Chef Gert de Mangeleer closed three-Michelin-star restaurant Hertog Jan at the height of its success, has never been busier

“Then we opened Bar Bulot, a seafood restaurant, at the end of June and it’s going very well – so well that we are planning on opening a second and a third one. And we’re working on a fourth casual restaurant called Babu, serving things like steamed buns, starting in Ghent, and we want to open a few other shops.

“I still have my farm – the building, the restaurant, the kitchen. It has a big kitchen and three hectares that we are cultivating. I still own the property. We sell the vege­tables and produce to suppliers. We use it as a preparation kitchen for projects, and from time to time we do private limited events there. But it’s not like we’re serving lunch-dinner, lunch-dinner.”

Why did you close Hertog Jan? “When I got my third Michelin star I was only 33 years old. At that moment, I was the youngest chef in the world to have three Michelin stars and the question was, ‘What’s next?’. So we moved to the farm; we created a very big restaurant. The first Hertog Jan was very small, the new one was very chic, very glamorous. Then I turned 40. We were on the 50 Best list, we had 19/20 in Gault Millau, we had three Michelin stars. I thought that if I did this for 20 more years [ …] we could not grow like we did before, or we can go down. Joachim [Boudens, his business partner] and I said maybe we need to stop at the top and share our knowledge with young staff members and invest in them and start businesses.

“It was also an opportunity to look for a work-life balance. I have two sons and two daughters. It’s important to have work-life balance but, like in a sports career, the most beautiful thing is to stop at the top. It was a difficult decision. Hertog Jan had been a big part of my life. I was married there, all my children were born there. But I think it was a good decision.”