Maarten Van Steen, chef of restaurant Villa Bardon in Sluizeken, Gent serves Maltese-style cuisine in his restaurant. It couldn't be different given his wife Anna comes from Malta and he spent two years cooking on the Mediterranean island where he learned all about Maltese food and Mediterranean culture. Maarten is constantly experimenting making liquors like limoncello and even Maltese sausages. But as he told us in an interview, he would also love to get the mother dough from a Maltese baker which would enable him to make Maltese bread at his restaurant. (If you are reading this and happen to know a baker in Malta who can help Maarten get mother dough please let us know). Here is our question and answer session with Maarten. What do you miss most about Malta when it comes to food? The freshness of the fish is something that I really miss. In Malta, you get fish so fresh it goes from the sea to your plate. It is not something that can be done here even if we have the North … [Read more...]
Archives for February 2016
Weekly roundup of great reads on food and wine #68
Here is a thought-provoking read about ordering food online in New York. It is about two savvy entrepreneurs who have created a successful company called Green Summit that is built on the notion that diners do not really care if their food comes from a restaurant that really exists in the real world. It offers menus from eight different virtual menus but the food is prepared in the same two kitchens. Could this be successful elsewhere? How often do you eat on your desk at lunch? The trend seems to be growing and that is not a good thing. According to an anthropologist the way people eat at work is pretty said. In the 1987 movie ‘‘Wall Street,’’ Gordon Gekko famously remarks, ‘‘Lunch is for wimps.’’ It has proved to be a prescient line in the American workplace, where taking time off for lunch has increasingly become a sign of idleness. But in an economy where the standard task is sitting in front of a computer, lunch is less intuitive and far more optional. On June 1st, … [Read more...]
Benoît Nihant’s Easter creation
Bean to bar chocolatier Benoît Nihant has launched his chocolate creation for Easter. He has created a chick (rather than the traditional egg) as his showcase piece for the Easter festivities. It is available in all his shops (Brussels, Liege, Embourg and Awans) as well as Rob in Brussels. The Poussin Câlin, as it is called, will be available in a limited edition at €56 from 1st March. It comes in two versions, with its beak either pointing upwards or downwards towards the other Easter creations like chocolate eggs. It is made from dark chocolate. The beans come from San Francisco de Macoris in Dominican Republic. The yellow colour is composed a range of flavours which is set to please all chocolate lovers. For Easter, Nihant has also created four flamboyant eggs which you can buy in an assorted box. The four eggs are the milk chocolate egg (a ganache with vanilla from Madagascar), the dark chocolate egg (intense ganache of dark chocolate), the red egg (milk … [Read more...]
A final food pilgrimage to In De Wulf
When Kobe Desramaults announced that his restaurant In de Wulf would closed its doors in December 2016 in October last year we knew that the clock was ticking and it was either now or never. The list of places to visit is endless but with closure of the restaurant looming, it was becoming more and more urgent to find the time to visit this restaurant in Dranouter, on the Belgian border with France. You could say that the restaurant is in the middle of nowhere but that is all the more alluring given what this Flemish chef has created. In De Wulf comes with a huge reputation given that the Flemish chef had created one of the top destinations in the world for foodies (it was number 1 in the top 100 European list of Opinionated about Dining in 2014 and 4th in 2015). The restaurant, which has a Michelin star disappeared from the 51-100 list in the World's Best Restaurant list last year but is an incredibly special place to visit. What we experienced was an exceptional … [Read more...]
10 things we learnt from Syrco Bakker (Pure C)
Few people would imagine that Cadzand could be the location for a highly successful restaurant. Dutch chef Syrco Bakker is the chef of Pure C, a restaurant created by Dutch renowned chef Sergio Herman in Cadzand, Zeeland on the North Sea in the Netherlands. Syrco is still young but is already a top performer and one of the rising stars of Dutch cuisine. We have published our interview with him last month. Here are the ten lessons we learnt from our conversation with him. Forget about the things you cannot control: When you are striving for perfection, sometimes you tend to focus on things that may be beyond your control and which you cannot correct. Syrco says that he has learnt to forget about the things that are beyond his control because it is a waste of energy and ends up putting you in a bad mood. Learn from your mentors: Syrco has had a number of top mentors from Jonnie Boer to Gordon Ramsay and Sergio Herman. He has learnt lessons from each of them and uses that experience … [Read more...]
