Jules Koninckx

Butchery at Luc De Laet gave Jules Koninckx a working base in the trade: reading a cut, respecting texture, and handling precision as a daily discipline rather than an abstract ideal. That training carried into Maven in Antwerp, Belgium (from 2020), where he moved first into the role of medeoprichter and then chef. From 2020 onward, the work at Maven has been shaped by that butcher’s logic, with meat treated as a material that can be translated into something more direct, more measured, and more personal.

The present tense of the work still sits close to the block. For Jules Koninckx, meat remains the central subject, considered not only for flavor but for how it is used and what that use asks of the cook. At Maven in Antwerp, Belgium, that focus keeps the cooking in line with the trade that trained him: attentive, restrained, and built on continuity rather than reinvention. That continuity shows in the questions the craft keeps asking.

What does a cut require? How should it be handled, framed, transformed? Those decisions sit at the center of his approach at Maven in Antwerp, Belgium, where the butcher’s eye continues to shape the kitchen. The result is cooking that keeps a direct relationship with meat while treating responsibility as part of the brief. That position gives the work its structure. It asks for care in consumption, and for ingredient choice to mean more than preference. In Jules’s hands, the lessons of butchery widen into a standard for use: deliberate, exacting, and clear about what the trade owes the ingredient.

The recognition attached to Jules Koninckx is vocational: a butcher’s foundation at Luc De Laet, then the role of medeoprichter at Maven, and chef work in Antwerp built around meat-focused cooking.