De Librije in Zwolle is the Netherlands' only three-Michelin-star restaurant. Jonnie Boer — who grew up catching eels in the canals of Giethoorn and built the most influential Dutch kitchen of the 21st century without ever training in a French brigade — died in April 2025. His wife Thérèse, head chef Nelson Tanate, and his children Jimmie and Isabelle hold the three stars, the glass-covered prison courtyard, and everything Jonnie built in it. Here is what it is and what it means to eat there now.

First, The Orientation



Zwolle is an hour from Amsterdam. The former prison inside it holds three Michelin stars.


Zwolle is a Hanseatic market city of 135,000 people in the Overijssel province of the eastern Netherlands, roughly equidistant between Amsterdam and the German border, built around a medieval canal system and a series of historic churches and guild buildings that reflect its centuries as a trading centre. It is not a city that appears in any standard European cultural or gastronomic itinerary. It has no major art museum, no UNESCO listed old city, no established tourist infrastructure of the kind that draws the international visitors who populate the lists of world-famous restaurants in Paris, Copenhagen, or London. What it has is De Librije, and De Librije is the reason to go.


The restaurant moved to its current location in 2015: the former Spinhuis, an 18th-century women's prison that Jonnie and Thérèse Boer purchased in 2000 and spent fifteen years transforming into the most distinctive restaurant setting in the Netherlands. The Spinhuis — Spinhouse in Dutch, named for the spinning work the imprisoned women performed — is a complex of historic buildings around a central courtyard that is now covered with a glass roof. The tables of De Librije are set in this courtyard: open to the sky in the sense that the glass above admits full weather light, from the grey flat cloud of a Dutch November to the sharp summer blue that the low Netherlands sky produces in June. The walls of the former prison rise around the diners. The building's history is visible in its structure. The kitchen is the warmest thing in the room, and the food that comes from it is the only credible explanation for why Zwolle is on any serious eater's map of Europe.


The name De Librije comes from the restaurant's original location: the library of a 15th-century Dominican abbey at Broerenkerkplein, where Jonnie Boer arrived as a twenty-four-year-old head chef in 1989 and where he and Thérèse purchased the restaurant in 1992, took their first Michelin star in 1993, their second in 1999, and their third in 2004. The third star has been held without interruption since — an unbroken run now extending over twenty years that places De Librije among the most consistently recognised three-star restaurants in the world. In October 2025, six months after Jonnie's death, the Michelin Guide confirmed the three stars would be retained. The moment was not expected by the team; it was hoped for. Thérèse told the ceremony that they had feared the worst and prepared themselves. The stars remained because the cooking remained what Jonnie had built.


He was foraging, fishing, fermenting and flying in the face of received notions about fine dining years before those things became pillars of the New Nordic movement. He didn't give up entirely on foie gras and caviar, but they shared the menu, and sometimes the plate, with pikeperch, tulip bulbs and chickweed.

NEW YORK TIMES OBITUARY, MAY 2025
The Chef — Jonnie Boer, 1965-2025



Grew up catching eels in the canals of Giethoorn. Never trained in a French kitchen.


Jonnie Boer was born on 9 January 1965 in Giethoorn — the village in the Overijssel wetlands sometimes called the Venice of the North, where the houses are connected by canals rather than roads, and where the flat polder landscape of water, reed, and sky that defines the northeastern Netherlands is at its most extreme and most beautiful. His parents, Lebbertus and Hennie Boer, owned a café called De Harmonie. As a child, he wandered into the kitchen to fry duck eggs and eels he had turned up while exploring the waterways. This was not a romantic rural childhood in the way that European food culture tends to romanticise rural childhoods. It was simply the practical formation of someone who grew up where specific things grew and where the question of what to do with them was the primary question a kitchen had to answer.