Weekly roundup of great reads on food and wine #67
If there is one thing that you should read this week then we recommend the following article which appeared in Wired. It's about Noma's taste of tomorrow and the future of food: One autumn afternoon in 2015, Danish chef René Redzepi is thinking hard about his restaurant's place in the world, both philosophically and geographically. "People consider Noma to be a local restaurant," he says. "We might be culturally local, but 'local' in terms of food miles - what does that mean? There are no definitions of these things. According to some 2008 Farm Act in America you have to source within 400 miles, which is like 650 kilometres, which makes us actually a Polish restaurant as well." Would you believe it if you are told that some of the best Italian food in Britain is served by non-Italians. There may be all sorts of reasons behind this odd fact but the reason is that the British chefs seem to have a stronger belief in a pan-Italian cuisine than most Italians do. Tim Hayward, has … [Read more...]
The Belgian chef giving a Maltese twist to his restaurant in Gent
A Maltese restaurant outside Maltese shores is not a common sight. And there is a reason. The island is small and few Maltese chefs have ventured out of Malta to cook Maltese-style cuisine in their own restaurants. Many Maltese chefs have gone abroad to train but most return to work on the island. It is even more unusual when that cuisine is replicated by a Belgian chef but there is a reason for this. Since 2011, Maarten Van Steen and Anna Vella Bardon have been serving Mediterranean style food with a Maltese twist at their restaurant Villa Bardon in Sluizeken, Gent. "It was always our dream to open a restaurant and Gent was a great location. As a chef I studied in the Flemish city of Bruges and was classically trained. Then I went to Malta for two years, (my wife Anna is from Malta) and it was here that I got to know Maltese food and Mediterranean culture," he tells Food and Wine Gazette. He loved the freshness of the fish and the purity of the flavours. "There are things … [Read more...]
Massimo Bottura’s soup kitchen is going viral
Massimo Bottura's soup kitchen is going viral. After the success of the soup kitchen at the Refettorio Ambrosiano in Milan which landed the Italian chef the award of European chef of the year, the chef from Modena will be working together with the Antoniano in Bologna to feed the city's poor in the evening. The Italian chef, famous for his award-winning Osteria Francescana in Modena, will be working together with Chef to Chef, a non-profit organisation in Emilia Romagna, to organise the evening service. The chef has recently announced that he wanted to replicate the experience at Refettorio Ambrosiano in different parts of Italy including Torino, Modena and in the Brazilian favelas during the forthcoming Olympic Games. The Italian chef worked throughout last year to raise awareness on food waste by creating the Refettorio Ambrosiano in Milan. The project was aimed at feeding the poor by using food that would otherwise have been thrown away from the pavillions of the Milan … [Read more...]
A “Dream” come true: One tonne of food saved from going to waste each day
It is a "Dream" come true for the morning food market in Brussels. Since last September, Dream (Distribution et Recuperation d'Excedents alimentaires a Mabru) which stands for the distribution of excess food at the Mabru market in Brussels, is working to distribute over one tonne of fruit and vegetables which would otherwise go to waste. The food is delivered to associations in need. It's an initiative that we at Food and Wine Gazette would like to highlight because it shows how creative solutions can be found to combat the problem of food waste. RTFB reported today that every morning at 6am, the partners of the Dream project Mabru and the CPAS, the Social Services association in the Brussels region, collect over a tonne of fresh unsold fruits and vegetables. These are sorted, repackaged and then made available to associations in need through a technological platform. The associations place their orders and the packages are distributed to these associations which help to feed … [Read more...]
Make Food not War is theme of 10th Culinary Cinema at Berlin film festival
Make Food not War is the theme of the 10th Culinary Cinema which is being held between Sunday 14 February and Friday 19 February in Berlin. The programme of the 10th Culinary Cinema will feature eleven films on the relationship between food, culture and politics. Star chefs like Andoni Luis Aduriz, Sven Elverfeld, Michael Kempt, Sonja Frühsammer as well as Alexander Dressel will take turns to serve a menu inspired by one of the films at the Gropius Mirror Restaurant. https://vimeo.com/139784150 This year's programme will be the international premiere of Pep Gatell's documentary Off-Road, Mugaritz, Feeling a Way. Andoni Luis Aduriz, two-star chef of the Mugaritz restaurant in San Sebastián have made a film about teamwork and how to turn ideas into food without using interviews or scripted commentary. This is the second time that Aduriz will create a menu for a film shown in Berlin. Mugaritz has been ranked in the top 10 of the World's 50 Best Restaurants for the past 10 … [Read more...]