Our Man in the Provinces Eats Seriously Cozy Pancakes
He ate out several times a week, always looking for the best wine, juiciest hamburger or finest meat thermometer. But six months ago, Marcel Langedijk left Amsterdam for the Provinces. Is it bearable there for a lover of good food and drink? This time: looking for pancakes.
So recently I was in Vledder, a Drenthe village whose name makes me think of the sound of a lukewarm cow pie exploding onto a concrete barn floor. Not such a crazy thought on my part, because according to Wikipedia, the name Vledder refers to ‘a wet place’. There isn’t much more to tell about the village. Two thousand people live there, and they will undoubtedly tell you that many burial mounds and urn fields from the Neolithic period have been found there, that it is an excellent and peaceful place to spend time, and that the local football team is called VV BEW, which stands for Blauw En Wit.
Floury chatterboxes
The reason I was there had to do with pancakes. My family and I don’t eat them often, but when we do, we eat them out. Making the batter and baking those things takes me disproportionately long for what you get in return. Besides, even when we’re hungry, we’re completely satisfied after a maximum of two of those floury chatterboxes. After which the cleaning of the frying pans, mixing bowl, plates and peripheral equipment can begin. Which, incidentally, doesn’t stop the pancake smell from lingering for days.
The restaurant smelled of sick animals
So we eat them out. Not often, by the way—actually only when my wife and I want to reward our daughter for good behavior or otherwise accommodate her. Since our move to the provinces six months ago, that had happened only once—our daughter is very sweet, but rewarding and accommodating your child too much turns them into a little shit. We ate them in a village-with-a-funky-name then too, because I simply have a soft spot for villages-with-funky-names. The pancakes were disgusting, though (lukewarm, dry, thick), the restaurant smelled of sick animals and its decor was depressing. On top of that, it was cold and drafty. You don’t want that when eating pancakes; you want something seriously cozy.
Mountain lodge on steroids
And so this time we ended up in Vledder, at Herberg de Wilde Hof. A tip from my little sister, who has three children and therefore knows all about rewarding, accommodating, giving birth and pancakes. De Wilde Hof is in a forest, right next to a campsite, so it is often pleasantly busy. A smart move by proprietors Henrico and Gisela. Reservations are possible, but not on Sundays and public holidays. And they’re actually not necessary, because the place is large. A kind of mountain lodge on steroids, yet still cozy. The decor has an instinctive tackiness: brown furniture, red-and-white checked tablecloths, cans of powdered sugar, buckets of syrup, a play corner for The Kids. You can also get salmon, steak or coffee there, but pancakes are their specialty, which is always convenient when you run a pancake restaurant. So we ate pancakes, if only because the website says they’re suitable for young and old. They were fluffy, exactly the right size, extremely tasty and reasonably priced. We took the fact that our car had meanwhile been pooped on by an owl, buzzard or other woodland bird in stride. A small price to pay for a seriously cozy evening in Vledder.
Herberg de Wilde Hof, Middenweg 12 (diagonally opposite VV Blauw En Wit), www.herbergdewildehof.nl.
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