Noor, Zuiderweg 38, Groningen noor.nl
Digit 6
Michelin star restaurant in a former chapel. Five or six-course menu €120 / €135, prestige menu €210, lunch menu €55. Closed Sunday and Monday. Students eat half price on some Tuesdays.
It’s always annoying to have to write a critical review about an in itself very sympathetic business – a restaurant that sticks its neck out and takes risks in this very complicated time for the hospitality industry. The young couple Marleen and Jeroen Brouwer previously ran De Loohoeve in Drenthe, where they impressed with their idiosyncratic taste and great ambitions. Last year they moved a province to Hoogkerk, a village that has now been encapsulated by the city of Groningen, with the further main attraction of a sugar factory that towers high above everything. ‘Noor – Fine Dining’, as they call the restaurant itself, is housed in a former chapel founded by the sugar workers and opened on March 1. Within three months they had won Groningen’s only Michelin star, and Noor was also the highest newcomer in the Gault&Millau guide. Our expectations are high – if not because of the flying start, then it was because of the prizes.
The cuddly chapel has been tastefully renovated. It’s a space that exudes both cosiness and stately chic, with sunlight streaming through the stained glass beautifully and floating rice paper lamps reminiscent of clouds. The whole choir is a glass climate cabinet, and the corridor along the kitchen, through which the young sommelier leads us to the dining room, is also covered with glass. While we are drinking our aperitif, the nice waitress takes a Polaroid photo that we take home at the end of the evening. Students eat and drink at Noor (on certain Tuesdays) for half the price – what a sympathetic promotion. Marleen runs the kitchen tonight, Jeroen has, as we hear later, daddy evening.
‘Discover familiar yet intriguing flavors and invite innovative flavors and textures to your taste buds’, we read on the menu. Well. ‘Noor combines apparently contrasting combinations that reinforce and complement each other, resulting in refinement, depth and perfection.’ We think they mean they’re going to cook for us. We choose the six-course seasonal menu, once vegetarian (as indicated in advance).
Good bread with brown goat butter is served, as well as a series of rather grumpy amuse-bouches: a tasty, sweet and sour meringue with cherry and fine chicken liver cream; a not-so-tasty frizzy leek ball with petals on it; a kind of stacked thingy of dorade with three kinds of frosty and mushy stuff of chicory and lavender, which is especially very sweet and cold.
Nice idea
The starter consists of mackerel tartare with Dutch shrimps and crispy potato, cucumber, avocado cream and a fresh-aromatic Thai vinaigrette – all very nicely balanced, what a pleasant dish. The green asparagus with egg yolk, chartreuse sauce and a ravioli filled with morel in the second dish is also a nice idea, but here the balance is significantly less good: we especially think the sauce is both too sour and too salty, as if the volume is too high. turned up, and there’s a rather sweet parsnip cream on it. As a result, the asparagus falls between two stools.
The same problem affects De Loohoeve’s signature dish, consisting of celeriac cooked in salt, curds, salted lemon, bay oil and a sauce of fermented tuber juice and goat butter. It looks pretty – like a mini birthday cake with eight tiny, meticulously erected mushrooms as candles. I can imagine that this can be an insanely good dish, but here too the taste is really out of balance: too much salt and too intense, suddenly sour. What a pity!
In addition to two wine packages, Noor has a non-alcoholic package. We really like that they offer this, but it’s still a bit hit and miss. The cucumber-sorrel juice is very tasty, as is the drink of salted strawberry and elderflower kefir. However, with some drinks we feel that things have been thrown together a bit haphazardly. There is a corn-vanilla-malt juice with fermented asparagus broth that tastes like a kind of diluted Worcestershire sauce with silage. With an in itself very nice, fine mixture of cherry and fermented beetroot, a burning bouquet of rosemary and thyme is thrown into the glass at the table with the necessary noise ‘for a slightly smoky touch’. The result tastes like someone put out their cigarette butt in your can of cherry cola.
Weird mistakes
The dish with slow-cooked trout, North African herbs, spinach and langoustine sauce is again very successful – it comes with a fine, sweet puree of yellow and orange carrots, which the waitress tells us is ‘two-colour pumpkin’. She makes some rather weird mistakes when explaining the dishes and drinks anyway; for example, she tells about a kombucha how it is made ‘with a species of fungus called scoby’ (a scoby is a colony of all kinds of different micro-organisms) and about a wine she claims that the harvest is ‘partly picked per grape, and partly per bunch’. It all has a rather high bell-ringing quality.
The Veluwe roe deer has a crispy crust and a nice cooking finish and tastes great with fresh green peas and asparagus. The game gravy does have a weird, too viscous substance due to the addition of xanthan gum – that should not be necessary for a good gravy.
We find the vegetarian menu really problematic, where the starter is the same as the dish with the mackerel and shrimps, but without the mackerel and shrimps: unfestive. With an artful stack of yellow and green zucchini with a concentrated tomato sauce (‘ratatouille’) we hardly taste the vegetables, because the sauce (a vegetarian dashi) is again too sour and too salty. The main course (‘our vegetable palette’) turns out to be the aubergine that is served with the wagyu beef from the prestige menu, with asparagus and green peas from my roe deer, with some sprigs of samphire and a sauce. This makes us mad: that vegetarian menu costs 135 euros, then you can at least serve a guest a dish instead of a heap of rather lovelessly mixed garnishes.
Dessert is a small plate of strawberries, cottage cheese and elderflower, topped with two colorful cookies that form a cartoon strawberry straight out of a Scarry children’s book. It looks very cute, and it tastes great too: fresh and fruity.
Noor has our sympathy, and it is possible that our experience would have been better on an evening when the entire Brouwer couple was at work – however much we give a young father time with his child. But we can certainly expect more precision from a restaurant that charges this kind of prices (the bill: € 449.50).
Fine dining or haute cuisine
The restaurant practice of a laborious, complex and expensive kitchen is usually called fine dining, or haute cuisine. It is almost exclusively businesses with this approach (full evening menu of more than four courses, extensive wine list, original dishes with many elaborate components) that are awarded stars and points by the leading restaurant guides.
Above all, what makes these restaurants special (and pricey) is the attentive, detailed, labor-intensive precision with which dishes and service must be executed to shine. Of course, expensive items are also often used; superimpose all the menus of Dutch star restaurants, and you will see that very few can be found without ingredients such as langoustine, North Sea crab, fattened liver. And the preconditions are also chic as standard: fine chairs and glassware, handmade crockery, expensive soap and cotton towels in the toilet. Before the menu you get a number of amuse-bouches (included in the price), home-made snacks with the coffee (for which you pay extra).
Of course, expensive things also differ greatly in style and interpretation. But the above does form a kind of blueprint of what people expect from an evening in a fancy restaurant, also as a justification for the high prices.