De Vijf Seizoenen

The Flemish Ardennes and the Case for Cooking from the Ground Up

The rolling hills south of Ghent have never attracted the same restaurant traffic as the Belgian coast or the city's historic centre, but that distance from urban density is precisely what makes the cooking in this part of East Flanders coherent. In the Flemish Ardennes, the land is close enough to the kitchen to matter: the kitchen at De Vijf Seizoenen on Kasteelstraat in Nederbrakel treats local soil as the primary ingredient, with herbs from the property's own garden and wild-picked plants from the surrounding hills arriving at the table through menus that shift with what is actually growing, not with what a supplier's catalogue can deliver year-round.

This approach places De Vijf Seizoenen in a specific and growing tier of Belgian fine dining, one that diverges from the classical French-Belgian tradition represented by houses such as Boury in Roeselare or the four-star creative programmes at Hof van Cleve in Kruishoutem. Where those restaurants build their identity around technique applied to premium animal proteins, the Haegeman siblings run a programme in which vegetables are the architecture, not the accompaniment.

What the Awards Actually Measure

De Vijf Seizoenen was named Belgium's Best Vegetables Restaurant in 2021 and received the Michelin Plate in 2024 and 2025. These are not generalist dining awards; they assess sourcing rigour, menu structure, and the proportion of the plate devoted to plant ingredients. The 5 Radishes classification places the restaurant in a small cohort of Belgian addresses operating at that level of botanical focus. The Michelin Plate, awarded in both 2024 and 2025, signals that the broader critical establishment has confirmed the cooking meets the quality threshold, even if the guide's format does not specifically address the plant-based category in the same granular way We're Smart does.

7 across 360 reviews is, in this context, more useful than usual as a trust signal. For a restaurant in a rural East Flemish village drawing the volume of response that figure implies, the consistency of satisfaction across a wide sample suggests the restaurant is not relying on a single spectacular visit to drive its reputation. That kind of sustained rating in a low-footfall location points to repeat engagement from a regional audience that knows the address well.

A Menu Structured Around the Vegetable Course

The menu at the restaurant is offered in four- and five-course formats, with a dedicated vegetable menu at its centre. Belgian fine dining in the €€€ price bracket has typically constructed menus around a fish course and a meat course, with vegetables as supporting texture. Here the architecture is reversed. The format places this restaurant in a comparable set closer to Willem Hiele in Oudenburg, which also builds its identity around hyper-local sourcing, than to the larger creative French programmes at comparable price points.

Siblings running a kitchen together is not unusual in Belgian gastronomy, but it is a structural fact worth noting because it explains the coherence of a programme that requires deep knowledge of a single terrain. The sourcing model, traditional cultivation, organic production, and climate-conscious growing practices, supplemented by what the garden and the Flemish Ardennes hills provide seasonally, demands the kind of long-term relationship with growers and landscape that is difficult to maintain across a larger, staff-rotated kitchen team. At the restaurant, the continuity is built in.

Nederbrakel and Its Position in Belgian Fine Dining

Nederbrakel sits in Brakel municipality, in the part of East Flanders where the terrain begins to roll before flattening back toward the Scheldt valley. The Flemish Ardennes designation covers a compact area of wooded ridges and agricultural land, and it produces a distinct regional character in cooking: foraged elderflower, wild garlic, hedgerow herbs, and seasonal root vegetables that reflect a climate and soil profile specific to this corner of Belgium. Restaurants operating in this tradition, drawing from the land rather than importing French luxury ingredients, occupy a coherent local identity even when they apply modern fine-dining technique.

For context on how Belgian addresses at the upper end of the market are positioned, Zilte in Antwerp and Bozar Restaurant in Brussels represent the urban end of the spectrum, where the dining room itself and the cosmopolitan address are part of the proposition. The restaurant operates in the opposite register: the location is an argument for the food, not a backdrop to it. For those exploring further afield, d'Eugénie à Emilie in Baudour and L'Eau Vive in Arbre offer similarly regional-rooted programmes in the French-speaking south of Belgium, while La Durée in Izegem, Ralf Berendsen in Neerharen, Sir Kwinten in Sint-Kwintens-Lennik, and Bartholomeus in Heist map the range of destination dining outside Belgium's major cities.

For comparable Modern French programmes in Europe operating at similar critical levels, Sketch, The Lecture Room and Library in London and Schanz in Piesport offer a sense of where the genre sits internationally, though the vegetable-first positioning of the restaurant places it in a narrower niche within that broader tradition.

Planning a Visit

The restaurant is at Kasteelstraat 5, 9660 Brakel, in the Flemish Ardennes. The €€€ price range positions it below the four-star tier represented by Boury or Hof van Cleve, making it one of the more accessible entry points into serious Belgian fine dining outside the major cities. Given the rural location and the relatively small profile of Nederbrakel as a dining destination, booking ahead is advisable, particularly for weekend services.