Piloersemaborg

“We have one menu and the farmers and nature around us determine how we cook. We buy fish directly from the fishermen and we use everything from the whole animal when cooking meat. We forage a variety of berries that we use for our desserts in combination with raw products from the farm, such as butter and yoghurt.”

From his Italian teacher, Dick Soek learnt that good food has to be regional. Over the years he set up a network of regional suppliers: growers, millers, dairy farms. De Piloersemaborg gets its fish directly from fishermen, oysters are picked on the shores of de Waddenzee, the shrimps are fresh and hand-peeled. Game comes from the local hunting society.

Soek cooks in the Piloersemaborg, a seventeenth-century estate that once belonged to a family of local noblemen. The house is surrounded by a canal, trees and an orchard amidst the flat countryside of Groningen. Soek’s wife Hilde runs a B&B in the same building. Her breakfast is famous for its serving of local cheeses and house-baked bread. Go for the food, stay for the hospitality.