The love between people is finite, but the love for high-end gastronomy is everlasting, and the living proof of this is Thayarni Garthoff. For many years, the trained restaurant specialist with Sinhalese roots was the partner of the German kitchen grandmaster Thomas Bühner, built up the gourmet restaurant "La Vie" in Osnabrück together with him, experienced his ascent to the Olympus of the three Michelin stars as a restaurant manager and was unhappy when she took it easy after separating from Bühner and turned her back on gastronomy.
Jakob Strobel y Serra
Editor in the feuilleton, responsible for the "Reiseblatt".
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She soon realized that she could live without him, but could not live without him, and did not hesitate for a second when the chance to return presented itself: Half out of desperation, half out of boredom, she attended a barbecue course that took place in the run-down "boiler house" of a former Osnabrück furniture factory, immediately recognized the potential of this place, and when Bühner's "La Vie" was closed in 2018, She hired his best people – including Dutch chef Randy de Jong – to transform the "Kesselhaus" into a gourmet restaurant.
De Jong got his Michelin star shortly after, in March 2020, and Thayarni Garthoff didn't lose hope when she had to close just a week later due to the pandemic. And she is certainly not discouraged by the fact that such a down-to-earth city as Osnabrück does not make it easy for top international gastronomy. This must be true love.
Flavour journey halfway around the globe
As a Dutchman, Randy de Jong is also fully committed to the basic principle of his home country in the kitchen: he is as polyglot as he is cosmopolitan, likes to be inspired by the unknown and merges the foreign with his own into something independent. In this way, the "Kesselhaus" creates a world cuisine that defies all common categorizations. For the finger food to kick things off, the chef fills a cream puff with Parmesan cream, combines fennel and sea bream in a tartlet, builds a turret of smoked trout, sesame and kohlrabi and serves seaweed butter with sourdough bread. It's as much a tribute to its maritime Dutch soul as the pickled and flamed mackerel lying between vertically placed zucchini slices on a bed of ginger under a duvet of ginger miso broth, bowing to Japan's haute cuisine. And already we have traveled aromatically halfway around the globe without even getting up from the table.
However, Randy de Jong does not want to be a young savage, an anarchist extremist at the stove. Despite all the exoticisms, he is firmly rooted in the European cooking tradition and shows this with the cheek of Ibérico pork, which he processes into a classic terrine with celery and a glaze of pear instead of aspic, topped with the spicy East Asian mizuna salad.
Not yet 30 years old
He does the same with scallops. The haute cuisine classic is cooked on a table grill and seasoned only with the dried corail, the roe sack of the mussel. In addition, there is a tartare made of scallops, cockles and mussels with a sauce rouille and an essence of clarified tarragon butter, although the individual components are a bit too solitary and do not care enough about the big picture. The two sauces, for example, do not tie the bouquet of ingredients together, but want to be the main actors themselves, a hopeless desire in the face of competition from a taster like the scallop.
However, it would be presumptuous to expect the perfect plate from this chef. Randy de Jong is not yet 30 years old, but seems to have planned his career as if on the drawing board. For three years he worked in a Dutch one-star hotel, then for three years in a Dutch two-star hotel and finally for three years with the three-star chef Thomas Bühner, most recently as a junior sous-chef.
Now he is the boss himself and, at the age of 30, the oldest in the kitchen of the "boiler house". There he has a free hand and uses it as gratefully as brilliantly, for example with his Dutch zander, which he only roasts on the skin. The fine fish rests on a risotto made of pearl barley, which has been dyed black with sepia ink. Well-proportioned shiso cress, sea asparagus and raw Jerusalem artichoke provide the necessary contrasts of spiciness and bite, while a sauce made from the zander cuttings and pastis harmonizes the dish in the most beautiful creaminess.
The fact that Randy de Jong is highly talented is shown by such plates, but that he sometimes still lacks daring, risk-taking, madness, he reveals with his flamed tranche of sweet potato, which he combines with sea buckthorn, purslane, jalapeño and flower sprouts, a cross between Brussels and kale.
Despite this impressive list of ingredients, the plate remains too indecisive, too cautious, too well-behaved. However, de Jong proves that he can be a little crazy with the main course: he prepares a pigeon from Anjou in such an arch-classic way à la Wellington, as if Auguste Escoffier were about to drop by for dinner. Puff pastry, duxelles, savoy cabbage, a farce from the pigeon's legs: it's all there and technically impeccably prepared, it's a young chef's unironic, deeply sincere declaration of love for Grande Cuisine. And this kind of feeling fits quite well into Osnabrück's "Kesselhaus".