Langoustine, pumpkin, cabbage and black cardamom
Is there any happier sentence to hear when you ask exactly how to find a restaurant than “Just catch a train to Zwolle station and our butler will pick you up from there”? True enough, an hour’s comfortable ride out of Amsterdam, we alight from our train and are intercepted by a gentleman’s gentleman approximately eight feet tall, with leonine hair and a voice like boulders grinding together. He’s also disarmingly voluble: it’s only 10 minutes’ car ride from the station to the converted abbey of world-class restaurant-with-rooms De Librije, and in that time we hear about his work history in the UK, his 18-month military service in Germany, and one fringe benefit of this latter career sidestep: “We were very near the border between Germany and Holland, so I did a lot of smuggling.” Is there still mandatory military service in Holland? “No,” he bellows, “mine was the very last year” – then roars with ferocious laughter. Presumably the German economy couldn’t take it any more.
De Librije – San Pellegrino’s 33rd best restaurant in the world – is housed in the abbey’s former library. The room’s raftered ceiling looks like an original fixture, as do the leaded windows. The walls are largely hidden behind long drapes, while a coronet of lights around the ceiling complements a large and very ornate chandelier. At the entrance to the room, an intricate relief resembles firewood stacked head-high. Tones are largely autumnal, all browns and golds, though the tablecloths, each set with a single gerbera in a glass stem, are white; beside these, the tall-backed black chairs seem a little too domineering. A meal at De Librije is a major event, and the grown-up clientele, refreshingly, seems to know that: there’s none of that phenomenon, sometimes seen elsewhere, of roistering guests who’ve chosen to dress down as a strange sort of rebellion against a haute environment they’re not comfortable with.
First prize for food you can play with, however, goes to one of the first courses “proper”, a bite-sized salad of steak tartare built in layers upon the back of the diner’s hand
Our meal begins with what’s described somewhat alarmingly as a “stomach cleanser”. Presented in a modified wine-glass with a truncated stem and a dimple set into its bowl to rest on, a warm red cabbage soup with pepper leaves is unlike anything else I’ve tasted. By its colour, and with your nose thrust into the bowl of the glass, your brain is fooled into expecting wine; further confounding your senses, the soup has a rich savoury-sweet tang more venal than veggie. It’s less a palate – or stomach – cleanser than perhaps a brain-cleanser: here, the dish seems to be saying, is the work of a kitchen which has totally mastered technique is now having a little fun now too.
Further evidence: on your table, under a little bell-jar, a seed-spackled lump of greyish bread dough is imperceptibly rising during your first few courses. At a predetermined point it’s taken away, baked to triple its former size, and returned to your table with a wodge of whipped yoghurt twice the size of the now fully plumped bread. Two cod amuses-bouches are served on the dried silver-and-copper skin of the fish they’re derived from, two more impaled upon the spiny vertebrae of its near-complete skeleton. (This presentation would perhaps seem more outré were we not close to Amsterdam, whose streets are full of “quirky” shops selling this sort of paraphernalia.)
Milk cow, cooked on hot stones, served with mushrooms, crayfish and cedar
First prize for food you can play with, however, goes to one of the first courses “proper”, a bite-sized salad of steak tartare built in layers upon the back of the diner’s hand, with components variously squeezed, spooned and tweezered onto your motionless extremity. (At an adjacent table, one diner, taken by surprise, had to ask the waiter to retrieve her iPad from her reticule so that pictures could be taken.) I felt the faintest suspicion that De Librije is having more fun than the dinners at this point – there’s a satire to be written about the extremes to which diners might let themselves be pushed by a restaurant pretending it’s all “fun” – nonetheless you swallow it in one mouthful, a good sport, while through your mind runs a list of your friends who would balk at this. No restaurant that wasn’t supremely confident in itself would dare try this kind of playfulness.
While co-owner Johnnie Boer is invisible in the kitchen, overseeing dishes which pair a coil of goose liver with fermented orange, or monkfish with Middle Eastern baharat spices, his wife and co-owner Thérèse, a Rubensesque brunette with something of the air of the headmistress about her, is in charge of wine. In addition to fashionably unfashionable oaked chardonnays and the like, here are some unusual pairings, such as a Hungarian Furmint – a varietal neither I nor my companion had ever encountered – which accompanies what might be the perfect dish: codfish back – pale, gelatinous, its texture lightly fibrous, like the most delicate of cheek meat – with wet hazelnut, Jerusalem artichoke and sprat. My companion and I stare at each other agog, before overtalking each other in an delighted hubbub of adjectives and superlatives. “It’s… sweet!” “And there’s heat! Is that the crumb?” “There’s crunch, but it’s unctuous too!” “Savoury!” “Nutty!” “That’ll be the hazelnuts!”
Two desserts – the latter a knockout “frozen green curry” of spices, fruits and tiny meringues, all served on a frozen water-bag and paired with a very moreish yuzu sake – and we’re done. Because we’ve a train and a plane home to catch in fairly short order, we’ve hurtled through a dozen courses in half the recommended time; normally, as our butler informs us as he drives us back to the station, guests begin to eat mid-afternoon, and, because they’ve booked to stay in De Librije’s rooms for the night, they let the meal sprawl out for much of the rest of the day. It’s definitely the way to do it – and it might make the restaurant’s final little joke seem less out of place. At the lights, the butler produces from somewhere about his person two vials containing what appear to be bright green spliffs. We hesitate – we can’t fly with these – until he explains they’re something like sweet cigarettes. He’s so deadpan I don’t know whether to believe him.
I munch mine later in the rather less dramatic setting of Schiphol airport. The butler would no doubt cock one eyebrow in disdain, but I don’t fancy trying to smuggle it out of the country.
Di Librije, Broerenkerkplein 13-15, Zwolle
038 853 0001; restaurantdelibrije.com