Rura’s young chef passed the test

The center of Roermond has a few beautiful historic buildings of which all details have been preserved. Restaurant Rura by Naomi & Joey is located in one of those buildings, a sixteenth-century building with a large, heavy door that takes real strength to open.

In the front part, the lounge with the bar, there is no sign of history, but that immediately changes when we enter the atmospheric restaurant part, which used to be a courtyard. There is a stone floor and what looks like a baptismal font, but turns out to be a fountain.

On that fountain is a statue of river goddess Rura (pronounced: rura). She is a local goddess from Roman times who protected the water and I read online that she ‘personified’ the River Roer.

Several restaurants have been in the building and the young chef Joey and his partner, the sympathetic hostess Naomi, have moved in for a year and a half.

Rura works with a set menu of four to seven courses. We choose four and start with an aperitif accompanied by some small snacks. There is a mini taco with shiitake, avocado, shiso leaf and onion. A good start, only the taco is too hard. The second snack, a tempeh with jelly of red curry and djeroek purut (lime leaf) has a mild taste.

Then there are two more amuse-bouches on the table: a bonbon with a liquid filling of Szechuan pepper, apple and horseradish and a warm spicy snack made of baked hummus with cream of fried vegetables. The bonbon is fresh, but we do not remove the pepper and horseradish.

At the end of the welcome snacks we are served a tasty shawanmushi, presented in a cocktail glass. Chawanmushi is steamed savory custard from Japan, and it has that typical smoky taste of roasted eggplant, soybean caviar pearls bursting with umami, and wild garlic oil.

And then the real menu can start. It starts with one of my favorite fish, the hamachi, and it comes with a cream of rice with puffed rice, sauce of vintage soy and shiso leaf, a bundle of herbs including oyster leaf and bean sprouts and a gel of Sicilian citrus. A tasty and layered dish with fresh, sour and spicy accents.

The second dish is very classic and contrasts sharply with the first, modern dish: turbot with hollandaise sauce, allspice oil, and potato and leek. The excess of the sauce is broken by the fresh-spicy of the leek. Expertly prepared, with a crunch from the fried potato pieces, but otherwise not very exciting.

Georgian wine

With the main course, my table companion gets a robust, but at the same time soft bedoba wine made from saperavi grapes, which grow in Georgia. Georgia is the oldest wine country in the world and yet you rarely come across the wines in Dutch restaurants that, especially when it comes to wines, are quite Eurocentric. This is a pleasant surprise.

There are people who have ‘wine is red and comes from France’ as an adage. Then you miss quite a bit, because fantastic wines not only come from Italy, Spain, Chile and California, but also from countries where no one expects them: Lebanon, Turkey, the Maghreb and Bali, for example, also have a lot to offer in terms of wine. Distributors and sommeliers should be more adventurous.

Back to the main course, hare fillet with preparations of chicory and beetroot, accompanied by a pan of hare pepper made from the legs, to share. The hare has that ‘dark’ spicy taste, typical of game. The slightly bitter of the chicory and the sweetness of the beet work well with it. But the fillet is too red for me, so after I’ve tasted it, I transfer it to my table companion’s plate, who loves it. The haze pepper is gently cooked, rich in taste, almost creamy in texture with an emphatic hint of sweetness.

Three courses, three different styles. Asian and light, French and rich, Low German and heavy. If the menu is a taste of Chef Joey’s prowess, then he’s succeeded.

We decide to share a cheese board before indulging in dessert, which consists of a scoop of delicious caramel ice cream with salted caramel sauce and chocolate biscuit crumble and, again to share, a nice chocolate bombe with hazelnut and caramel filling with curd cream and shreds of kumquat.

I love caramel, I really did when I was a kid. But since salted caramel became popular, it’s in everything. While regular caramel is also tasty, you can give it different depths of flavor and structures that you can use in all directions.

This is not a complaint, but an encouragement to explore the wonderful world of caramel. Because, after the friandises with coffee – a bonbon with salted caramel (there it is again) and peanut from the Maastricht house La Fève, a delicious cheesecake with cherry and bastogne in a glass, a tasty macaron of sesame and a pandan filling with kafir and a gin and tonic marshmallow – we can only conclude that this is simply a very good restaurant. A star is shining for the young duo.