He completed culinary training and began his career in kitchens in the 1980s before arriving at De Librije in Zwolle in 1989 as head chef. He was twenty-four. The restaurant was located in the library of a 15th-century Dominican abbey. He had never trained in the grand brigades of France. He had no Robuchon stage on his CV, no Ducasse foundation, no formative years in a classical Parisian kitchen. What he had was the knowledge of a landscape — the waterways and polders and coastal shallows of his childhood — and the conviction that this landscape contained culinary materials as fine as anything imported from further south. When he was ridiculed in the early years for trying to serve Dutch lamb rather than the imported variety, his response was to continue serving Dutch lamb.


"Everything that grows here is just as good as something that grows somewhere else. Why should I buy porcini mushrooms which are imported when I can find them here? Why should I get seafood from Brittany when I can get it from fishermen in the North Sea?"

JONNIE BOER


He met Thérèse Boer-Tausch at a disco. They became the defining partnership of Dutch fine dining: Jonnie in the kitchen, Thérèse in the dining room, developing in parallel into a chef of international distinction and a sommelier and maître of equal calibre. She trained as a viticulturist. She built the wine programme that underpins the De Librije experience as completely as the food does. In 1992, the couple bought the restaurant. In 1993, the first Michelin star. In 1997, Jonnie earned the SVH Meesterkok title — the Dutch association's recognition of master chef — at thirty-two. In 1999, the second star, making him at thirty-three the youngest two-star chef in the Netherlands. In 2004, the third.


Long before René Redzepi and Claus Meyer published the New Nordic Manifesto in August 2004 — the document that launched a global conversation about local, seasonal, foraged, fermented cooking — Jonnie Boer had been doing it. He was foraging wild herbs from the polder landscape on weekend excursions on his black Harley-Davidson. He was fermenting vegetables and rose petals and juniper berries, testing his fermentation methods at a Dutch university, travelling to South Korea to attend fermentation classes. He was building the greenhouse and kitchen garden that would supply the restaurant year-round. He was not following a movement. He was, in the fullest possible sense, ahead of one.


He died on 23 April 2025 on the Caribbean island of Bonaire, aged 60, of a pulmonary embolism. Dutch social media mourned him as the Roger Federer of chefs: a person who had dominated his field with grace for so long that most of his contemporaries had never known it without him. The Gault&Millau guide awarded a posthumous Lifetime Achievement Award in 2025. The New York Times ran an obituary. The food world marked a loss that was larger than any individual restaurant can contain — because what Jonnie Boer had done was not simply to build the finest Dutch restaurant. He had built Dutch fine dining itself.

The Formation


From the canals of Giethoorn to the prison courtyard of Zwolle — thirty-five years of one kitchen.


  • (Giethoorn, Childhood) The canals, the duck eggs, the eels — The foundational landscape: the flat polder waterways of the Overijssel wetlands, where specific things grow in specific seasons in ways determined by the water table, the reed beds, and the specific quality of the northern Dutch light on shallow water. Jonnie grew up in a family café, frying the eels and eggs he found in the landscape around him. This is not a background that produced a repertoire. It produced an orientation: the understanding that cooking begins with asking what this specific place produces, and what to do with it.


  • (Training, 1980s) Dutch professional kitchens — no French brigade — Jonnie completed culinary training and worked in Dutch professional kitchens in the 1980s. He never trained in the grand French brigades that define the formation of most European three-star chefs. This absence — like Heston Blumenthal's absence of formal training, like Norbert Niederkofler's return from New York to a specific alpine landscape without a French master's imprimatur — is not a gap in the formation. It is the formation. Jonnie's freedom to ask questions about Dutch produce that the French tradition would not have raised for him was a direct consequence of never having learned, as foundational fact, that French produce was superior. He never accepted the premise.


  • (Zwolle, 1989) Head chef at De Librije, age 24 — The Dominican abbey library building at Broerenkerkplein. A restaurant that already existed, with a history and a name he would make into something else entirely. He arrived knowing his landscape. He spent the next years learning what a kitchen required of it.


  • (Zwolle, 1992-2004) Purchase, first star, second star, third star — In 1992, Jonnie and Thérèse bought De Librije — going to a local bank for a loan, wearing a tie for the only time in his life. First Michelin star 1993. Second star 1999 — at thirty-three, the youngest two-star chef in the Netherlands. SVH Meesterkok (Master Chef) 1997. Third star 2004. The decade between 1993 and 2004 was the decade that built the kitchen: the producer network, the greenhouse, the fermentation programme, the specific Dutch terroir vocabulary that would define everything that followed.


