Create by Guido Braeken

Control at the first plate

A tartelette arrives with emulsion and Wagyu tartare before Guido Braeken, chef of Create by Guido Braeken in Eijsden, lets the menu widen into its modern European register. The gesture is small, but it gives the room its grammar: richness held in check, umami used for depth, luxury treated as structure rather than display. Braeken leads the restaurant as head chef inside Van Oys Maastricht Retreat, where a converted barn on the estate has become the setting for a kitchen built around control, clarity, and balance.

His role here is unusually direct. The restaurant carries his name, and the cooking carries the same line: French technique, contemporary composition, seasonal ingredients, and occasional Asian flavours placed where they create tension. Create opened in 2025, and the house received MICHELIN Guide recognition with 2 stars in 2025. Braeken has also been recognized as the youngest Dutch chef to hold 2 Michelin stars, a fact that belongs less to myth than to discipline at the pass.

The menu holds its nerve

The Heart of Create tasting menu gives Braeken a long frame without loosening the method. Seasonal cooking can become a soft phrase in lesser hands; here it is a sequence of decisions about what deserves the center of the plate and what must remain in support. Norwegian langoustine can carry sweetness and salinity without being crowded. John Dory can take refined seasonal garnishes and still read as fish first. Turbot with morels, one of Braeken’s signatures, points to the same instinct: a firm main line, then richness placed beside it with care.

The kitchen works in the vocabulary of emulsions, tartares, polished sauces, and precise garnishes, but the technique does not ask to be admired separately from the course. That is the discipline. A dish may pull from French training and let an Asian note sharpen the finish, yet it stays within the restaurant’s quiet register. The wine program sits close to that structure, with pairings built for a tasting-menu table rather than for spectacle. The strongest impression is not abundance. It is editing.

A barn made into a room

The room keeps the work close. Create occupies a former barn on the Van Oys Maastricht Retreat estate, surrounded by parkland, vineyards, and orchards, but the service does not lean on rustic theater. The mood is formal, intimate, and quiet enough for the pass to set the pace. Plates arrive with the polished calm expected of a 2-star kitchen, yet the building keeps a trace of its agricultural past, a useful counterweight to the fine lines of the cooking.

There is a particular kind of luxury in that contrast: old volume, modern restraint, a dining room shaped around attention rather than noise. The counterpoint matters because Braeken’s food works by subtraction as much as by technique. Nothing needs to announce itself twice. By the time the John Dory reaches the table, the room has already taught the same lesson as the plate.