I tried Daalder & De Librije’s luxury restaurant box and this is what I thought
Over the past year, we’ve regularly been testing delivery meals to help restaurants and bars get through these impossible times and make our lives at home a little more bearable. Since the hospitality industry is still closed (SOB), we’re simply carrying on. Today we have a real showstopper: the six-course fine-dining restaurant box from Daalder & De Librije.
There’s absolutely no shortage of original collaborations and menu boxes during corona times. When a restaurant closes, Dennis Huwaë from Daalder happily continues cooking. Daalder previously launched the brilliant collaboration ‘Rijksdaalder’ with restaurant RIJKS®, and now there’s a sequel in the form of a new collaboration: ‘Thuis met Daalder & De Librije’. And it follows the same principle: the dishes are largely prepared by the chefs and, through handy video instructions in which you listen in on the culinary conversations between the two chefs, you learn how to finish the dishes at home. Anyone can do it, in short! Although…
PANIC! Black box turns out to be a black box
When a huge black box is delivered on Saturday morning, I quickly break out in a sweat. This box contains a huge number of containers and piping bags, divided across different compartments. There are no numbers or stickers anywhere—what belongs to which dish? Each course has probably been placed in a separate compartment, but there’s no way I can fit the entire box in my fridge. As I try to arrange everything in the fridge as logically as possible, panic takes over: how on earth am I going to put a Michelin-star-worthy menu on the table myself?!
Stars on your plate
Star-worthy, yes, because this culinary construction kit is nothing less than a collaboration between Daalder and De Librije. De Librije is one of the two three-Michelin-starred restaurants in the Netherlands (the other three-starred establishment is Inter Scaldes in Kruiningen), and the fact that chef Dennis Huwaë of Daalder still doesn’t have a star to his name has been a mystery to me for years. Restaurant guide GaultMillau once named him Talented Chef of the Year (in 2018), he appeared in the Top 100 of The Best Chef Awards 2020 and he has been tipped as the prime candidate for a star for years. On Monday, March 29, he may finally get one (at last), because that’s when the Dutch Michelin-star announcements take place again.
Handy instruction videos
After scanning the QR code, which contains not only a delicious Spotify playlist but also a number of incredibly useful videos (one for each course), I call a friend. I need a sous-chef. Preferably someone with character traits I lack: attention to detail and endless patience. An hour later, Paulien is at the door. She’s a dentist; we can do this.
Perhaps it wasn’t the most brilliant idea to pour a glass of champagne first and then immediately start sorting out and preparing course 1, without watching all the videos and sorting all the ingredients first. I fall into this trap every time; just as with a written recipe, you should read the entire recipe before getting started. Each video/course clearly shows and explains which containers and bags to sort out, meaning that even a kitchen klutz like me can put something masterful on the table—with the help of a perfectionist sous-chef, of course.
This looks truly impressive
We start with the starter: a Moluccan fish dish made with white fish cobia. We quickly take a screenshot of all the required ingredients and get to work. This little dish is really a matter of arranging everything on the plate correctly. We can do that. And it must be said: it not only looks stunning, it tastes that way too. It’s fresh and sour and exciting, and above all, wonderfully refined and delicious. Yes, we were missing tweezers—’if you don’t have them, a fork will do too,’ Dennis encourages us—but it is fiddly. Even if you’re not a top chef, it’s wonderful to put something on the table that looks this impressive and tastes this fantastic. Only a top chef could invent it, but finishing it yourself at home is at least as much fun for an amateur like me.
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- De chefs doen het voor
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- En wij doen het na
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- Tadaaaaa!
Butter, lots and lots of butter
After patting ourselves on the back for the amazing achievement we’ve just delivered, we move on to the next dish: cauliflower. Correction: the heart of a cauliflower, already fully pre-cooked and sitting in a container of butter. While we’re cooking, it becomes immediately clear once again why food cooked by a real chef tastes so good: they use butter. Lots of butter. An insane amount of butter. And this gives everything so unbelievably much more flavor. After warming the cauliflower in its butter, it’s once again a matter of decorating it with the right ingredients. But that’s not quite as easy as it sounds. ‘Is it this white piping bag, or this one?’ We watch the video again, drink another glass of bubbly, and the mild panic is soon overtaken by giggles.
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- Hart van bloemkool met curry madras en gerookte amandel
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- Zeeduivel met Oost-Indische kers en pandanblad
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- “Hunebedden” Dessert
IKEA flashback
The cauliflower is fantastic, really like a pastry (and at least as rich), with flavors that absolutely knock you over. And everything is so beautifully balanced. A fresh, sour sauce to cut through the richness, something soft, something crunchy—it all fits perfectly. With the monkfish dish (there’s lots of butter here too, which you have to keep spooning over the fish while it cooks), we lose the plot a little. We watch the video, but it’s quite long (12 minutes), and we cook at the same time. That turns out not to be very smart, because the three different sauces split or almost disappear completely during the product explanation in the video. The crunch we put over the cauliflower turns out to be meant for dessert, and why is the oven on fire (oh, there was still bread in it), and why do we have ingredients left over while missing a few others? Very IKEA-ish.
But the funny thing is, none of it matters. Every plate is just as beautiful as it is flavorful, and we have a lot of fun. The next day I find an unidentified bag of white sauce behind the fruit bowl. Well, it probably belonged with the monkfish, but I’m not entirely sure. Maybe it was actually for dessert? That may be the only downside: it would genuinely be much easier if all the containers and bags were numbered or had their own colored sticker for each dish.
Order away!
Over the past few months, we’ve tried a great many delivery menus, and the conclusion is that the meals where you have to perform the final steps at home really do taste the best. This applies to pizza (a recommendation: the pizza from No Rules: not cheap, but absurdly delicious!) and it also applies to a six-course fine-dining menu. Throughout the month of March, you can still order ‘Thuis met Daalder & De Librije’ here (for €75 per person). The six-course menu consists of three courses from Daalder and three courses from De Librije. You can upgrade to the deluxe menu (€195 for 2 people), including caviar to accompany the beef tenderloin, a glass of Moët & Chandon champagne and a Hennessy Espresso Martini digestif.
The menus can be collected from restaurant Daalder, Edel by Dennis and De Librije. On Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays, the menus are delivered throughout the Netherlands (excluding the Wadden Islands). To use the refrigerated transport service, the order must be placed at least one day in advance by 12:00 p.m.
And be smarter than I was: as mentioned, the ingredients are packed in one large cardboard box with different compartments to keep the ingredients for each dish separate. Leave it that way. Good luck and enjoy!
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