  • (Zwolle, 2000-2015) The Spinhuis complex takes shape — The purchase of the former women's prison in 2000. The opening of Librije's Hotel in 2008 — nineteen rooms in the former prison. The cooking school, the wine school, the wine bar, the gourmet shop, all gradually added to the Spinhuis complex. The relocation of De Librije from the Dominican abbey library to the glass-covered prison courtyard in 2015: the physical expression of a kitchen and a family that had grown to the point where everything needed to be under one roof.


  • (Zwolle, 2023) The next generation — Nelson Tanate, Jimmie and Isabelle Boer — At De Librije's 30th anniversary, Jonnie and Thérèse handed the Next Generation Keys to the prison doors to their children Jimmie and Isabelle and to head chef Nelson Tanate, adding them as co-owners of the company. The documentary series De Opvolging (The Succession) aired in February 2025 and documented the succession planning. It concluded two months before Jonnie's death. The succession was in place when it was needed most.



  • (April, 2025) Jonnie Boer dies on Bonaire. De Librije reopens two weeks later — "We will continue to inspire you and make Jonnie proud," Thérèse and the team wrote. "Jonnie would say: okay, and now we keep working. Continue with what we were working on. Standing still is going backwards." In October 2025, the Michelin Guide retained the three stars. Nelson Tanate received the chef's jacket at the Maastricht ceremony on behalf of the team. The Guide described Jonnie as "the most influential Dutch chef of his generation."
The Philosophy


Dutch terroir. Twenty years before it had a name. Fermentation when nobody was doing it.


The "De Librije spirit" — the phrase Jonnie Boer used to describe the kitchen's essential quality — was defined by the combination of a specific geographical commitment and a creative restlessness that treated the Netherlands' flat, wet, agricultural landscape not as a limitation on what fine dining could be but as the most interesting possible subject for it. The polders, the canals, the IJsselmeer, the North Sea, the market gardens of the Overijssel province, the wild plants of the wetland margins — this is what the kitchen worked from, and the question it was always asking was not "what can I do with good ingredients" but "what does this place produce that nobody has thought to cook yet?"


The answer, over thirty years, was pimpernel, pine tips, meadowsweet, birch sap, bog myrtle, chickweed, tulip bulbs, the colostrum milk of cows that have just given birth (which has a different protein structure from ordinary milk and becomes, when treated correctly, something close to custard), and the full range of creatures that the Dutch waterways and the North Sea produce in their ordinary operations. Jonnie foraged these ingredients on weekend excursions through the landscape — initially on foot, later on the black Harley-Davidson that became his characteristic vehicle for this work — and what he couldn't bring back from the wild he planted in the greenhouse and kitchen garden at the Spinhuis. He was doing this in the 1990s, when the critical and culinary establishment understood Dutch cuisine as herring, stamppot, and stroopwafel. The reaction was sometimes bewilderment and sometimes dismissal. He continued.


The fermentation programme was equally pioneering. Jonnie was fermenting vegetables, rose petals, and juniper berries in fermented cabbage in the 1990s — "when you preserve something in its natural environment, you do not need to use vinegar," he said — developing methods he subsequently had tested at a Dutch university and deepened through a specific trip to South Korea to study Korean fermentation techniques. The bright acidity that the Michelin Guide now identifies as one of the kitchen's defining characteristics is the product of this fermentation practice: a sourness that does not come from citrus or wine but from the controlled biological transformation of Dutch produce, a flavour that is simultaneously native to the region and unlike anything produced by conventional European fine dining.


The "De Librije spirit" was the willingness to serve something before knowing whether it would work — to take a tulip bulb, acknowledge that it was inedible in its natural state, and ask what could be done to make it good. "Our aim is to be different," Jonnie said. "Sometimes we do not know what the best way to prepare something is, but we still go ahead and this is what I call the De Librije spirit."

