478 pans later

On Floraliënlaan, a stone’s throw from the Citadelpark and the S.M.A.K. museum, an engraved brass plate hangs on the front of a townhouse. Jan and Marie-Paule Van den Bon moved in in October 1986. This October that makes forty years.

What convinced them wasn’t the dining room but what lay behind it: a town garden of a size you don’t expect in Ghent, in full view from the table. Marie-Paule is from Dijon and runs the floor. On the walls hangs work by the Liège painter José Chapellier. Deep blue and warm orange inside, green through the window. Classic French, no fuss.

For more than twenty years there was a Michelin star on the facade. Not any more.

Not our line. It’s the title of one of their own pages. The chef grew up in the vegetable country around Mechelen and does the gardening himself. Behind the house grow parsnip, salsify, swede and chervil root — crops that largely vanished from the shops and came back on his menu. The herbs are picked next door, in the herb garden. The sauces go without cream.

A supplier ten metres from the stove. That is not the sort of thing you put in a banner with a slogan on top. You just show it.

In 2019 we kept their old WordPress site standing. In June 2021 we rebuilt the website in Kirby, in time for the reopening after the long Covid closure. The colours of the room came along to the screen: deep blue, warm orange, and a full-width photo of the garden to let the page breathe.

No ordering module, no newsletter, no pop-up after your email address. A restaurant, a menu, a garden and a phone number.

The site runs in Dutch, French and English. There are three formulas: a three-course business lunch, a four-course seasonal menu and a six-course tasting menu. Title, courses, price and photo of both menus are handled by the restaurant itself in the CMS. When the season turns, the site turns with it — without us, and in all three languages.

Anyone still holding an old link to the seasonal or the tasting menu lands on the right part of the menu page instead of an error. The wine page, incidentally, claims some 350 references and that no bottle enters the cellar without three days of tasting first. We did not verify this. We did believe it.

The booking form asks what a maître d’ would ask: name, email, phone, date, lunch or dinner, time, number of guests and a note. It leaves as a tidy email to the restaurant, with the guest set as reply-to. One click on reply and the answer goes straight back to the guest.

So no middleman taking a cut per cover. What those middlemen cost, we once worked out on Fou du Goût.

The date picker knows the closing days: Sundays and Mondays can’t be clicked, and pick a Saturday and only dinner is left. If they are open by exception — a holiday, a special Sunday — the restaurant ticks that date in the CMS, with lunch, dinner or both. From then on the calendar simply opens it up. The form stops at twelve guests; for a larger party, it really is better to call.

At the bottom of every page sits a short list of five hotels and B&Bs in the neighbourhood, walking time included: two minutes to twenty. No affiliate links, no booking widget. Just: you came a long way, here’s where you sleep. The restaurant keeps that list up to date itself.

On 27 August 2026 the site moved from Kirby 3 to Kirby 5.5.3, on PHP 8.3. The booking form gained a spam filter. What nobody used any more went out, with a clean redirect for the old addresses.

Beyond that: nothing. No new identity, no new navigation, no “fresh design”. You don’t go fiddling with a place that has worked for forty years just because it happens to be a Tuesday.

More hospitality from our kitchen: Tranzistor Café in Zervochori and the gift vouchers of Fou du Goût.