A Day at Restaurant Niven

By now you know that I have bought my fair share of Groupon vouchers... it is usually a game of hit and miss with Groupon but spending a day in a Michelin star kitchen seemed like a great idea to me! My husband thought I should definitely do it although he thought it was quite funny that I'll be paying for the pleasure of 'working' in a kitchen.

Restaurant Niven is located in Rijswijk which is about an hour away from Utrecht and on a rainy Saturday morning I met my friend Lisl there. We were completely clueless as to what would happen that day but we walked in the door and was met by a friendly waiter offering us a delicious cappuccino. Then the fun started.

We were handed kitchen outfits and aprons and were literally ushered into the kitchen. All day long we helped the staff prep food. They were very friendly and worked together like a well oiled machine. They patiently answered our questions, and kept us busy. Slicing cucumbers and then putting a blow torch to them was definitely a new thing for me to do!

Chef Niven spent a lot of time in the kitchen, making sure everything is perfect. He is very young and it is quite an achievement to be so successful at the age of 32!! His team in the kitchen is also young and energetic. It was a little strange to be the oldest person there...

After a busy lunch time service we started prepping for the dinner service and let me tell you, working in a kitchen is not an easy job. You stand all day long and there is also a lot of cleaning to be done. You always have something else to prepare, from slow cooked beef cheeks and finely slicing tiny radishes to making dough for the cookies which customers get when leaving the restaurant.

We were surprised by a 10 course dinner after our 'hard' work and it was delicious! It is pretty amazing to know exactly where the produce came from and what it looked like before becoming a piece of art on a plate.

Thank you Chef Niven and team for a lovely experience!

Here are a few photos I took during the day... as you can image it was pretty hard to select only a few! I'll post the photos of our dinner next week :-)

The Niven kitchen

Chef Niven in action!

Michelin style 'pizza' - amazing, right?

Team work! Chef Niven and his sous chef Bas

Beautiful!