JONNIE BOER


The kitchen's relationship to its producers was as defining as its relationship to its landscape. Jonnie consistently placed his suppliers in the spotlight — he would take the stage at culinary events and talk about the men and women growing and fishing and farming for De Librije rather than about his own technique. The sourcing network he built across thirty years — the fishermen of the IJsselmeer, the market gardeners of Overijssel, the wild foragers, the dairy farmers, the small-scale producers of Dutch terroir ingredients — is the infrastructure that makes the Dutch terroir argument possible. Without these relationships, the kitchen has nothing. Jonnie understood this before almost any other three-star chef in Europe.


Thérèse's dimension of the philosophy is the wine programme: an exceptional cellar and pairing structure built by a trained viticulturist who approaches wine with the same combination of deep knowledge and creative instinct that Jonnie applied to food. The wine bar in the Spinhuis — where guests can try extraordinary bottles by the glass — is an extension of this programme into the hotel and complex. The wine at De Librije is not a service; it is the equal creative contribution of the other half of the partnership that built everything here.

The Dishes


What the glass-covered courtyard sends to the table — and why the flatlands make it possible.


The tasting menu at De Librije changes seasonally and is built around whatever the Dutch landscape and the kitchen's producer network is delivering at its best. The dishes below are the ones that defined Jonnie Boer's kitchen and that Nelson Tanate and the team carry forward — some of them still on the menu, some retired, all of them illustrations of what the De Librije spirit looks like on a plate.


The Signature · Dutch Terroir — Pike-Perch from the Ijsselmeer — Apply Syrup, Zolderspek, Riesling Beurre Blanc


The Michelin Guide's choice of illustrative dish for De Librije is the pike-perch course: fish from the IJsselmeer — the freshwater lake formed from the Zuiderzee by the Afsluitdijk, whose specific water chemistry produces a pike-perch of flavour that is distinct from any other freshwater fish in the Netherlands — cooked until perfectly succulent, glazed with apple syrup that is not overly sweet, topped with zolderspek (the "attic bacon" — pork cured in the traditional Dutch manner of hanging in an attic, which produces a concentration and a dryness that commercial cured meat cannot replicate) smoked in-house, accompanied by seasonal vegetable garnishes and a beurre blanc made with Riesling. The Guide calls it "an ode to Dutch terroir" — a description that is accurate and that also slightly undersells how much technical precision is required to make what reads as simple Dutch ingredients into a three-star course. The fish, the apple, the smoked pork, the Riesling: all of these are things from this place, combined with the accumulated knowledge of what they taste like together.


The Eel · Jonnie's Childhood — Lacquered Eel — Nitrogen Smoke, Star Anise, Scent


Jonnie Boer grew up frying eels he caught in the canals of Giethoorn. The eel of the Dutch waterways — smoked and barbecued and lacquered — recurred across De Librije's menus for thirty years as the dish most directly connected to the chef's formative food memory. The preparation that became most associated with the kitchen involves the eel disappearing in a smoke cloud produced by liquid nitrogen, the scent of star anise in the cloud, the specific combination of technique and theatre that Jonnie was deploying before nitrogen smoke became a fine dining cliché. The eel itself is the traditional Dutch smoked variety; the lacquering concentrates and intensifies the fat; the nitrogen cloud is not theatre for its own sake but a specific delivery mechanism for the anise aromatics that the cloud carries. Guests at the ceremony in October 2025 described the barbecued eel as a highlight — in tribute to Jonnie, who considered it a signature.


The Unusual · De Librije Spirit — Tulip Bulbs — Chicken Liver, Chicken Skin Waffle, Seaweed Oil


The tulip bulb course is the most famous expression of the De Librije spirit — the dish that the food world most often cites when describing what made Jonnie Boer's cooking genuinely original. The tulip bulb is a Dutch staple that was eaten during the wartime hunger years of 1944-1945 not by choice but by necessity, and that existed after the war as a folk memory of deprivation rather than as a culinary ingredient. Jonnie researched which tulip varieties were edible (many are not), visited farms, and developed a preparation that makes something "not tasty, taste good" — his own description of the challenge. The combination with chicken liver and chicken skin waffle, dressed with seaweed oil, is not a reconstruction of a wartime dish. It is the transformation of a Dutch cultural memory into a course that is simultaneously specific to its geography and genuinely pleasurable to eat. The dish is "ahead of the game," as Jonnie described any course that solved a problem the kitchen had not previously solved.


