Gert De Mangeleer and Joachim Boudens took over a brasserie called Hertog Jan in Bruges in 2005. De Mangeleer cooked; Boudens ran the wine list and the dining room. The first Michelin star came in 2006, the second in 2009 and the third in 2011; by 2012 Hertog Jan was one of three restaurants in Belgium at that level. In July 2014 they moved it to a farm in Loppem, in the municipality of Zedelgem, for which they had borrowed €4.2 million. Four years later they closed it. The last guest left at 1:34 in the morning on 22 December 2018.

Stopping at the top

The pair announced the closure in January 2018, almost a year ahead. They said they had missed ordinary life and wanted to “enjoy the small things in life, eating out together and picking the children up from school”. De Mangeleer later told the Michelin Guide that the decision was deliberate: “we agreed to stop right at our peak.” The debt played its part. “The loan put tremendous pressure on us,” he said; they had paid it back within five years. De Karmeliet in Bruges, another of Belgium’s three-star restaurants, had closed earlier.

Stopping did not suit him. “I was only 41 years old and I have four children to raise,” De Mangeleer said of the first months. “I felt uneasy idling around.” He set up the Hertog Jan Restaurant Group instead, “to provide more opportunities for my chefs to excel”, as he put it. The group ran L.E.S.S., a bistro that held one star and moved into the centre of Bruges in June 2019, and the seafood restaurant Bar Bulot, and it kept the farm in Loppem for private events. In 2019 the farm grew 132 varieties of tomato, up from 102.

A hospital on Leopoldstraat

The name came back in Antwerp. Hertog Jan at Botanic opened on 5 October 2021 at Leopoldstraat 26, in the hotel Botanic Sanctuary, on the site of a 13th-century hospital. Monks founded a monastery and the St Elisabeth hospital there in 1238. In the 16th century the pharmacist Peeter van Coudenberghe laid out an apothecary and a medicinal garden, and in the 19th century the hospital’s chief surgeon and its head pharmacist replanted it as the Botanical Garden, which was listed in 1950. The IRET group of Eric De Vocht and Maryse Odeurs signed a 99-year lease on the buildings in 2017, and the hotel took its first guests in 2022, with 108 rooms across five historic buildings. “Our hometown has long had an impressive variety of hotels,” the owners said, but it was “missing something truly luxurious”.

The restaurant has 22 covers in a dining room designed by the architect Benoit Viaene. It won two Michelin stars about seven months after it opened and still holds them in the 2026 guide; Gault&Millau gave it 18 out of 20 in 2023. The hotel also holds Fine Fleur, with one star, and a Bar Bulot of its own, and nearby is Het Gebaar, the tearoom of the pastry chef Roger van Damme. Antwerp’s only three-star kitchen is still Zilte, on the ninth floor of the MAS.

Two weeks a month

The Michelin Guide describes the cooking at Leopoldstraat as De Mangeleer’s signature with “a particular focus on Asia”. There is one menu, served as omakase, the Japanese convention of leaving the choice to the chef, and it changes with the seasons, with West Flemish produce and herbs from the restaurant’s own garden. A 2023 menu ran from Breton langoustine with passion fruit, cocoa and vanilla, through North Sea sole with an oyster emulsion and a course called Tomato Collection 2023, to “grandmother’s Brussels waffle”. Boudens still runs the floor.

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The restaurant opens for two weeks a month, Tuesday to Saturday, for lunch and dinner, with the dates published in advance by the hotel. That is the right way to run it: the pair closed their first Hertog Jan because a full calendar left no room for anything else, and a 22-seat dining room that cooks for half the month keeps two stars without bringing that problem back.

In 2005 Hertog Jan was a brasserie. In 2021 it came back as a restaurant that shuts for half of every month.