Born in Limburg, Bas van Kranen has reinvented fine dining at Flore in Amsterdam’s Hotel De L’Europe, earning two Michelin stars and a Michelin Green Star (2022) with a dairy-free, hyper-local menu he calls conscious fine dining.
Growing up among Limburg orchards, Bas van Kranen took his first kitchen job washing dishes at 14, captivated by the energy of a two-star brigade. By 23 he was heading De Leuf, regaining the restaurant’s Michelin star (2014) and being named Gault&Millau “Talentvol Chef van het Jaar” 2016.
In 2018 he moved to Amsterdam to lead Bord’Eau, capturing a star in his debut year and becoming the city’s youngest starred chef. Determined to align luxury with ecology, he closed Bord’Eau and, in 2021, reopened the room as Flore, dedicated to Dutch produce, North-Sea fish and a kitchen free of dairy, beef and pork.
The transformation was vindicated when the MICHELIN Guide awarded Flore two stars and a Green Star in June 2022, praising “an original and mindful approach to the natural world” and calling the cooking “worth the journey.”
In the 11-table dining room, van Kranen pairs botanical exuberance with technical restraint: a weekly “25-vegetable, herb and fruit” composition and dry-aged brook trout with barbecued leeks and pickled berries exemplify his aim to let nature speak through minimal intervention.
“We work with a small group of farmers, foragers, fishermen and hunters with a heart for nature,” he says, a discipline that led him to banish butter and cheese and to rely on biodynamic Dutch growers and North Sea day-boats.
Today the chef mentors young producers, speaks on waste reduction and continues to refine conscious fine dining, framing luxury around micro-seasonality rather than imports—an influence increasingly felt across the Netherlands’ high-end kitchens.