The Sea · North Sea Brown Shrimp — Dutch Brown Shrimp — Multiple Preparations


The North Sea brown shrimp — Crangon crangon, the tiny, intensely flavoured crustacean that has been caught along the Dutch coast for centuries and that the Netherlands still produces in vast quantities — appears in the De Librije kitchen as a primary ingredient rather than as a garnish or background element. Dutch brown shrimp are smaller than the pink Atlantic shrimp familiar to most European diners and considerably more flavourful: the specific salinity of the southern North Sea and the traditional cooking and peeling process produce a sweetness and a marine depth that larger crustaceans from warmer waters cannot approach. Jonnie served them in multiple preparations simultaneously — different textures, different temperatures, the full range of what the small crustacean can be made to express — as an illustration of the kitchen's central conviction: that Dutch produce, studied with the attention it deserves, reveals complexity that its reputation would not lead you to expect.


The Hand · The Joke — Beef Tartare on the Back of the Hand — Veal with Caviar on a Ring


Two of De Librije's most discussed moments from the amuse-bouche sequence: veal tartare with caviar served on a ring — a small dome of the preparation balanced on the hand, eaten in a single bite, raw meat and caviar in the combination that is classical fine dining luxury but delivered in a format that is part joke and part instruction — and the beef tartare served on the back of a diner's hand, like a bump of cocaine, a gesture that the restaurant was making years before Manhattan's caviar bump trend made the same cultural reference. Both preparations illustrate the specific quality of Jonnie's personality in the food: not irreverence exactly, but a refusal to take the solemnity of the tasting menu format more seriously than the pleasure of eating deserves. The jokes are good. So is the tartare.


The Ferment · The Method — Fermented Dutch Vegetables — Rose Petals, Juniper, Cabbage


The fermentation courses at De Librije — rose petals preserved in fermented cabbage, juniper berries in their natural fermentation environment, the range of Dutch produce that Jonnie was pickling and fermenting in the 1990s before fermentation became a fine dining vocabulary — are the most technically specific expression of the kitchen's methodology. "When the produce is good, you can ferment and preserve vegetables," Jonnie said. "When you preserve something in its natural environment, you do not need to use vinegar." The resulting preparations produce the bright acidity that the Michelin Guide now identifies as a De Librije characteristic: a sourness that comes from biological transformation rather than from the addition of acidic ingredients, which is a different flavour register entirely from what citrus or wine vinegar produces. The ferments change with the season; the method is the constant.


The Wild · The Harley-Davidson — Foraged Polder Herbs — Meadowsweet, Pine Tips, Pimpernel, Birch Sap


The wild ingredients that Jonnie foraged on weekend excursions through the Dutch landscape — meadowsweet, pine tips, pimpernel, birch sap, bog myrtle, chickweed — appear in the De Librije kitchen as primary flavour elements rather than garnishes. Each of these grows in the specific ecological niches of the Dutch polder: the wet margins of the canal system, the edges of the reed beds, the managed grasslands of the IJsselmeer delta. What Jonnie found in the wild and could not reliably source throughout the year, he eventually planted in the greenhouse and kitchen garden at the Spinhuis. The foraged ingredients are the most direct connection between the kitchen and the landscape that surrounds the building — the specific plant life of a flat, wet, northern country, used with the precision of a chef who spent thirty years learning exactly what each one tasted like and what it could do alongside a Dutch freshwater fish or a piece of polder-grazed lamb.


