Through the train window to Ostend, I gaze at the endless plain that is Belgium.
I wonder what Willem Hiele’s food is.
The surfer chef, almost two meters tall, with long hair and a Viking look, who once told me he loved the beaches of my country when I first met him a few years ago.
Coming from a family of fishermen, seafood reigns supreme in his kitchen.
“My mountain is the sea,” he told me when we were talking about another chef whose identity is rooted in the mountains.
Scallops (first in their shell with smoked plums and tomatoes, then with truffles and walnuts), clams, razor clams, mackerel, mussels (with their own miso and pumpkin), monkfish, sea bass, oysters, langoustines (with radishes and caviar) and the essencial small Ostend shrimp.
Meat plays a subtle yet thoughtful role: smoked duck paired unexpectedly with mackerel, tender hare with Trompette de la Mort mushrooms in cherry sauce, and a pristine wild goose consommé with mushrooms and apple.
And then that intriguing vegetable dish, perhaps the most original and accomplished of all, whose correct name I can’t remember, but it would be close to ‘Still life of all the fruits and vegetables of last summer’. Pumpkins, tomatoes, beetroot and figs, and perhaps something else, preserved through brining, drying, and smoking, were thinly sliced and layered like abstract brushstrokes on a small rectangular canvas.
The idea came to Willem when he saw a painting by the French painter of Belarusian origin Chaïm Soutine called ‘Carcass of Beef’.
In fact, there is little or nothing in common between it and the dish, apart from its bold, faded colours. But it was enough to awaken something in Willem, a lateral thought. Things that happen when you look outside your own bubble.
In all of this, the fire.
In the courtyard, as the day draws to a close and the light fades. In the wood-burning oven to my left and in the fireplace lined with pots, pans, and hanging fish bones. The fire he uses to impart unique textures to ingredients—those mussels!—and subtle smoke notes throughout his dishes.
No strict rules, conventions or obvious classical references. A cuisine that is intrinsically intuitive, I felt. And his own.