What a pleasure, then, to sink into the passenger side of this all-black Mercedes SUV and have a conversation with Thomas Bühner. This is not, I should point out, an interview. He’s the chef of Michelin three-starred La Vie and I’m just some guy he has invited to eat there. He’s fifty years old and I’m not yet thirty. He drives.

I pretend I’m just excited and grateful to be here, but I shift about in my seat, anxiously. My legs stop shaking but my teeth start chattering when I open the door. We’ve arrived at the kitchen garden in Bad Essen, today a 4,000 m² grid of snow, ice and twigs. This is nature’s graveyard shift — winter in the upper latitudes of Germany.

A woman named Victoria owns this place. At 600 years of age, it has been in her family since well before its renovation in the early 1800s. Chez Victoria is not, by the way, a cottage or a farmhouse or a cabin. It’s a bona fide castle, and Thomas is not the king of it.

“She asks me what to grow… I don’t say a thing,” he admits.

I look around and realize that I don’t see a thing. Not what Thomas sees here, at least. His eyes find spring and summer, shoots and roots. He pauses in an invisible flower garden, and nearly cries at a barren quince tree I’d have walked right past. “I just feel like when it’s over, it’s over,” he sighs to punctuate a rather emotional description of that tree’s fruit. One can feel his love for this garden, when it’s in bloom and not.

Nearly three years ago, Victoria approached Thomas about growing vegetables for La Vie. He and I talk about those years on the forty-five minute drive back to Osnabrück. He tells me how proud he is of his brigade of fifteen cooks, and how humbled to see his son growing up so fast, now fifteen years old. Being the leader and role model for both is for Thomas life’s biggest challenge, and its greatest reward.

Within a few days, La Vie will close for winter break and Bühner will retreat to an ayurvedic farm in Sri Lanka. I get the sense he’d take the entire staff with him if he could. Since April 2006, when he arrived at a restaurant boasting just one Michelin star and 16 points in Gault-Millau, this has been his family.

Thomas treats me, I realize, almost like a son. It’s dusk now and he’s arranged a tour of historic Osnabrück for me and my friend, just arrived by train from Amsterdam. Already today Thomas has fed me lunch, and she and I will return to La Vie shortly for dinner.

Rebels, we sneak away from the group at city hall to explore the weihnachtsmarkt, or Christmas market, going on in the main square. We sip glühwein and get rained on and laugh and shop for gifts for our families and it all feels very good and also very bad because it’s very cold.

“So what did you buy your mother?” Thomas asks me later. He sounds just like my dad.

Now he’s Chef Bühner and he’s back in the kitchen. In my mind, lunch and dinner merge into a single stream of culinary consciousness, and at first, I drown in it.

In these waters, menu descriptions span three lines like unintentional haikus:

This poetry reveals a seasonally ambiguous list of ingredients. Where but in its verses would watermelon, pumpkin, tomato, cranberry, sweet potato and sweet corn be cohabitants? I’m not upset about this, just confused by the unlikely December bedmates.

But I don’t give a damn what month, day or even year it is while I devour lamb with comté, sweet potato, and wheatgrass. This is meat and potatoes in twenty different permutations, and each makes the constituents taste more like themselves. I’m happiest using sweet potato chips to scoop up coarsely chopped lamb tartare. I dollop on some wheatgrass foam with the texture of shaving cream, then drag a corner through warm comté sauce.

Besides this I love the snacks, the surprise interludes, the pre- and post-game coddles. These include a sort of terrine of North Sea crab propped in a salty-sweet nori crumble, and shiso sorbet with hibiscus broth under a crispy coil of what looks like ribbon but tastes like cranberry. Best is a palate cleanser served at both meals — warm potato foam that hides a scoop of pumpkin-curry ice cream — a firecracker buried in the ground.

Digging deeper here isn’t always rewarding, though. A scallop dish is perfectly fine until you stab at the kohlrabi “noodles” that snake around it, limp and insipid. Beautifully cooked ribeye (‘merican beef, in fact) suffocates next to sticky discs of over-smoked bone marrow.

Elements of contrasting texture, temperature and flavor predominate to the point of absurdity. Superfluous garnishes have us asking “why?” while someone in the kitchen apparently wonders “why not?” The fresh and the fermented seem attached at the hip; hot rarely shows up without cold. I feel like ice cream appears on every dish.

Maybe I exaggerate. Or maybe Bühner and I are both just writers in need of an editor. We sit together in the lounge now. The other guests are gone. I stuff my gullet with too many bonbons and quaff solera-aged grenache like it’s Welch’s. We talk about dinner, and he listens intently.

