eppo

Duck egg yolk and a Berchem pass

Duck egg yolk gives a noodle its pull before sauce ever enters the bowl at eppo in Berchem. The question the room keeps asking is how much craft can sit inside a neighbourhood restaurant without turning it stiff, and the answer arrives in the handling rather than in a signature: pasta made in house, a sauce held back until the noodle is ready, a plate that does not announce its own technique.

The kitchen associated with eppo is led in daily terms by chef Laurens Jasperse. The place has moved beyond its hotel-restaurant origin into a more independent identity within Hotel Yust, with its own entrance and a warmer, more direct style. It is not a temple of ceremony. It is a small Berchem room built around a la carte choice, set menus, and the kind of cooking that lets greens, fish, meat, and plant-based plates share the same pass without hierarchy.

Classic technique, kept close to the plate

The method at eppo is contemporary without losing the older grammar: pasta made in house, chicken cooked sous vide and finished on the BBQ, asparagus marked by fire, tomato clarified into water and returned as jus. The menu can hold peeled tomato with tomato powder, wild mushrooms with pig mince, mushroom cream and egg yolk, or Japanese amberjack set against tomato water, XO sauce, kumquat and dill. These are not decorative gestures. They are decisions about concentration, acid, fat, smoke, and when to stop.

The restaurant also makes room for a full vegan sharing menu, including 10 dishes over 5 courses, which is where its no-nonsense language becomes most visible. Plant-based cooking here is not treated as a substitute station; it sits inside the same discipline as steak tartare with lovage, spaghetti alla chitarra with chicken jus, or sous vide chicken with tarragon purée, charred fennel and shiso leaf. The wine program follows that breadth, with bottles and glasses that move from picpoul Picapol by Justine Loiseau and Patrick Bouju to a 1986 Saint-Julien from Château Léoville Poyferré. Daan Guelinckx handles that side of the table, keeping the cellar conversation close to the food rather than above it.

Untreated materials, conversational heat

The room at eppo carries the looseness of Berchem more than the polish of a hotel dining room. Untreated materials, a contemporary interior and a small scale make the place feel held rather than staged. The noise sits at conversation level. Plates move through a room that can take friends, families, couples and vegan diners without asking any of them to perform seriousness.

That atmosphere suits the cooking. A tomato dish can arrive with its water, powder and jus, but the table still reads it as lunch or dinner in the neighbourhood, not a lesson. The pass has enough precision for Gault&Millau to give the restaurant two toques and Michelin to give it a Bib Gourmand, yet the better clue is the way eppo lets a chicken-fat breadcrumb, a strand of spaghetti alla chitarra, or a glass of 1986 Saint-Julien do its work quietly. If the kitchen keeps sharpening this chapter, the room will still turn on the same concrete thing: a duck egg yolk noodle.