaking bread replaces constructive change, it does feed more than the soul. I’ve seen people walk in alone, feeling sad about the genocide, or having second thoughts about sitting next to people they don’t know, but by the end of the night they found solidarity, shared mezze plates and bottles of wine, had great conversations with people they would otherwise have never met, and some even made new friends.”
Nihal came to Amsterdam in 1992. She started out cooking at restaurant De Bolhoed and various vegan squat cafés across town. She found that celebrating
Palestinian cuisine was not considered acceptable in the Amsterdam food scene for her first thirty years here. “The ‘average white Dutch folks’ were never interested in Middle Eastern food beyond falafel, hummus and shoarma, until Ottolenghi sold us out about a decade ago, after which his enablers started appreciating our cuisine only when labelling it as Israeli.” Nowadays she’s slowly witnessing the perception of Palestinian food change.
“To me, animal and human rights are intertwined so if someone claims to be vegan just for the sake of protecting animals and don’t care about the world we live in, then I don’t waste my time on them. A perfect example of such a contradiction is Israel’s greenwashing attempts, claiming Tel Aviv as a haven for vegans, even providing plant-based combat boots for a military that is starving and murdering animals on Palestinian land.”
📅 The next Palestinian community dinner will be in September, date yet to be announced.
On August 25 she will do a pop-up at
‼️ On August 30 she will be selling vegan Palestinian food at our very own Vegan Amsterdam Festival!
She also runs film festival .nl coming up in October.
