Michel

Foie gras, Maitrank, and the same old discipline

Foie gras meets Maitrank before the plate leaves the pass. Thierry Dellisse is the executive chef at Michel in Boninne, where the room still asks for traditional French-Belgian cooking rather than novelty. Michel Dellisse founded the house in 1969, and Thierry now runs it with his wife Jeaninne, which makes the continuity literal rather than rhetorical. The kitchen is shaped by local produce, seasonal habits, and recipes that do not need to announce their age: foie gras with Maitrank, lobster menus, sweetbreads, ravioli, pigeon, broth, jus. Gault&Millau scored the house 13 out of 20 in 2023 and singled out his open ravioli with monkfish in a saffron broth. The discipline is not novelty here. It is restraint at the bench, keeping a plate generous without letting it become heavy, and letting a local product carry its own accent. The restaurant has held Bib Gourmand recognition since 2013, a number that matters less as decoration than as a pressure on the pass. The cooking has to stay legible, careful, and rooted, service after service.

A classical menu with local weight

The method at Michel is built around a la carte choice and seasonal menus, with the old vocabulary of the region still doing real work. Duck foie gras is paired with Maitrank, a Mosan Valley drink, then given brioche and pickled vegetables for lift. Lobster has its own place in the program, treated as a festive product rather than an imported flourish. Sweetbreads arrive with the expectation that the hand stays quiet. The kitchen also works in the familiar architecture of scallops, samphire, coral butter, open ravioli with monkfish, saffron broth, pigeon breast, beef strips, and carcass jus. Those details say more than a manifesto. This is a restaurant where broth, garnish, and sauce remain part of the craft, not background. The wine program is curated in the same register, supporting a table that moves between local produce, French technique, and Belgian appetite. Michel does not need a long tasting ritual to make its point; the plate work comes through in proportion, heat, and the timing between the pass and the room.

The room keeps the pace

The room at Michel has the warmth of a house that expects people to stay at the table. It is polished without stiffness, cozy without crowding the work, and the spacing gives the plates room to arrive properly. Conversation sits at a human level, which suits a kitchen working in terrine, broth, lobster, and jus. There is a festive note in the dining room, but not the kind that pulls attention from the pass. The craft remains visible in smaller ways: the pause before sauce lands, the clean exchange between kitchen and floor, the way a generous plate can still look composed. This is upscale casual in the useful sense, a room with enough ease for family meals and enough form for business tables, while the food keeps its old grammar.

Continuity without theatre

Michel's place in Boninne rests on continuity, not reinvention. The restaurant has carried its traditional French-Belgian line from its founding through later family stewardship, holding to local sourcing and seasonal cooking while guides and tastes have changed around it. Dellisse works inside that inherited frame, where the task is not to overwrite the house but to keep its signatures alive under service pressure. If the close of a meal needs a concrete measure, it is there in the return of foie gras with Maitrank.