The service is top notch at chic Vigor, and the vegetarian menu is to be commended

My personal favorite from the cooking jargon lexicon is the ‘make family’ instruction. This is a fairly concrete indication: ingredients with different structures and temperatures should not be mixed together from hatsekiedee, but first carefully, little by little. Then you get the fluffiest chocolate mousse, thick mayonnaise that does not split, and custard without lumps.

At good restaurants I see this kind of careful caution in all sorts of guises, on and off the plate. Sidney Schutte from Spectrum, the restaurant in the Waldorf Astoria hotel in Amsterdam, is famous for its unusual, genius combinations. He once told me that in his creative process, ingredients must be gently ‘cooked towards each other’, into parts that were previously foreign to each other to merge into a new, harmonious whole; a culinary family.

At the table, the same caution is required to achieve the harmonious feeling that can make a good restaurant evening so enjoyable. What some guests see as cordial and relaxed service, others see as offensively jovial, and while one wants to be left alone, the other loves to be involved in everything. Craftsmen sense such a thing, and make family by first paying attention and then moving along benevolently.

Family

Okay, so I was thinking about all of that because of the slogan of the restaurant Vigor, which can be pronounced in English, better not to be pronounced in English, Vught. ‘Every family has a story, welcome to ours‘, is stated on the website and the menus, and although it is not an actual family business, the professional benevolence of family making can be felt in all kinds of places. ‘Besides,’ says our waiter, ‘we now see each other here more often than our real family.’ The business, which is housed in a thoroughly renovated monumental city villa at the foot of the stubby St. Peter’s Church, is tastefully furnished with a lot of black and wood and the kitchen is in the middle of the business. We are warmly welcomed by maître Randy Brouwer and head waiter Lorenzo van Doorn, both excellent hosts who provide every table with measured knowledge, respect and idiosyncratic flair: here a dash more, there a point less. Brouwer opened the restaurant together with chef-owner Lars Albers, with whom he worked at Noble in Den Bosch.

We get a small, nice aperitif card, with just enough goodies on it to make a good choice – Brouwer has a cheerful, infectious obsession for sherry, but we also see good beer, champagne and a few cocktails. Then an equally exquisite and tasty battery of amuse-bouche: an elegant, tender crepe with green herbs and soft celeriac, a delicious raspberry meringue with salty fish eggs and chalky seaweed, and a mojama beignet (Spanish tuna ham). Albers has a distinct, creative style and confidently combines meaty, fishy and fruity flavors without falling into gimmicks. In addition to the regular menu, there is a completely parallel, lovingly composed vegetarian menu of eight courses (€ 130) without any overlap with the meat and fish dishes: unfortunately this is the exception rather than the rule in expensive Michelin shops like this one.

vegetable menu

The vegetable menu is excellent. There is soft celeriac from the barbecue with some fresh raw ribbons, savory feta cream and lovage leaf. Then a beautiful dish of slightly grilled little gem with verveine butter, delicious stewed onion and ginger flour, where the pure lettuce taste has remained very nicely. And a fun ‘risotto’ of sunflower seeds in spinach puree, topped with a soft egg yolk and thick slices of Tasmanian winter truffle – because the seasons are reversed there, it is suddenly available here in the summer too.

Then stewed artichokes with the paprika-almond sauce romesco, buttermilk, nasturtiums and fried artichoke and kombu, again super tasty, and roasted and then grilled savoy cabbage with spicy rettich, beurre noisette and hazelnuts. Van Doorn serves wines here that support but do not outshine all those lovingly prepared vegetables. Especially two from Austrian Burgenland stand out in a positive way: the biodynamic grüner veltliner ‘Supernatural’ by Roland Velich at the tuber, and at the cabbage a biodynamic Zweigelt by Martin Nittnaus. The only let down is the rather goofy, gimmicky dish of musty fern tops in a jar with black garlic, some sort of marmalade and blue cheese – that tastes just like it sounds.

Smart combinations

There is also a lot to discover in the regular eight-course menu ‘The Family Story’ (€ 145). The chef excels at clever combinations of fish, fruit and oiliness: we get beautifully cooked trout with sour unripe strawberry, cream of attic bacon, and yuzukosho – a rather trendy spicy-savoury-aromatic Japanese condiment of green peppers, the citrus fruit yuzu and salt. Van Doorn serves the Brabant natural wine Dassemus from Chaam, aged in amphora; a quirky, well-aimed choice. There is also red mullet in a rather irresistible combination with rhubarb, verbena and homemade xo sauce; that’s a super savory Cantonese pasta of dried shellfish, fried garlic and peppers that they make here with dried pata negra. Very effective in its total delicacy is also the crispy sweetbread on an oxtail stew, cleverly presented with dried shrimp, aged Chinese black Donghu vinegar, fish eggs, lemon wedges and fresh oyster leaf: a dish in which the flavors seem to have turned to the vibrates, with perfectly played off contrasts of fishy, ​​sour and savory and soft, creamy and crunchy. We get a glass of Madeira and are purring like cats.

Precisely that careful precision in the composition is missing in a few other dishes, which is a shame. There’s a potentially great dish of cuttlefish, fattened liver, coffee berry (also known as cascara), trout roe, crispy bacon, palm cabbage and an oolong tea-based broth; a stack of pronounced and intriguing flavors and textures, with the execution somehow imprecise, not focused enough. The result is therefore overcrowded and – I don’t know what else to call it – a bit of a sticky mess. The various parts do not yet want to become a family, which means that the focus is lost. In another dish, delicious toro (the squishy belly of the bluefin tuna) is beautifully layered alternately with tender barbecued leeks and black sesame, but the dashi leek broth underneath turns out to be way too salty. The quail fillet is fine again, soft and tender, with a fine buckwheat crunch, black garlic and aubergine compote with miso – we get a funny bao with it, a steamed bun filled with the leg.

And the desserts are also excellent: first a super fresh and savory dish with a frog-green sorbet of the cumin shiso leaf, strawberry, salted mascarpone and some crunchy raw chicory: cleverly conceived, well executed. Also delicious is the madeira sabayon with pine nuts, sweet peach, quark ice cream and citrus cream.

There may still be some ties here and there, but all in all it’s great to make a family at Vigor.