Restaurant Beulings

There’s no menu at Restaurant Beulings, an intimate French/Italian restaurant on a side street off Singel, just a choice of two dishes per course – and lots of freebies.

Chef Bas Bont’s culinary style is defined by his use of fresh, seasonal ingredients. This explains why the menu is limited to just eight dishes – two starters, mains and desserts, with an optional intermediate course.

It doesn’t explain, though, why the menu isn’t written down anywhere but reeled off by the waitress. With the different components of each dish, their sauces and toppings, we had to ask for the options to be repeated three times before we were able to order.

While we waited for our food to arrive, we were served a plate of sliced salami, olives and cheese biscuits. Italian-style crudités followed. This was accompanied by a tiny red oven dish filled with a dip made out of milk, anchovies and lots of garlic. We also received a bowl filled with slices of both sweet and savoury breads (made on the premises), butter, olive oil and a herby baba ganoush, also home-made.

I started with sliced scallops on pureed Romanesco and toast blackened with squid ink. This was accompanied by a slick of sea urchin sauce that had such an intense ocean flavour it was almost like swallowing sea water. The initial novelty quickly faded, however, and I was left with an overwhelming taste of salt in my mouth.

An intermediate course of polenta in butter sauce with a mound of Dutch shrimp followed. Unlike the pungent starter, all the elements of this course were bland, with nothing to pep them up. It was the least successful dish and - given all the freebies we’d chomped our way through at the start of the meal - I could have done without it.

Image of fish sausage at Restaurant Beulings R.’s main of wild boar with slices of meaty Portobello mushroom and Brussels sprouts was rich and wintery, while my fried cod with creamy mashed potatoes and sauerkraut, topped with caviar and – the dish’s highlight - a white smoked sausage stuffed with fish, was a lovely combination of strong and delicate flavours.

When we told the waitress we were going to share Restaurant Beulings' dessert of French and Italian cheeses, she thoughtfully divided each cheese into two portions before serving it. She also demonstrated her training (or memory – evidently much better than mine, which went into meltdown when presented with eight menu items) by giving us a detailed explanation of the region from which each cheese came and the milk it was made from.

We had gone to eat out on a whim and had chosen Restaurant Beulings more or less at random. It didn’t disappoint, although we probably drank too much of the Donna Marzia white wine than we should have for a Wednesday evening. At €4 a glass, though, it was hard to say no to a refill…