Antwerp Museum Turns Art into a Cookbook

Flemish chef Matthieu Beudaert has transformed 40 works from Antwerp’s Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen (KMSKA) into recipes. The museum brought him in as its Artist in Residence, and the result is Chef d'oeuvre, a cookbook born from encounters between its collection and a restaurant kitchen. The project places a working chef within a major cultural institution’s programme, which also connects the museum with practitioners in dance, theatre, music and literature.

A museum’s chosen connection

KMSKA selected Beudaert for the residency in 2024. Samuel Mareel, the museum’s curator and project leader, said: “The aim of this project is to keep the connection with today's creators.” Mareel said museums were created in the 19th century to inspire artists with past creations, but later became tourist places. The residency, he explained, invites audiences to see the collection differently, “not just as sacred or abstract,” and to “showcase the creative process preceding the final result.”

Beudaert, 49, trained in art history and taught himself to cook. He studied in Ghent until 2003, working part-time as a cook at a tourist restaurant. The restaurant’s chef invited him to a weekly evening cookery course. By the time Beudaert finished his master’s degree in art history, he had also graduated in basic cooking. “I gradually became obsessed with cooking,” he said.

He later moved to Brussels to work at Bozar while moonlighting as a private chef. After three years, he decided cooking appealed to him more than museum work. In 2009, he and his wife, Sofie Delbeke, took over a restaurant outside Kortrijk and named it Table d'Amis. Roadworks pushed them to move to the city centre. The restaurant’s casual beginnings gave way to fine dining, and Gault & Millau named Beudaert Young Flemish Chef of the Year in 2013; he also won a Michelin star.

Forty works, repeated experiments

Beudaert visited KMSKA around a dozen times, explored the galleries and talked with curators. His first shortlist included around 60 works. “For some of them it did not work,” he said. “For others, I had to do them five or six times before being satisfied with the result.” The residency combined visits, research and experimentation, and the finished book contains 40 recipes.

Roger Raveel’s De Wandeling (The Stroll) inspired tomato with shrimps, a Belgian classic. Beudaert aimed to capture the work’s orange-red, yellow and green palette, assigning each colour a distinct element in the dish. He made yellow mayonnaise with turmeric and Madras curry, paired with pale green mayonnaise made from chervil and spinach.

Some of the source images don’t depict food at all. Lucio Fontana’s slashed canvas Concetto Spaziale inspired a ravioli-like dish: sliced gelatine over sea bass tartare with dill mayonnaise. Beudaert ties the dish to childhood memories of his father feeding him canned ravioli when his mother was away. “It's more interesting for the public when the inspiration comes from a work of art which contains no food,” he said.

From gallery to restaurant

Other recipes turn artworks into ingredients and techniques. Louis van Lint’s Landschap (Landscape) suggested squid, white beans and preserved paprika, a traditional Spanish combination. Otto Piene’s Grote zon (Great Sun) inspired aubergine parmigiana. During cooking, Beudaert burns the aubergine using the artist’s firing technique. That dish now has a permanent place at Madonna, the museum’s brasserie.

Hannibal Books published Chef d'oeuvre. Mareel said the museum had found “a rather big niche of people fascinated by the book.” At Table d'Amis, the team sometimes serves other creations, including tobacco-smoked veal sweetbread inspired by Constantin Meunier’s Sigarenmaaksters in Sevilla (Cigar Makers in Seville), and oyster risotto prompted by Walter Leblanc’s Collage.

Table d'Amis has been closed since last year and is set to reopen in November as Chambre d'Amis. Delbeke’s pizzeria and trattoria will move to a floor with room for more customers. Beudaert’s restaurant will become more intimate, with seating for fewer than two dozen diners.