How entrancing are those still life paintings from the Dutch Golden Age – the pleasures of the table laid out in intimate detail. A modern day equivalent has just been set before us in a Rotterdam cellar. It looks an edible picture. Outside the pleasure craft are bobbing in the marina. This is the Kop van Zuid-Entrepot, part of the city’s waterfront redevelopment after World War Two devastation.
Inside the brick-vaulted Tres restaurant it feels like it could be any era. Yet the ingredients displayed in this preview of the 18 course tasting menu ahead of us are very much of the moment. Great mercantile city that it was, feeding off its far-eastern trade routes especially, it would have imported vanilla, soy sauce, caviar, truffles and spices. That they could all be produced in the Netherlands would have been unimaginable, but here they are today, explains front of house Emy KosterIt.
The brilliant wines in the pairing she has chosen, though, are not the product of the polders. Piemonte, Hungary, the Jura, Rioja host the vineyards and the winemakers. The Blanc de Noirs we are still sipping as we are escorted down from the amuse bouches upstairs is a low dosage growers Champagne. Hyper-localism can only go so far.
Less surprising will be the presence, across the autumn-specific menu, of rabbit, wild boar, roe deer, pigeon and duck. All sourced from as close to Rotterdam as possible. Nothing is from further away than 20 miles.
This devotion to seasonality and locale, alongside committed eco-responsibility, is expected of you when you hold a Michelin Green star and Emy’s life partner, chef patron Michael van der Kroft is so obviously worthy of his. Yes, the judging principles are less clear cut than in the standard Michelin star allocation and there are dissenters. One Substack scribe recently claimed Green stars were being quietly dropped, but this ‘fake news’ has been dismissed by the tyre folk.
In the UK three star establishments L’Enclume and Moor Hall additionally hold a Green Star. Manchester Food and Drink Awards restaurant of the year Where The Light Gets In just has a Green Star. Great company for Tres to be in – and it delivers. “Raw and pure, vintage and warm” was the verdict of those Michelin inspectors, but they were surely damning it with faint praise. A meal here is a remarkable experience that has won it 16 points in the Gaul Millau Guide. Note though, that each seasonal 18 course tasting menu costs 185 euros (alcoholic drinks pairing 110 euros, the inventing N/A 100 euros). You could do a lunchtime à la carte, but that doesn’t seem the point. Three to four hours perched along the 16-cover counter won’t drag.
We go all out with extra Champagne to kick off and two specials at a supplement. We feel obliged to load the ‘caviar course’ onto our truffle venison tartare. Royally obliged. Anna Dutch Caviar of Eindhoven is named after Anna Paulowna, Grand Duchess of Russia, who later became Queen of the Netherlands in the early 19th century. Granddaughter of Catherine the Great, who I’m sure was partial to a spot of beluga herself.
The second special is a signature dish dear to Michael that eventually turned up mid-meal (and yes we had an extra matching wine, too). It was a Dutch masterpiece – a pear poached two days in an egg broth, then aged, and served with a tomato ferment, pepper sauce and black garlic.
Where ferments including the house koji come to life, Michael’s lab is in the shadows at the back of the dining room next to the fridge where the duck prosciutto is curing. Another fridge has whole wild ducks stuffed with hay ready for the barbecue. Our breast from one will be served with a blackberry sauce and a blackcurrant wood oil riff on tahini. One of our snacks has been a duck ragu croquette with wild boar lardo and cherries on a bed of smoking pine and the most savoury of our desserts matches duck with fermented cherry in a soufflé. The exquisite petits fours will include duck fat waffles with chestnut. What an all-rounder the Dutch duck is.
Michael bases only one mouthful on the local pigeon but what a mouthful. Maybe it helps that it is served on an impala or some such skull (I meant to ask), but who could resist an oliebol (Dutch fried beignet) filled with pigeon ice cream – cool inside, warm outside like a profiterole? You down it in one like an Indian puri.
Just before the poached pear, that duck breast prosciutto arrives as a side to a dish that Michael wooed Emy with in their courtship and it has stayed on the menu during the six years of Tres’s existence. Essentially crisp kale and other greens in an intense ceps sauce. If only the Shokupan (delicate Japanese milk bread with morels) could have arrived earlier to mop up the juices.
It has been well chronicled that this chef came from a troubled family background, went off the rails as a teenager, turning to athletics and professional BMX as a refuge, before finding hid true metier as essentially a self-taught chef. His Eureka moment came when working in an Italian restaurant.
What has art got to do with it?
At this point let me state my aversion for detailing a tasting menu in chronological order. Given up on that. The Van der Kroft magic at times feels akin to freeform jazz and I’m happy to lift some solos willy-nilly. The whole experience left me craving a return visit to a season when fish is to the fore. Now that would make a still life.
One past reviewer reported “an umami-rich lobster flan, a strikingly realistic ‘octopus’ tentacle made out of vanilla cream and a caramel made from the fish fat that was separated in the lab.”
Hopefully my notes at table next time will extend beyond the likes of “Roe deer, vine leaf woodruff, walnut, vanilla”, for a gamey highlight even surpassing “Rabbit loin belly, ceps cream sauce, Van Gogh!”
Yes, that fellow Dutch master gets a look-in as a savoury canvas with bunny loaf partnering a roulade of rabbit. A pudding of Dutch vanilla praline is less cornfields more some bizarre objet from Magritte. Belgian, of course, but I feel his imagination would have felt at home on this Rotterdam quayside.
Tres, Vijf Werelddelen 75, 3071 PS Rotterdam, Netherlands. 16 points Gault MIllau.
Well, who would have thought the Dutch could offer such produce?
One of the curiosities of Michael van der Kroft’s cuisine is his refusal to use salt. Ditto no chocolate. Only one of the dishes on our tasting menu featured salt – and that was a pudding. But what sea salt it is. Zeeuwsche Zoute originates from the fishing village of Bruinisse situated next to the largest national park in the Netherlands, the Oosterschelde. Oyster and mussel beds purify the saltwater, which is finely filtered to remove as many microplastics as possible before the salt is extracted.
Salt is the only preservative in Anna Dutch Caviar, produced at an innovative sturgeon farm near Eindhoven. 90 per cent of the sturgeon is from the species Acipenser gueldenstaedtii, aiming to recreate the taste of Caspian style osetra caviar. My own preference is for beluga, but we loved our Tres o setraoverload.
I was less surprised to discover truffles are found in the Netherlands; astonished, though, about the country’s own Koppert Cress Architecture Aromatique vanilla and Tomasu Rotterdam Soy Sauce.
The Tomasu producers bank everything on the nutrient-rich, healthy soil in which they grow their sesame seeds, rice, peppers, and sweet sorghum. Mantra? “We don’t grow for quantity; we grow for quality. And therefore, seed selection plays a significant role. In parallel, we can play and experiment with new and old varieties of seeds.”
They brew their soy the traditional way, using soybeans, wheat, salt, and water. Then it is fermented and aged for a minimum of 24 months in former American white oak whisky barrels.