Rumour has it there’s a beach in the Netherlands where, in the dead of winter, you can spot a colony of European flamingos poking at the shore in search of tiny grey shrimp. Not in all my Miami Vice-watching days would I have taken such a claim seriously. You might as well have told me about a band of wild unicorns skipping over the dunes 120 miles east of Harwich. Yet nearly everyone I ask in the Dutch province of Zeeland, those witchy fingers of land reaching into our shared stretch of North Sea, insists this is so.
“That’s no rumour,” says my waiter at Seafarm, the dining room of a family shellfish farm in Oosterschelde National Park (seafarm.nl). “I sometimes see them from the bridge when I’m driving from Rotterdam.” Whether they ended up here after a wrong turn from Spain or owe their ancestry to zoo escapees, nobody can quite agree. But the estuary waters around the Oosterschelde, a diverse tidal area at the centre of Zeeland, suits them just fine, even — especially — in winter.
To be honest, I never do spot one myself. But I come to believe the hype over a long weekend in and around Zeeland, the remote fringes of the low country. I sense real Pirates of the Caribbean energy in this archipelago 25 miles south of the Eurostar terminal in Rotterdam and 50 miles north of Brussels Midi. I spot a barnacle-coated shipwreck teetering on a beach, a porpoise nosing around a dive centre and mountains of seals lazing on sandbars at low tide. Seabirds cackle at the rich cache of molluscs in the shallow surf. An entire salt marsh has grown up around the sunken city of Saeftinghe, inundated by floods in the 16th century. Zeelanders liken their landscape to a permanent safari, where the big five include roe deer and sea eagles.
My base for the weekend is Inter Scaldes — or “between the scheldes” — a restaurant in the rural village of Kruiningen with two Michelin stars and twelve suites next door. The rooms sit rather unassumingly in a cosy, thatch-roofed house, their plush upholstered furnishings looking out of French doors to luxuriant gardens smelling of fresh herbs. Yet the chef, Jeroen Achtien, stresses that the restaurant is the main draw for its delicate way with North Sea delights, venison and hamachi from a neighbouring fish farm. “We’re a restaurant with rooms,” he says. “On Monday until Wednesday, when the restaurant is closed, so are the suites.”
Inter Scaldes has two Michelin stars
My explorations start with a long blustery beach walk an hour away at Kwade Hoek, the sunken-ship capital in nearby South Holland, scanning the shore for oystercatchers, spoonbills and, of course, flamingos, as kites soar overhead. The beach is as broad and deep as that of Holkham in Norfolk, and the distant views do me good after a long dark winter in the city peering at screens of various widths. The air smells of salt, the skin on my cheeks feels like a baby’s and the medley of wind and waves soothes me. When I hear someone wolf-whistle in my direction I whip around to see a flock of terns flapping off like hummingbirds.
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My drive to lunch at Seafarm passes old brick lighthouses, battered windmills and a long spit of sandy beach where kitesurfers cluster offshore. The road unfurls along the ridge of a six-mile storm-surge barrier between two rustic islands. In the Middle Ages this coastline was dotted with thriving maritime towns, sited on reclaimed land protected by dykes. But excessive peat-digging, destructive wars and freak torrents caused a whole civilisation to be inundated by sea. These emergency locks and dams allow life to continue safely, even if the industry has shifted from seafaring to seafood.
Kwade Hoek in South Holland
ALAMY
With hindsight the switch may have been fortuitous. People no longer burn peat or captain frigates, but they do consume the sheer tons of oysters, mussels, scallops and opalescent razor clams that flourish in the eastern estuary. This is Seafarm’s raison d’être. Walking in past tanks of oysters I study a streamlined menu focusing only on what has been hauled in. Shellfish arrive on ice, a la plancha or on tiered plates. The 12-hour marinated turbot bisque is a thick velvety coating for a wedge of molasses-dark bread (mains from £19).
Industrial fishing is banned in this 37,000-hectare expanse of brackish water — it now makes up the Netherlands’ largest national park. Yet a handful of fish farmers have designated hectares to cultivate. And many operate firelit bistros or wine bars on the banks of the Oosterschelde serving what they harvest. These are a saving grace in winter, when the climate, though reasonably temperate, comes with a strong waterlogged breeze. The seafront village of Yerseke (pronounced ear-sucker) has several, punctuated by an intimate acre of beach shrouded by a steep dyke.
Seafarm’s raison d’être is incredible shellfish
CASPER VAN DORT
I’m in town for a tour of Oesterij, a 120-year-old oyster farm and tasting room where couples see out daylight over platters of milky-white shells and German white wine (oesterij.nl). Inter Scaldes is a devoted customer of the family outfit, and offers an afternoon tour and tasting with its weekend package. So while an ibis perches in the distance I follow my guide, Melanie Brouwers, out towards sea, past a grid of deep, watery wells where the oysters are brought to mature. On the shell-littered beach she points to a seal bobbing on the water beyond and explains the ins and outs of the ecosystem (tour £67pp; oesterij.nl).
Since the 1960s, when shipping traffic was redirected south, “the Oosterschelde has had the cleanest water in Europe — if it wasn’t salty, you could drink it”, she tells me. It makes sense when you consider each oyster filters 100-200 litres of water a day, and 30 million grow here each year. “They’re natural bottom-feeders so their shells are always open,” she says. “That’s their natural state.”
Ellen Himmelfarb, right, with her Oesterij oyster farm guide, Melanie Brouwers
Each morning fishermen dredge, clean and sort their catch into the wells. When the tide comes in, water and algae surge into the wells via long pipes, and the oysters filter out sand from the sea floor. In a week they’re ready to slurp — Oesterij employs a champion shucker called Peter Oreel for that purpose. As part of her tour Brouwers hands me a pair of waders and we kick off our shoes and trudge out, shells cracking beneath our boots. She peels a couple of wild Pacific oysters off a rock and gets out her knife. “I never go anywhere without this,” she says, jabbing it into the shell and prising it open like a pro.
A confession here: my allergy to oysters has been a source of great shame in my life. But Brouwers has brought a taster along, an intern from Oesterij’s kitchen. She loosens the breathing, bubbling meat and hands him the shell, which he knocks back, rolls around on his tongue and savours before reaching and grabbing the next.
It’s best that I don’t spoil my appetite in any case. Back at Inter Scaldes, Achtien is preparing me a menu of his greatest oyster-less hits. Each combination of ingredients comes as a gorgeous, layered package, topped with a curl of fried cod skin or a pebble-shaped onion, a big Zeeland export. The pretty presentation belies Achtien’s tendency to build his terrines and soups “from offcuts of the ugliest, flattest oysters”, to use the fatty fin of a turbot and to layer a savoury parfait with pickled string beans, smoked egg yolk, crispy quinoa and Dutch brown beans. “Peasant food,” he calls it. “But we like to use every part of everything, even though it takes time to prepare well.”
It’s not all tantalising. He pipes duck liver through a tiny nozzle so that it resembles grey matter with a scoop of blood-red beetroot jelly. But I fall for the brioche, prepared with flour from a nearby mill, buttery and flaky as a croissant. The Dutch version of fine dining is a curious thing. But so was this entire weekend. I’ll come back for those flamingo claims but I’ll stay for the food.
Ellen Himelfarb was a guest of Inter Scaldes, which has room-only doubles from £268 (pillowshotels.com); and Eurostar, which has London-Brussels Midi returns from £88 (eurostar.com)
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