At De Nieuwe Winkel, the menu begins with the landscape. The team cooks only with plants, drawing from food forests, fields and gardens to express what is growing around them. They call it botanical gastronomy: a way of cooking that follows the season, stays curious and asks us to imagine a different relationship with the land.

Their kitchen is a place for discovery. Ingredients are picked, smelled, tasted and studied, then fermented or cooked until they become something surprising. Plants that have grown in the Netherlands for centuries sit alongside others that have found a home there. What matters is what each one can bring to the plate.

We felt a kinship with that approach. For their seasonal menu, we created a still red blend using ingredients from our blendery alongside botanicals harvested from De Nieuwe Winkel’s own farm and forest. We built it with depth, acidity and structure to sit at the table with their food, and to carry a sense of the place it came from.

The blend was made for service at De Nieuwe Winkel. It is our small part in their exploration of what botanical gastronomy can be.

A still red blend made with blackcurrant leaf tea from DNW’s food forest is blended with MURI’s foraged woodruff to create something deep, fragrant, and gently botanical. 

Dark berries, ripe plum, beetroot, and a touch of oak bring structure and savoury depth.

At the restaurant, the blend is paired with the dessert. The dish is served as a tribute to Wassily Kandinsky’s painting Development in Brown, created in response to the rise of fascism and the closure of the Bauhaus. 

It features three chocolate ganaches made with chestnut, acorn, and almond. Beneath them are ingredients from the food forest, including nashi pear, sea buckthorn, plum, ceps, and blackcurrant.