De Smaak

The Vegetable Kitchen in West Flanders

Belgium's most talked-about restaurant cooking has long clustered around Bruges, Ghent and Antwerp, with the West Flemish interior receiving far less editorial attention despite a density of serious tables that would surprise most visitors. Izegem sits in that underappreciated tier: a mid-sized industrial town between Roeselare and Kortrijk where a handful of restaurants have quietly built cooking programs that stand alongside peers in larger cities. De Smaak, on Gentsestraat, belongs to that tier, operating from a philosophy rooted in the creative vegetable kitchen, a tradition in Belgian fine dining that treats produce not as garnish but as the structural and often starring element of the plate.

That tradition has a specific lineage in Belgium. Frank Fol, sometimes called the "vegetable chef," spent decades arguing that vegetables deserved the same technical attention and menu prominence that French classical cooking reserved for proteins. His influence spread through the kitchens of cooks who worked under him, and De Smaak's Wouter Creytens counts himself among that lineage. That credential matters not as biography but as a marker of which culinary conversation the kitchen is participating in, one that connects Izegem to a broader Belgian movement that has drawn attention from Brussels to the coast.

Where the Produce Leads

The vegetable-forward kitchen is frequently misread as a concession to dietary trends. At its more considered practitioners, it is the opposite: a harder discipline, because vegetables tolerate neither poor sourcing nor imprecise technique the way a well-marbled cut of meat can. When a plate centres pak choi with couscous, soy and shiitake as a pure vegetarian preparation, or pairs the same pak choi with bok choy, shiitake and tomato alongside skrei, the Norwegian winter cod that arrives on Belgian tables between January and April, the sourcing decisions become immediately legible. Skrei has a short, weather-dependent season, and pairing it with pak choi signals a kitchen tracking the calendar rather than a fixed menu.

That seasonal attentiveness connects De Smaak to a comparable set that extends well beyond Izegem. Boury in Roeselare, roughly ten kilometres to the north, has built one of Belgium's most discussed menus around market-driven produce. Willem Hiele in Oudenburg has taken a more radical terroir position, concentrating almost entirely on ingredients from a tight geographical radius. The restaurant sits between those poles: the approach is produce-led without becoming doctrinaire, and the menu moves between vegetarian preparations and fish- or meat-anchored dishes in a way that gives the table flexibility.

Reading the Menu Structure

The logic of the restaurant's menu becomes clearer when you notice that the same vegetable preparation can appear in two configurations: once as a self-contained vegetarian dish, and again as a component in a fish or meat plate. Pak choi with couscous, soy and shiitake, for instance, functions as a complete vegetarian course or as an accompaniment to skrei. Carrot with sucrine, egg and aged cheese works as a standalone vegetarian combination. This dual-track structure is more considered than it appears, it allows the kitchen to source and develop a vegetable preparation in depth, then deploy it across different protein contexts, rather than treating vegetables as ad hoc additions to a meat-centred menu architecture.

The use of aged cheese in the carrot preparation is worth noting in a regional context. West Flanders has a long tradition of farmhouse and aged cheeses, and incorporating them into hot preparations rather than restricting them to cheese courses is consistent with the way ingredient-led kitchens in this part of Belgium have been working for several years. Similar thinking appears in the cooking at Hof van Cleve in Kruishoutem and, at a different price and ambition point, at Castor in Beveren and Cuchara in Lommel.

Broader vegetable-centred approach the restaurant practises has also drawn comparison beyond Belgium. Kitchens such as Le Bernardin in New York City and Emeril's in New Orleans have approached their core protein categories with a similar structural rigour, though from entirely different culinary traditions. The shared thread is technique applied to ingredient rather than technique applied to presentation.

Izegem's Dining Context

Visitors approaching the restaurant should have a working sense of what Izegem's restaurant scene looks like. The city punches above its population in terms of the number of kitchens with genuine ambition. La Durée, operating at the French-Belgian creative tier, and Nast in the modern French register, both command €€€ to €€€€ pricing and represent the upper bracket of the local dining tier. Villared occupies a modern cuisine position at a similar price point. Together, these tables give Izegem a restaurant density that is easier to understand if you consider the town's proximity to the N36 corridor connecting the major West Flemish cities, a route that has historically supported serious, locally-oriented restaurants rather than tourist-facing addresses.

The restaurant sits on Gentsestraat 27, in a part of town that is navigable by car and accessible from the broader Kortrijk-Roeselare axis.

Coastal Flemish cooking at addresses such as Bartholomeus in Heist and urban fine dining at Zilte in Antwerp represent adjacent reference points for understanding where the restaurant sits on the regional spectrum: less formally structured than the Antwerp flag-carriers, more technically deliberate than a conventional West Flemish brasserie.

Planning Your Visit

The address at Gentsestraat 27, 8870 Izegem gives a precise starting point for route planning if arriving by car from Ghent, Bruges or the E403.