Restaurant De Dyck: for the adventurous diner who wants to be surprised

In Woubrugge, there’s a farmer who has completely changed course. After taking over his parents’ arable farm in 2003, he transformed it into a fine-dining restaurant with the ambition of becoming self-sufficient by 2025. And they’re almost there. Not a restaurant for the seasoned bistro-goer, but for the adventurous diner who wants to be surprised. Because surprised you will be at De Dyck—we experienced it ourselves.

The enthusiastic host offers us a lovely welcome drink in the form of Betuws Bruis, the non-alcoholic option we ask for. A little later, chef Martijn Koeleman appears and suggests taking a tour of the kitchen garden. While we are by now freezing in the fierce wind blowing across the polder landscape on this cold evening, Koeleman’s enthusiasm is undiminished. He guides us past the vegetables and herbs that make the restaurant almost one hundred percent self-sufficient, the fruit garden they are working hard on so they can eventually source everything from there too, and the refrigerated, drying and heating cabinets that make it possible to cook year-round with produce from their own land.

We ask what happens if the harvest fails one year. That has never happened so far, but with our own eyes we see all the ways they make use of every opportunity to prevent it. Every preservation method is used, from fermenting to drying and vacuum-packing. And how do they make up for shortages in winter? ‘In winter, our hens lay fewer eggs, so we work with more egg white, which you can freeze. We cure the yolks,’ the young chef explains. ‘In summer, all kinds of things grow, but in winter the menu is much heavier, for example, and the harvest is more limited. We balance that by using lots of ferments we made in summer.’

De Dyck’s Kitchen-Garden Menu

But what does it taste like? We return to the pleasantly warm restaurant and, after a glance at the Kitchen-Garden Menu, begin our adventure. The menu is vegetarian at its core; fish and meat are optional. What immediately stands out are the ingredients that the average person probably didn’t know were edible, but mainly knows from the garden centre. That says a lot about the menu: you have to be open to experimentation. The menu changes according to the harvest, and the chefs are forced to make creative and sometimes unconventional choices.

Kohlrabi flower, magnolia, buttermilk and rhubarb

Overall, we think those choices are a hit. The amuse-bouches alone are little works of art and offer a whole range of flavours. The extremely irritating Japanese knotweed that overruns Dutch gardens is used here, for example, together with tomato and shiitake. The beauty prize definitely goes to the second dish: a flower of kohlrabi, magnolia, buttermilk and rhubarb. The green asparagus with pumpkin seed, codium and cucumber is also a picture, with the seed providing an interesting texture. All dishes in which the combinations work.

Homemade kombuchas

All the wines at De Dyck come from within a 500-kilometre radius. That means wines from Dutch soil to an area extending as far as the Champagne region, part of Alsace and, for example, Great Britain. We are usually great wine lovers, but during our visit we decided to be just as experimental as the restaurant itself. We opted for a non-alcoholic pairing with the menu, with one wildcard left to the sommelier. An excellent choice, because a (nearly) self-sufficient restaurant obviously doesn’t serve Fanta. Several homemade kombuchas pass by, our favourite being based on smoky celeriac and fresh tomato. There are also juices from Dutch fruit growers and their own produce, often featuring some of the same ingredients as the dish they accompany. Our wildcard arrives with the green asparagus, in the form of a pleasantly bitter pet-nat from the German Weingut Balthasar Ress, made from the Riesling grape.

An atomic bomb of flavours

The risk of self-sufficient cooking: experimentation can also go the other way. The corn tempeh with onion, radicchio and walnut is an atomic bomb of flavours that not everyone will appreciate. I finish my plate because it may not be my favourite, but I can still appreciate the idea and flavour; my dining companion gives up at this point. The same goes for the dessert, which is partly left uneaten; koji, a kind of wonder fungus that forms the basis for sake, soy sauce and miso, leaves a decidedly bitter mark on the dish, just as it did with the tempeh.

Bold choices like these make De Dyck a restaurant that comes with a disclaimer, but in our view they do not detract from the experience. They cook with so much knowledge, passion, love and respect for nature that you can forgive the chef if these elements briefly win out over flavour. As long as there is balance—but hey, we trust him completely on that.