Eating the Flowers in Amsterdam

Flowers are well-known as both a major export and a tourist attraction in the Netherlands. But on a visit to Amsterdam this summer, we were treated to a few beautiful flower-bedecked courses at Restaurant De Kas. Spoiler alert: they were also delicious.

De Kas is situated just inside East Amsterdam’s Frankendael Park, in a former municipal greenhouse built in the mid 1920s. If you head for the street address via car (or arrive by Uber), you will find yourself on the sidewalk near the park entrance; a few steps into the park will bring the greenhouse into view.

The restaurant dates to 2001, when Michelin-starred chef Gert Jan Hageman rescued the structure from demolition and transformed it into one of the Netherlands’ first farm-to-table restaurants. Their website cites De Kas as one of the first farm-to-table restaurants in the world, but there’s general agreement that the movement started with Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse in 1971, and spread to Europe with the beginnings of the “Slow Food” movement in the mid-eighties. Pioneering, perhaps, but “one of the first in the world” strikes me as a big stretch.

Perhaps the description is just missing the words “with its own farm” because, for sure, the plant is close to the plate. Guests are invited to wander the greenhouse garden and its adjoining outdoor growing space while waiting to be seated. An additional plot about 20 miles north of the city also supplies the kitchen’s needs. Together, the on-site and off-property gardens provide about 80% of the kitchen’s ingredients.

The interior of the restaurant feels like farm-to-table, with a relaxed atmosphere, well-spaced tables, and a view of the kitchen. It’s upscale, in a way that doesn’t conflict with the carefully designed cuisine and beautiful plating. But it’s downscale at the same time; relaxed and definitely not fussy. It’s welcoming to children, and we saw several during our meal.

Chefs Jos Timmer and Wim de Beer took over at De Kas in 2018. Both are veterans of Michelin-starred kitchens, including a star they earned together before De Kas. In the transition, the chefs spoke about keeping the restaurant’s focus on sustainability, and about wanting to create gourmet food that, in Timmer’s words, makes the garden the star of the show.

In 2021, the restaurant received a Michelin Green Star, followed in 2022 by a “standard” Michelin Star. The Green Star highlights restaurants committed to sustainability; Michelin retired it in May of this year. But De Kas’ achievement in holding both for several years shows critically recognized success for those goals.

However, once I’ve leaned on the judgment of others to choose a restaurant, it’s my own visit that forms my opinion. So having set the table, let’s turn to the food. I’m mostly not going to attempt telling you how individual dishes taste, although there’s an exception to every rule. I have more to say about the impressions they made, and the overall experience of the meal.

There are two reasons for this. The first is that De Kas serves a tasting menu, which rotates weekly or even daily based on what arrives from the garden. Put differently: you don’t get to choose your meal, and my descriptions wouldn’t help you if you did. For the second reason, I invite you to consider the dish pictured below.

This was an optional appetizer: courgette (zucchini) flowers stuffed with langoustine, resting on a sauce of red pepper and tomato. I like to think I have a pretty good palate, but I would not have identified either the pepper or the tomato. Many dishes we were served had this quality: ingredients carefully combined to create some new flavor that was delightful, but hard to describe or attribute. No careful dissection would convey the taste; I have not the words.

I mentioned that De Kas is a tasting menu, with a choice of 3, 4, or 5 courses for lunch and 5 or 6 for dinner. Like many tasting menus, it begins with a few amuse-bouche, along with bread service.

I wish I better recalled what the above drinks were. The left was a spritz of some kind (Dad says rhubarb), and the right was an herbal lemonade with mint. That’s all I got. Note to self: next time, better notes.

Another plate, or bowl in this case, where I should have taken better notes. This dish was full of contradictions: a clean and herbaceous broth, the tart pop of the berries, and a slightly astringent, fruity flavor from the leaf. We could swear that the server said “fin-fin leaf”, but Google doesn’t know what that is, so we must have misheard it.

Are you feeling the food porn yet? Here is the main meal. None of the four main course dishes is large, but combined with the earlier amuse, you won’t leave hungry.

You may recognize the above dish from the featured image. It’s one of the few that I stopped eating long enough to photograph multiple times, because I was so impressed with how much fun it was to “unbundle” this dish as we ate. And all I could think as we did eat was “Salt, Sweet, Acid, Heat.” Not much of the heat here, but salt from the roe, sweet from the strawberries … this plate really had it going on.

Hidden under the foam were some of the most perfectly sautéed greens I have ever eaten. Luscious, moist, and soaked in a slightly sweet curry … I joked about the food porn above, but we might have made some “I’ll have what she’s having” noises about those greens.

Finally, the dessert. We were given the choice to do the entire six courses, or choose either the 5th or 6th entry as a single dessert. Dad and I each chose one of the final courses, so that we could try both. After that, a final amuse of lemon sorbet.

I thought De Kas shone, a unique dinner that I’ll remember as a highlight of my visit to Amsterdam. It isn’t just that I can close my eyes and bring back the flavor of that perfectly cooked chicken, with a skin somehow still crisp under the moist greens, or the pairing of curry carried on those luscious leaves. It was the well-paced service. The skill required to create those transcendent flavors, more than the sum of their parts. The plating; dishes that were not only beautiful but packaged as little layered secrets to be discovered as you dug in. And the knowledge that it’s no mean feat to put together a menu of such well-executed and complex dishes that varies “based on what the garden gives you.”

Perhaps most of all, I was struck by the cleverness, the craftsmanship that created an echo of the farm-to-table concept in the procession of our meal. It might not be obvious looking at the pictures, but our first pair of amuse-bouche felt more “raw” to me, with rougher textures and cleaner flavors that weren’t as sumptuous as the later dishes. As we made our way through the meal, sauces became a bit richer. Umami and “hefty” notes were more present, reaching a peak with the chicken, then receding a bit with the desserts. And finally, the classic palate cleanser of lemon sorbet, wiping away the flavors of the meal from everything but our memories.

Does this progression happen every night? I don’t know! If you’ve eaten at De Kas, I’d love to hear in the comments whether this was your experience as well. And if you haven’t, here’s what to know: the meal is expensive by Amsterdam standards, but those used to prices for fine dining in major U.S. cities won’t feel any sticker shock. Reservations are recommended, but generally available a couple of months in advance. And if you visit, plan to spend about three hours for a relaxed dinner; we were seated at 6 and finished around 9.