From troublemaker to Michelin stardom: Belgian chef Kobe Desramaults recalls the good old days

What was your childhood like? “My mother opened a bar called In De Wulf the year I was born [1980]. It was an old-style Flemish bar built on a farm [in Dranouter, in Belgium’s West Flanders province] and a year later it changed into a restaurant. My parents built some rooms on the property, too.”

Did you help out in the restaurant? “I did chores, like washing dishes, for extra money. I was interested in making pastries. I don’t have that fascination any more for pastries, like when I was a kid. Mum says I was always in the kitchen. But she had a lot of problems with me because I wouldn’t eat anything. Everything to me tasted horrible [laughs]. It took a long time for me to learn how to appreciate food.”

How did you get into cooking? “When I was 12, I went to high school but got into a lot of trouble because I couldn’t concentrate and changed schools like 10 times. When I was 18, they had to take me out of high school because I was a troublemaker, and I had to do an appren­tice­ship instead. So I started working at Picasso, a restau­rant in Dranouter.

“It was just me and the chef in the kitchen of the French-Belgian restaurant and he was very hard on me. I worked there for two years and the restaurant got a Michelin star while I was there. I didn’t even know what a Michelin star was at that point. Everyone was so happy, the chef and his wife were dancing in the restaurant. My life would have been very different if I had ended up in a kitchen with a lot of people and I could hide. But there I couldn’t hide.”

What did you like about cooking? “At first, I didn’t like it because I had a hard time with someone telling me what to do. But I accepted it because I saw this man had a lot of passion for what he did and I started to enjoy working with my hands, creating something out of simple vege­tables or herbs. I would come home afterwards and try to imitate the dishes I had learned at work. With the little money I had, I would go buy a beautiful sweetbread and cook it with a reduced sauce on top and eat it myself.”

Where did you go after Picasso? “When the appren­ticeship was over, I went to chef Sergio Herman’s restaurant Oud Sluis, in the Netherlands, which was a revolutionary place [it closed in 2013]. The restaurant was a big name, with two Michelin stars, which later became three. But, at that time, Herman still had a small team, and it was good for me to be close to the chef. In a big team, a young chef gets lost.