Festive Opening: The Green Classroom

The first sustainable outdoor classroom in the Netherlands was opened on the Helenastraat last Tuesday afternoon. This special green classroom is a sustainable outdoor kitchen where students learn to cook with products from their own garden. Teacher and chef Pierre Wind and former student (one of our alumni) and influencer Nick Toet (known from the Dutch television programmes ‘Koken met Nick’ and ‘De Slimste Mens’), were present to prepare the first dishes from their own garden and to let the guests taste the results.

Pierre Wind is enthusiastic: “Seeing is believing and gaining an understanding of a fresh product. In this green classroom you learn to ‘talk’ with a tomato or an apple. It is completely ‘in’ and relevant to the current times and it is food that suits everyone.”

It was a Teacher’s Idea
The Green Classroom has a large reach, because the benefits will literally be plucked not only by the restaurants of Invitez, The Hague Hospitality Experience Centre at ROC Mondriaan. Primary and pre-vocational schools in the vicinity will also be able to make use of the Green Classroom. In this way, the Green Classroom offers a sustainable perspective for hospitality education in the city of The Hague.

School director Brigitte Laukens tells the story: “It all started in April 2021 with an idea that Vincent Dullaart had. He thought the square here was not being used well and he came up with the idea of an outdoor classroom where students can see for themselves where fruits and vegetables come from. We asked our students to think about this and provide feedback and the gardener who worked here also provided us with some great advice. Former colleagues also came up with some good tips and the facilities services starting helping us, too, with ideas. Sustainability was, of course, very important. For example, we have a water tank here that can store 10.000 liters of rain water. Unfortunately, there was not enough money available for an outdoor kitchen. Then we came into contact with Laan van Meerdervoort Foundation, which turned out to have some money available for us to fund the realization of an outdoor kitchen.

Barbecuing with Vegetables
Mondriaan alumnus and influencer Nick Toet presented a quiz together with Pierre Wind, in which all those present were allowed to participate. The participants could give their answers by raising and lowering a green cap. The prize for the winner was Nick’s barbecue book with a complete chapter dedicated to vegetables. He says, “I don’t have a green thumb myself, but I do like to know where my food comes from. It is, of course, very nice to be back at my old school and to guide the students in this outdoor kitchen. Everyone thinks of meat when they think of a barbecue, but I want to show that you can also barbecue extremely well with vegetables, especially with leeks, the most underestimated vegetable there is!”