1397, Grote Markt 36-38, Bergen op Zoom hoteldedraak.nl
Digit: 6.5
1397 is the restaurant of Hotel de Draak, the oldest catering facility in the Netherlands. Four (€ 64.50), six (€ 89.50) or eight-course menu (€ 99), luxury menu of six courses (€ 95) and à la carte. Lots of use of local products.
The gate with gold letters and the huge, scaly mythical creature is hard to miss. For more than seven hundred years, a weary traveler has been able to go to the beautiful Grote Markt in Bergen op Zoom for a hot meal and a place to sleep. The first mention of De Draak, the oldest catering establishment in the Netherlands, dates back to 1397. In that year, the whole of Bergen op Zoom was reduced to ashes in a devastating fire, but De Draak was spared. By then it was almost certainly an inn for more than a hundred years where travelers could spend the night, water their horses and ate with the pot at long tables. The idea of an eight-course menu, preceded by amuse-bouche and followed by coffee and sweets, would probably seem extraterrestrial to medieval people – the idea of a journalist who then states that ‘the taste and ambition are fine, but the dishes still focus and lack of balance’ by the way. The restaurant as we know it today, and the restaurant criticism associated with it, is an invention of at least four hundred years later (see box).
Grand-Hotel de Draak has been in the hands of a Brabant family since the 1980s. The in-house restaurant Hemingway had a Bib Gourmand for a few years, the decoration that Michelin gives to restaurants with a good price-quality ratio. Last year the eatery moved to the large hall at the front of the business, changed the name in 1397 and, as it is called, increased its culinary ambitions: a Michelin star is the new goal. The high space overlooks the square, and is full of old things: a huge gold statue of a dragon, a painting of a dragon, chandeliers, wall hangings, Chinese dishes, red table lamps – the heavy chairs have red velvet and rivets. It is a hodgepodge collected over the years that reminds me of my grandmother’s showroom, but very large and slightly better lit. At the same time, I find it sympathetic that the establishment is not subject to an expensive style book, like many restaurants of large hotel chains. Our straight waiter isn’t so squeaky anymore either – he’s been working here since 1980 and at unexpected moments says things like ‘Yes ladies, a day without laughter is a day wasted, I always say.’ However, he is helpful, serving a nice arrangement with huge glasses of wine and also a glass of cider before and a marsala for dessert, and is assisted by two young and very sweet students.
Two menus
You can order from the menu and there are two large menus: Menu 1397 (six courses for €89.50) and the luxury menu Torben Bouterse (€95), named after the chef. We opt for the first, of which once vegetarian (€ 84.50). The battery of vegetable appetizers includes fried cauliflower with curry-onion mayonnaise (kinda hilariously referred to as ‘cauliflower squiggles with structures of house-made joppie sauce’) and a green herbal ice cream with yogurt, kimchi and fried Jerusalem artichoke that decays into unfocused, hot splashing acid.
The first dish is placed on the table in two floors: a bowl at the bottom, and on top of that a suitable plate that is placed at the table next to the bowl. We see this more often with dishes in which, for example, two different, but complementary preparations are served, but here there is almost exactly the same thing on both plates, which actually makes it a bit strange and awkward to eat. It certainly is delicious: acidified, raw-milk Breton cream in a sort of paint fan of beetroot, green apple, delicious brown butter, black garlic, white balsamic vinegar and excellent fresh-fruity ice cream of beetroot and cherry, with all kinds of crunchy prawn crackers and things in between. The flavors are nicely balanced: a really good vegetarian starter.
Next I get Zeeland kingfish (the farmed king mackerel that has quickly pushed the wild tuna off the plates in this kind of business) with various radishes, salted lemon and some pieces of sepia. At the table, a light dashi broth is poured over it: it is a tasty, tender and fresh dish. The vegetarian gets the same, but with pieces of celeriac instead of fish, and without sepia and sauce – rather unfestive. This does not apply to the third vegetarian dish, homemade pasta filled with oyster mushrooms and fried artichokes, together in a super hearty mushroom sauce: very good!
belly button fluff
Skrei is a Norwegian winter cod, and Bouterse serves it cold, lightly pickled, in a green spice powder frame and with a warm mussel sauce. There is also a fried and a steamed open mussel, the plate is dotted with citrus jelly and we also find some kind of wonderful frog green stuff, which turns out to be sponge cake on inquiry. Unfortunately, it has fallen apart, making it more like navel fluff. The whole dish makes you long for, simply, a piece of baked skrei with mussel sauce and leek – especially because the last two are particularly tasty, the flavors are just fine with this chef, but he flies in the choices for preparations here and a bit off the mark there.
The dish ‘Hokkaido’ (a Japanese island, but also a pumpkin) is downright puzzling, which consists of unannounced, uncooked Sardinian ball pasta (fregola) with only two carrots and a tough piece of spring onion, covered with a gluey, cold foam – a bit as if the most important part of the dish has been forgotten. The vegetarian main course is one-sixth barbecued pointed cabbage with aged cheese, in a cool large dish. With the tasty Kemperlander beef, I get barbecued little gem lettuce with anchovy mayonnaise – a bit coarse, but just delicious – also a mountain of unannounced stroganoff sauce. Such an addition, although the taste of the sauce is also fine, does not seem well thought out.
Dessert
For dessert we get a nice dish of sweet, earthy celeriac with dulce de leche and coffee and a dish of sea buckthorn ice cream with beurre noisette and savory mushroom powder: both original and tasty. We ate some tasty things, but we get the feeling that the menu has not been fine-tuned enough. It’s okay if someone has to search for their new culinary inflated style – but the prices here are really too high for that right now.
Well, the chief may still have a few hundred years to straighten things out.
The first restaurant
People were eating out before the door was even invented: inns, table d’hôtes and breweries supplied hungry travelers with refreshments, and street food stalls are very old. But the restaurant as we know it – where you sit with your group at your own table and choose your own dish, instead of eating together at the joint tables – is a modern invention with a very specific birthplace: the Palais Royal. in Paris, at the end of the 18th century. Like the café (‘coffee’), the restaurant is a drinking establishment named after the drink consumed there. The restaurant was initially the name of a restorative broth, which was a kind of health craze at the time. A chain of events (the rise of the bourgeois class, better food supplies and farming techniques, then the French Revolution, and the increasing talk and writing about food) made these restaurants very popular in a short time and eventually became the blueprint for constituted eating out. Which is also often mentioned as the reason: since this was about health food, sometimes with a doctor’s prescription, they were the first places where (‘decent’) women could go, and therefore excellent opportunities to pick up someone. So little has changed in that regard.