The name is older than the cooking: hof van Cleve, the yard - or court - of the Cleve family, who lived at the spot until 1968. The first restaurant on the site, in the 1980s, was a modest country place. When Peter Goossens bought it from the previous owner in 1987, the deal came with an unusual clause: for five years, no gastronomic menus. The seller, perhaps protecting what he had built, perhaps just nervous about competition, made the young chef agree to wait. Goossens waited. In 1992 the gastronomic restaurant finally opened. Two years later it had its first Michelin star, in 1998 its second, and in 2005 - the year Goossens turned forty - its third. From that moment until 2021, when Viki Geunes's Zilte in Antwerp joined it, Hof van Cleve stood alone in Belgium.

Belgium is a country that takes food seriously, and the cluster of Flemish three-stars and two-stars is, per capita, one of the densest concentrations of high-end cooking on earth. But Hof van Cleve was peculiar even by Belgian standards. There was no city to draw from, no theatre crowd, no business district. There was Kruishoutem, fields, and the kitchen. Goossens leaned into it. The menus tracked the seasons of the surrounding farms: white asparagus in spring, North Sea sole, hare in autumn, eel from the polders. The plates were precise and architectural, more Paris than Lyon, but the produce was unmistakably Flemish. Gault Millau scored the restaurant 19.5 out of 20. Le Chef magazine put it in the world's top thirty. The Elite Traveler list named it the sole Belgian restaurant in its top 100 every year from 2012 onward. Diners booked months in advance for the privilege of driving past a beet field at lunchtime.

Peter Goossens owns and runs Hof van Cleve with his wife Lieve. The dining room they built was famous for service that matched the kitchen: Stijn Van der Beken was named Best Sommelier of Belgium in 2004; Pieter Verheyde took the same title in 2012; Mathieu Vanneste in 2016; Tom Ieven, who started at Hof van Cleve in January 2019, was named Gault Millau Best Sommelier of the Year for 2021. Four sommelier-of-Belgium titles from a single cellar in a single village is not an accident. The wine list ran to thousands of bottles. The pours were generous. The pacing of the meal was unhurried in the way that only a kitchen confident of every dish can manage.

COVID-19 hit Belgian restaurants hard, and Hof van Cleve hard in particular. The first lockdown closed the doors from March to June 2020. The second was longer: October 2020 to June 2021. Asked about takeaway during the pandemic, Goossens famously replied: "You cannot put Hof van Cleve in boxes." The restaurant survived, kept its team, and reopened to long lists of guests grateful that it still existed. But something had shifted. The kitchen was older. The lanes around Kruishoutem were quiet. A village of 8,000 had supported a restaurant of forty staff for thirty years, but the world that flew in to fill those tables had begun to feel its own age.

At the end of 2023, after 37 years of cooking in the farmhouse, Peter Goossens sold Hof van Cleve to his long-serving head chef Floris Van Der Veken. The plan was not closure - Goossens was sixty and had a new project opening in Knokke - but succession, and he was open about why. The lane was too narrow, the building too old, the logistics too creaky for a kitchen feeding a clientele that increasingly arrived by helicopter from Brussels. Under Van Der Veken, the restaurant continues in Kruishoutem with a revised name and a dramatically lower price point - but without the three stars, which Michelin did not carry over. What it will become was, at the time, less clear than what it would no longer be: the slightly improbable miracle of a three-star restaurant in a village where the church bell still measured out the hours and the cooking, somehow, kept measuring out the seasons. For more than three decades, the best meal in Belgium was in Kruishoutem. The story of where it goes next is still being written.