The Marigold · The Signature Close — Foraged Polder Herbs — Meadowsweet, Pine Tips, Pimpernel, Birch Sap


The marigold caviar course — spheres of marigold preparation with champagne sauce, the flowers from the kitchen's own greenhouse at the Spinhuis — is both a technical achievement and a statement about the specific quality of what can be grown in the Dutch greenhouse tradition. The marigold is not an ingredient that appears in European fine dining anywhere else in this context; it appears here because the kitchen's greenhouse grows it, and the kitchen's greenhouse grows it because Jonnie's philosophy required the kitchen to control its own botanical supply, and because the marigold's specific floral and slightly bitter character produces something in preparation that the kitchen found worthwhile. Guests at the 2025 ceremonies described it as a highlight — "a signature dish" recommended alongside the barbecued eel — in the first service after Jonnie's death, as the team worked to make him proud.

Before You Arrive


Everything practical, plainly told


  • Address: Spinhuisplein 1, 8011 ZZ Zwolle, Netherlands. The Spinhuis complex is on Spinhuisplein, a short square in the historic centre of Zwolle, accessible on foot from the train station in approximately 12 minutes through the medieval centre. The restaurant's entrance is through the complex's main gate; follow the hotel and restaurant signage to the glass-covered courtyard.


  • Getting There: Zwolle has a direct train connection from Amsterdam Centraal — approximately 1 hour 10 minutes by intercity train, running frequently through the day. From Utrecht Centraal approximately 45 minutes. From Groningen approximately 50 minutes. The train station is a 12-minute walk from the restaurant through the medieval centre of Zwolle. By car from Amsterdam: A1 east, then A28 north, exit Zwolle Centre — approximately 1 hour 20 minutes in normal traffic. The Spinhuis complex has limited parking nearby; the city centre parking garages on Luttekestraat are the practical option.


  • Reservations: Via librije.com or by telephone (+31 38 421 2083). The restaurant is open for dinner Wednesday to Saturday, with lunch service on Saturday. Reservations are typically available two to three months in advance; the restaurant fills consistently but does not present the extreme booking difficulty of the World's 50 Best top ten. Weekend evenings are the hardest to secure; Wednesday and Thursday dinners are typically more available. Dietary requirements must be communicated at the time of booking.


  • Opening Hours: Dinner: Wednesday to Saturday, service from 18:30. Lunch: Saturday from 12:00. Closed Sunday, Monday, Tuesday. The restaurant also observes seasonal closures; confirm current dates at librije.com. One sitting per service. The kitchen operates at capacity on every service.


  • The Menu: One tasting menu per service, changing seasonally. Approximately 8 to 12 courses over 3 to 4 hours, preceded by an amuse-bouche sequence in the lounge. Wine pairing available, curated by Thérèse Boer and the sommelier team with the same seriousness and creative intelligence she has applied to the cellar for thirty years. The wine bar in the Spinhuis — accessible to hotel guests and diners — offers the chance to try extraordinary bottles by the glass in a setting that is itself worth the visit.


  • What to Budget: The tasting menu is priced at approximately €225–275 per person for food (pricing adjusts seasonally; confirm at booking). Wine pairing from approximately €100–150 per person. A full evening with wine pairing and service is approximately €350–450 per person — consistent with equivalent three-star restaurants in the Netherlands and Belgium, and below the pricing of three-star restaurants in Paris or London. Staying at Librije's Hotel adds the cost of accommodation in the former prison cells converted to luxury rooms, which is worth calculating as part of a dedicated visit.


  • Librije's Hotel: Nineteen rooms in the former Spinhuis women's prison — the prison cells converted into individual luxury rooms, each with its own character, the historic prison architecture visible in the vaulted ceilings and the original ironwork. The hotel is the correct accommodation for a De Librije dinner: a short walk from the table to the room at the end of the evening, breakfast in the complex, and the specific experience of sleeping inside the building that was a place of imprisonment and is now a place of exceptional hospitality. Book the hotel alongside the dinner. The combination is complete in a way that a taxi to a different hotel is not.



