This article was originally published in French on MUNCHIES FR.
A month ago, the Instagram account of Kobe Desramaults exploded. The star chef, one of the Flemish Foodies, celebrated the last shift with his team after he decided to close his restaurant. Here, Kobe Desramaults looks back on his star restaurant, the kitchen that he set up, and he tells why he decided to permanently close the doors of his restaurant In De Wulf.
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When I started In De Wulf, we were cooking in an old barn in the garden with two people. Since then, we’ve experimented a lot and continued to grow until we found a suitable concept for our business. Setting up a good restaurant is a bit like creating an artwork: when it’s done, the artist doesn’t need to adjust anything, because nothing can be added anymore. That’s exactly what I started to find annoying.
Everything in life comes to an end at a particular moment, and the same goes for kitchens, which is fine by me. At this time in my life, I feel a lot more like doing a cuisine spontanée, a spontaneous kitchen where I can decide what I’m going to make every day. That wasn’t possible at In De Wulf.
Of course I couldn’t just quit in the middle of a shift. My 20 cooks would have looked at me and thought, “What’s he doing?” But I was just getting a little tired of having the same routine over and over. People coming, people going—it requires a lot of energy. A team should see and understand each other as a kind of small family, and at In De Wulf, the family became too big.
Lamb slowly smoking over indirect heat.
I have gone through a lot of phases in my business, including some dark and sad days. I’ve always fought for the business, and I have incredibly beautiful memories of it. Deciding to quit and leave it all behind was certainly a difficult decision, but also the right choice.
I also have other projects in mind: I bought the oldest building of the village, a farm that was once a pub. I’m still not sure what I’ll do with it exactly, but I’m giving myself four years to think about it.
Of course, If I open a new restaurant, the only thing I’ll change is the setting. My kitchen will remain the same: a raw kitchen with fermented and aged products. This is a logical consequence of my career, as I’ve worked very hard to create this kind of cuisine. In the beginning, I just reproduced what I had learned in other cuisines, especially in the three-star restaurant Oud Sluis in the Netherlands, which has since closed. One day I realized that didn’t make me happy, even though I won Michelin stars with it. I wasn’t expressing myself, but someone else.
Twenty chefs and pastry chefs from all over the world worked in the kitchen with dedication from the early morning to the late evening.
I decided to get my inspiration elsewhere: I went to Bras (a famous French restaurant) and while I sat there, facing their famous gargouillou, it opened my eyes. I pulled myself back together and decided to work with local products, and to do everything myself: maturing, fermenting, and even creating my own miso.
Our signature dish at In De Wulf was pigeon. I’ve played with the maturation of the meat, and I’ve even experimented in a cold store for 100 days before I got the perfect recipe. The pigeons were delivered in full and stayed in the cold store for two weeks before being cleaned. Then we filled them with hay and smoked them lightly. After that we’d let them rest in a cold room for four weeks, well packed in hay. I like to treat the pigeon meat this way. The flesh ripens and absorbs the taste, and it needs nothing else.
Homemade butter.
We served the pigeon in this simple way, too, without decorations or a pile of sliced beetroot. It didn’t need that. I also like to mature cream and convert it into butter in a wooden barrel, so you get an incredible flavor.
I also love the purity of charcoal. Cooking on charcoal is harder than on wood fire; you have to really keep up with your head, be constantly focused, and understand what is happening with the meat. When you taste the meat, you know that nature has done its work here. Whether it’s the cooking method, aging, or fermentation, we let nature speak. And we just help a little.
Voilà, that’s my kitchen.
As told to Céline Maguet.
