At De Nieuwe Winkel in Nijmegen, chef Emile van der Staak earned two Michelin stars without a scrap of meat, fish, or dairy. His secret? Foraging for ingredients in a food forest.

Picture a former orphanage in one of the oldest cities in the Netherlands. The building dates to the seventeenth century. You climb a wide staircase to reach it, and when you sit down, you don’t get a menu built around a cut of beef or a fillet of fish. Instead, the evening unfolds as a kind of guided walk through the season: leaves, roots, blossoms, fruits, and ferments you’ve likely never tasted, arranged with the precision of a scientist.

This is De Nieuwe Winkel, in Nijmegen, and it may be the most quietly radical restaurant in Europe. It holds two Michelin stars and a Michelin Green Star for sustainability, and it does it all without animal products. If you care about where food is heading, toward something the planet can actually sustain, this is the table worth crossing a continent for.

A Chef Who Almost Became an Engineer

The story starts with Emile van der Staak. Although his grandfather had owned restaurants, his path into kitchens was anything but preordained. He first trained toward a career in civil engineering. But he’d been drawn to kitchens since he was fourteen, when he took a job washing dishes, and somewhere along the way the pull became impossible to ignore. He dropped out of university, according to National Geographic, and committed to cooking for real.

He learned his craft in serious rooms, moving to Amsterdam in 2000 and passing through the kitchens of respected Dutch and Belgian chefs. In 2006 he traded big-city kitchen life for Nijmegen, and in 2011 opened De Nieuwe Winkel.

The Forest That Rewired a Restaurant

In 2014, van der Staak began working with Food Forest Ketelbroek, a roughly six-acre experiment near the German border co-founded by ecologist Wouter van Eck. A food forest is exactly what it sounds like: a cultivated landscape designed to behave like a wild one. Ketelbroek grows more than 400 edible perennial species: peaches, pawpaws, Japanese plums, nuts, herbs, and a wardrobe of plants most of us have never heard of. There is no ploughing, sowing, spraying, or fertilizing here. Van Eck has called it a “Lazy Farmers’ Paradise.” Nature does the heavy lifting and the farmer mostly gets out of the way.

The turning point came in 2019, when van Eck floated an idea: what if the restaurant ran an entirely vegetarian trial menu? The response stunned everyone, van der Staak included. He committed to cooking without animal protein altogether in 2021. The bet paid off almost immediately. That same year, Michelin awarded the restaurant its first star along with a Green Star for sustainability; a second star followed in 2022. Today it’s widely reported as the only fully vegan restaurant in the world with two Michelin stars.

Van der Staak has a phrase for his philosophy that captures it neatly: we should trust nature a little more. He’s also blunt about the stakes, arguing that the modern way of eating is pushing the planet to its limits. And that chefs, of all people, are positioned to help lead the way out.

What “Botanical Gastronomy” Actually Means

De Nieuwe Winkel calls its cooking “botanical gastronomy,” and the name is more than branding. Split it in two: gastronomy, the art of exceptional food and drink, meets botanical, the science of plants. Put together, it describes a kitchen that treats vegetables, fruits, and foraged greenery not as a side act or a sacrifice, but as the whole point and worthy of the same obsession a three-star kitchen would lavish on caviar or wagyu.

In practice, that means the team works the way a naturalist might: pick, smell, taste, analyze, ferment, cook, and repeat until a humble plant becomes something genuinely astonishing. Fermentation is central, a way of coaxing depth, funk, and umami out of ingredients that don’t come with it built in. The sourcing is playfully global for a restaurant so rooted in place: alongside its Dutch food forests, the kitchen champions unexpected transplants like Japanese ginger, Chinese mahogany shoots, and Siberian honeyberries, all of which, it turns out, feel right at home in Dutch soil.

Beyond Ketelbroek, the restaurant leans on partners like the Ommuurde Tuin, a walled garden tended for more than twenty-five years, brimming with hundreds of edible crops. The through-line is a rejection of industrial agriculture in favor of working with the land rather than against it. As van der Staak has framed it, this isn’t cooking that asks you to give something up. It’s a journey of discovery, full of creativity and flavor.

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What’s on the Menu

Dinner here is a single seasonal tasting menu, and the menu itself changes three times a year to follow what the forests and gardens are actually doing. Each season gets a name that reads like a chapter title.

Awakening runs roughly March through June, when the first fresh flavors of the year emerge. Growth carries the summer, July through October, as young vegetables come into their own. And Abundance takes over from November into March, the restaurant’s own “paradise on earth,” a finale built from everything the year has stored up. It’s a lovely way to eat: come three times, and you’ve essentially tasted the calendar.

Inside the Plant Lab

If the restaurant is the stage, the DNW Lab is the workshop behind the curtain, and it’s the clearest signal of where van der Staak’s ambitions are really pointed. Grown out of the restaurant’s own kitchen, the Lab is a research-and-development space where chefs, scientists, and farmers work side by side. Their motto tells you the spirit of the place: they come together, as they put it, “to play, to fail, to discover and to share what we find.” The bigger idea behind it all is disarmingly hopeful. A future in which farming actually restores ecosystems, and plant-based food wins people over not through guilt but through sheer flavor.

What makes the Lab special is that it takes real science seriously without losing the joy of the plate. Work here follows an academic rhythm: a hypothesis, an experiment, a measured result. Taste, texture, and aroma are the final judges. The team has partnered with the University of Southern Denmark to study the microstructure of plant foods, digging into how fibers, proteins, and fats shape the way a bite actually feels in your mouth. And the projects coming out of it are genuinely delicious-sounding provocations: a cocoa-free “chocolate” made from locally grown chestnuts (a crop that happens to improve the soil it grows in), a dairy-free cheese built from almonds, and the revival of the aardaker, a nearly forgotten European tuber being coaxed back into cultivation. It’s part test kitchen, part science department, part seed bank — and the surest sign that what’s happening in Nijmegen is meant to outgrow a single dining room.

That mission extends to the page, too. In 2025 the team released Plant, a cookbook of more than eighty recipes drawn from the food-forest philosophy.

Why It Matters

It would be easy to file De Nieuwe Winkel under “impressive vegan restaurant” and move on. That undersells it. What van der Staak is really doing is offering working proof that the most exciting, most decorated fine dining doesn’t have to come at the planet’s expense. That a forest tended lightly can out-thrill a supply chain flown in from around the world. In a wellness landscape that too often confuses restriction with virtue, here’s a place where eating in step with nature is simply, unmistakably delicious. That’s the kind of table worth building a trip around.

The Details

Restaurant: De Nieuwe Winkel

Address: Gebroeders van Limburgplein 7, 6511 BW Nijmegen, The Netherlands

Reservations: Book directly through the “Book Now” reservation system on the restaurant’s website, where you’ll see live table availability.

Website: denieuwewinkel.com

The Plant Lab: dnwlab.com

The cookbook: Plant is available through the restaurant’s website.

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All photography courtesy of De Nieuwe Winkel.

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