  • What to Wear: Smart casual, without stiffness. De Librije has always had the specific quality of warmth that Jonnie and Thérèse built from the beginning — guests consistently describe it as formal without formality, precise without being intimidating. A jacket is appropriate and common. The glass-covered courtyard is responsive to weather; the building is warm in winter and cool in summer. The service team is led by Thérèse, whose approach to hospitality was described by the Michelin Guide as "exemplary": attentive but discreet, professional without aloofness. Dress for an occasion that matters in a room that has always known what it was.
Things Worth Knowing Before You Go


The notes that belong in no other section


  • Stay at Librije's Hotel — the former prison cells, specifically — The rooms at Librije's Hotel are not all former prison cells — some are in the wider Spinhuis complex — but the ones that are, are. The prison architecture of the 18th-century Spinhuis is present in the rooms: the height of the ceilings, the depth of the walls, the specific quality of space that a building designed for incarceration has when it is converted to hospitality. Sleeping in what was once a prison cell, after eating in what was once a prison courtyard, inside a building that Jonnie and Thérèse spent fifteen years transforming from a place of punishment to a place of extraordinary pleasure, is the most complete experience available in Zwolle. Book it.


  • Arrive through the glass-covered courtyard before you sit down — look up — The glass roof of the former Spinhuis courtyard is the setting for the restaurant's tables. Before you are shown to your table, take a moment to stand in the courtyard and look at the building around you: the historic prison walls, the glass above, the former cells visible in the upper floors, the kitchen warmth visible through the pass. This building was built in 1739. It imprisoned women who worked at spinning through the 18th and 19th centuries. It is now the site of the most important meal in Dutch gastronomy. The architecture is telling you something about the country it is in — a country that consistently transforms its history into something more useful than a monument.


  • When you eat the tulip bulb course — if it appears — understand what it is — The tulip bulb is a wartime hunger food. The Dutch Hunger Winter of 1944-1945, when the Nazi blockade of the occupied Netherlands produced a famine that killed approximately 22,000 people, produced tulip bulbs as a necessity — the only thing available to eat in some areas of the country. Jonnie Boer took this ingredient — associated in Dutch cultural memory with extreme deprivation — and spent years making it into something delicious. The course is not a history lesson. But it is enriched by knowing that what you are eating was once what people ate when there was nothing else. Jonnie found that there was something worthwhile in it even before the necessity was lifted. This is the De Librije spirit in its most serious form.


  • Take Thérèse's wine pairing — she is one of the finest sommeliers in Europe — The wine programme at De Librije was built by Thérèse Boer over thirty years. She is a trained viticulturist who has spent three decades building a cellar and a pairing philosophy that matches the ambition and the creativity of the kitchen. The pairing at De Librije is not simply complementary — it is as creative an act as the cooking, and the specific selections Thérèse and her team make for each course reflect knowledge of the food and knowledge of the wine that few other sommeliers in Europe possess at equivalent depth. Take the pairing. It is the other half of what Jonnie and Thérèse built together.


  • Visit the wine bar in the Spinhuis — it is not just a hotel amenity — The wine bar in the Spinhuis complex is available to hotel guests and to diners who arrive before the restaurant service or wish to continue after. Thérèse's cellar is accessible here by the glass: extraordinary bottles, the Dutch and European wine landscape as seen by one of its most knowledgeable practitioners, in a setting that is historically and architecturally remarkable. A glass of something exceptional from the bar before the dinner is the correct preparation for the wine pairing that follows. The bar is not a hotel lobby bar. It is an expression of the same philosophy as the restaurant.


  • Go to Giethoorn if you have a free morning — it is forty minutes from Zwolle — The village where Jonnie Boer was born and grew up — the Venice of the North, connected by canals rather than roads, where flat-bottomed punts are the primary transport and the Netherlands' characteristic polder landscape is at its most extreme and most beautiful — is forty minutes from Zwolle by car. Going to Giethoorn the morning before a De Librije dinner, and understanding the specific water, reed, and sky landscape that produced the chef who built the restaurant, is the most direct available contextualisation of everything the kitchen is made from. The eels in the canals, the duck eggs, the flat light on the water in the morning — this is where it all began.



