What was your childhood like? “My mother opened a bar called In De Wulf the year I was born [1980]. It was an old-style Flemish bar built on a farm [in Dranouter, in Belgium’s West Flanders province] and a year later it changed into a restaurant. My parents built some rooms on the property, too.”
Did you help out in the restaurant? “I did chores, like washing dishes, for extra money. I was interested in making pastries. I don’t have that fascination any more for pastries, like when I was a kid. Mum says I was always in the kitchen. But she had a lot of problems with me because I wouldn’t eat anything. Everything to me tasted horrible [laughs]. It took a long time for me to learn how to appreciate food.”
How did you get into cooking? “When I was 12, I went to high school but got into a lot of trouble because I couldn’t concentrate and changed schools like 10 times. When I was 18, they had to take me out of high school because I was a troublemaker, and I had to do an apprenticeship instead. So I started working at Picasso, a restaurant in Dranouter.
“It was just me and the chef in the kitchen of the French-Belgian restaurant and he was very hard on me. I worked there for two years and the restaurant got a Michelin star while I was there. I didn’t even know what a Michelin star was at that point. Everyone was so happy, the chef and his wife were dancing in the restaurant. My life would have been very different if I had ended up in a kitchen with a lot of people and I could hide. But there I couldn’t hide.”
Chef who closed three-Michelin-star restaurant has never been busier
What did you like about cooking? “At first, I didn’t like it because I had a hard time with someone telling me what to do. But I accepted it because I saw this man had a lot of passion for what he did and I started to enjoy working with my hands, creating something out of simple vegetables or herbs. I would come home afterwards and try to imitate the dishes I had learned at work. With the little money I had, I would go buy a beautiful sweetbread and cook it with a reduced sauce on top and eat it myself.”
Where did you go after Picasso? “When the apprenticeship was over, I went to chef Sergio Herman’s restaurant Oud Sluis, in the Netherlands, which was a revolutionary place [it closed in 2013]. The restaurant was a big name, with two Michelin stars, which later became three. But, at that time, Herman still had a small team, and it was good for me to be close to the chef. In a big team, a young chef gets lost.
“It was intense, hard work but there was so much satisfaction and fun. I looked up to Sergio as a brother. I learned to be creative and open my mind to more playful cooking. It was very much influenced by El Bulli. Afterwards, I spent 10 months in Barcelona, at Comerç 24, opened by Carles Abellan, an ex-El Bulli chef. But after 10 months, my mum called and said she was selling In De Wulf. I couldn’t let that happen. Everything I imagined doing was in that restaurant. I was 23 when I came back. Two years later, I got my first Michelin star.”
When did you start focusing on local ingredients? “In 2004, I started feeling unhappy about what I was doing, because I was imitating what I had learned, it was not my cooking. I visited Michel Bras’ restaurant, Bras, near Laguiole, in France. He has a dish called gargouillou, which is a salad made of 50 ingredients. You sit there, eat the salad and look over the hills and it’s beautiful, and the connection with where you are is so strong. It’s that connection I wanted to bring to my place.
“I decided we would start by using only local produce. It was challenging but also very interesting, foraging wild herbs and then starting to see your surroundings in a new way because you never noticed before, like the different seasons.”
Why did you close In De Wulf? “It was my mother’s property and she had financial issues. I had just bought a farm for myself in the village and, though I could get a bank loan to buy her property, I would have to commit to it for 20 years and that scared me. I’m someone who is restless and wants change. I wanted to experience the city life, look for new energy.”
Describe Chambre Séparée. “It’s a small restaurant where we serve 16 diners, compared with 60 in the countryside, and we work only with grills and a wood-fired oven. When you restrict yourself, you’re going to start being creative, and you evolve and adapt. That’s life, no? But we will close the restaurant in December 2020 and I’ll go back to the village. That’s the deal we made with the landlord. It was just an opportunity for me to taste city life but to be able to walk away from it.”
Tell us about fermenting food. “We started doing a lot of fermenting at In De Wulf. We have a basement full of vinegars and fermented foods. If you use ferments, you can have one flavour or one vegetable and watch its evolution. If you combine the two, you can have depth. For example, mussel miso – the mussels have been smoked, turned into a purée and then aged for about two years. You get this intense but beautiful mussel aroma, it’s so umami. We combine it with fresh mussels from the sea to get layers of flavour.
“We also have young pigeons that we age intact for two weeks to activate the enzymes and break down the muscle structure so the meat becomes tender. After that we take the heads off, the guts out, rinse them out and then stuff them with roasted hay. The hay has an aroma but also coumarin, which makes it antibacterial. We age it for four to six weeks and then roast the pigeons. We hang them over the grill at 40 degrees Celsius for a few hours so they are almost cooked and then they go into the wood-fired oven at 450 degrees for 10 to 15 seconds for a direct char. We serve the meat on the plate and tell guests to eat it with their hands, to be connected with nature.”
Kobe Desramaults was recently a guest chef at Beet, in Central.
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