When I spoke with Jacob Jan Boerma, he was chef and owner of De Leest in Vaassen, The Netherlands. The book’s roll call records that De Leest closed in 2019 and that Boerma is now Signature Chef at The White Room in Amsterdam.
Boerma was among the eighty hoteliers and chefs I interviewed for The Luxury of Attention. Not every one of those conversations produced a quotation on the page. Some shaped the book by confirming or sharpening a pattern I was seeing elsewhere. His conversation belongs to that group. What he told me about running a kitchen at the top of its field in a small Dutch town fed the synthesis that runs through the chapters on the team, the creative act and the pursuit of perfection, even where his name does not appear.
I am careful on these pages to quote only what the book attributes to a person directly, so there is no quotation here. The chapters themselves carry the argument his conversation helped me form. Readers who want to see how the Dutch kitchens in the book approach creativity and standards will find that material in the Field Guide lessons linked on this page.