  • The playlist changes through the evening — pay attention to it — Jonnie Boer collaborated with local DJ Hans Stroeve on the restaurant's music programme for years. The playlist was not incidental to the experience: it progressed from deep house music in the early part of the evening to stadium rock anthems — Bon Jovi, raised lighters — as it got later. "If Jonnie felt like guitars in the restaurant, you heard guitars in the restaurant." The music is part of the atmosphere in the way that lighting and room temperature are part of the atmosphere — designed, specific, and expressive of a personality. Notice when it changes. The change marks the evening moving from a formal beginning to something more generously informal.


  • The herbal joints sent home in glass tubes — accept them and understand what they mean — One of De Librije's most discussed sendoffs: guests leave with edible herbal joints inside glass pre-roll tubes. This is not a stunt or a brand moment. It is the most direct expression of Jonnie's conviction that fine dining should be enjoyed rather than endured — that a restaurant can simultaneously produce technically exceptional food and send guests home with something that makes them laugh. The joints are edible and herbal; the form is a joke that is also a gift. Accept it in the spirit it is offered: from a kitchen that spent thirty years proving that Dutch food was exceptional, and that never confused seriousness about cooking with the absence of delight.
Why This Restaurant



What De Librije actually is


The restaurants in this series that are easiest to understand are the ones that have been doing what they do in a context that prepared the world to receive them: the elBulli alumni in Barcelona building on an established avant-garde tradition; the Notting Hill chef developing British gastronomy in a city that already had several restaurants of serious international standing; the South Tyrolean chef working within a regional fine dining culture that has twenty starred restaurants in a province of half a million people. De Librije is different. Jonnie Boer built the most important Dutch restaurant in a country that did not have one when he started, in a city that had no gastronomic reputation, from a landscape that the European fine dining world had always treated as producing inferior ingredients.


The specific quality of what he built is that it was not the result of importing a model from elsewhere and applying it to Dutch produce. It was the result of asking, from the inside, what Dutch produce actually contained — and refusing to accept the received answer. The received answer, in the early 1990s, was that Dutch ingredients were functional rather than gastronomic: good enough for the home kitchen, inadequate for serious fine dining, which required French product supplemented by the best of what the global market offered. Jonnie's response was empirical: he tried the ingredients, found them extraordinary, and served them. When people laughed at Dutch lamb, he continued serving Dutch lamb. When nobody else was foraging pimpernel and meadowsweet and birch sap from the Dutch wetland margins, he continued foraging them. When the fermentation methods he was developing had no established vocabulary in European fine dining, he had them tested at a university and travelled to South Korea to learn from the tradition that had one.


After his death, Dutch social media called Jonnie Boer the Roger Federer of Dutch chefs. The comparison captures something specific: not just excellence, but the kind of excellence that redefines what is possible within a discipline, that extends what the field understands its own territory to be, and that does so with such grace and consistency that its absence is mourned not only as the loss of a person but as the loss of a standard against which everything else was measured.


De Librije continues. Thérèse holds the dining room, the wine programme, and the institutional memory of thirty years together. Nelson Tanate holds the kitchen and the responsibility of carrying a philosophy forward that he absorbed working alongside the chef who built it. Jimmie and Isabelle Boer hold the keys to the prison doors, as their father gave them two years before he died, and the obligation to ensure that the building their parents transformed from a women's prison into the finest restaurant in the Netherlands remains what it became under their care. The three Michelin stars retained in October 2025 are the external confirmation that these people are equal to this task. The more important confirmation is that they returned to service two weeks after Jonnie's death and made his food.


Go to Zwolle. Take the train. Walk through the medieval centre to the Spinhuis. Eat in the glass-covered courtyard of the former prison. Drink the wine that Thérèse has selected for what the kitchen is sending to your table. Accept the herbal joints at the end and understand why they were sent. And understand, before you arrive, that you are going to eat at the restaurant that built Dutch fine dining from a flat, wet, agricultural landscape that nobody else thought was worth the effort — and that the chef who built it grew up catching eels in a canal village and never stopped believing that what grew there was as good as anything that grew anywhere else. He was right about that. Three Michelin stars, held without interruption for twenty-one years, confirm it.