He’s listened all day, come to think of it. But have I?

My expectations and the unique circumstances under which I’ve come here are nothing but background noise, I realize. They still rattled in my head as I tried to focus on pastry chef René Frank’s parsley root dessert. But then Thomas sat down beside us, one hand propped on my shoulder, and leaned in to tell me about it.

There’s blown sugar shaped into a hollow parsley root, he said. A filling of that vegetable and coconut. Black garlic-and-chocolate cream beneath. Torn bits of a salty pistachio sponge cake. I saw the dish through a clearer lens now, and admittedly, the combination was masterful. I shut up, and I smiled.

Back home, I’ve struggled to tell this story. To color this prose even a light shade of purple would be disingenuous and discreditable. There were dishes at La Vie that I struggled with, but to highlight only those would be incomplete and insincere. My only hope, then, is candor. The candor to lift the veil that I held over my own eyes in Osnabrück, to see not just Thomas Bühner’s food but also his warmth and his generosity. To hear his voice. Because maybe Rumi was right that one who chooses to live by bread alone is to be left that way — alone.

This place is in de middle of nowhere, so we’ll stay the night in the guest rooms upstairs. But this afternoon, ambassadors from France, Spain, China and the US convene in the lounge — a UN of restaurant junkies. Friends old and new have just eaten lunch, while my buddy Jose and I await dinner. 3,600 miles from my house, I am at home.

Tea time turns to tee time, and we are back by the fireplace. I feel like a Lay-Z-Boy in this lounge chair, where my poor posture is rewarded with a wealth of snacks and a flute of champagne. Some are crispy, some are pickled, many are both. Call me plebeian, but the pork rinds (topped with gossamer lardo slivers) and nachos (well, beet chips with yogurt) please me most.

We move through the kitchen to our table to find a plate of rocks. Among them hide crispy shells of burned bread, stuffed with a pungent local cheese called Maroilles. Snails from the French-Belgian border town of Comines have traveled 25 minutes here to meet a garlicky aioli, possibly longer if they’ve walked. With crispy shrimp heads we do a line of vinegar powder.

Up to this point in the meal, our fingers have been our only forks.

The water is only 40km from Dranouter. So it’s no surprise when mackerel, seppia and oysters wash up on our plates like successive waves on the shore. The latter, wedded with whey and sauerkraut, show how just three ingredients can reveal a thousand nuances. Briny, tangy, tart, crispy, creamy, and rich — it is all of the above. But I’ve squandered it, greedily, in one bite.

Ingredients at In De Wulf repeatedly take the stage one by one, and each has time to speak. Roasted leeks get dressed in the mirror, with fermented leek juice and an oil made verdant with their tops. A stagiaire comes by with a couple of sunchokes that the poor bastard has been basting with butter for 5 hours. The inside is like custard; the outside, candy.

Kobe turns up table-side and breaks open a dinosaur egg-sized orb of salt to reveal a knobby celery root baked inside. It’s served in a warm, silky foam of the same, and a slab of celeriac “cheese” on the side whose production sounds so labor-intensive that I zone out during the tutorial.

A masterful wine pairing has me feeling rather toasted toasty. It’s mostly vin naturel: oxidative funk when it is called for, elegance and brightness when it’s not. Far from the “drinking vinegars” of which a chef friend of mine disparagingly tried to warn me earlier this week. Vive la différence of opinion.

Kobe Desramaults and I crossed paths twice in 2011, first in Belgium and later in New York. For two years I have thought about these flavors. Now, of tonight’s proteins and pastries I could opine at length. But doing so would undermine what I believe to Kobe’s greatest skills: those of an editor.

Tonight’s was a meal with no commas. Staccato sixteenth notes that form a song. One that is personal. Persistent. Powerful. Its verses are clear. But its melody changes as soon as you’ve memorized it. It is one that makes you listen. Kobe is one to watch.

Welkom in Nederland. I’m in Zwolle.

I arrived yesterday ’round midnight, the only one who got off the train at this station. The only one walking these cold, foggy streets at that hour. Now it’s lunch time and I’m biting my tongue because I want to make a joke about purple drank, but nobody in this country thinks I am funny. So I’ll just sip this fermented cabbage juice in silence. It’s the first serving at a restaurant called De Librije.

I’ve been invited here so I don’t order, really. I just eat. Jonnie Boer cooks, and Thérèse — his wife — commands the floor. I’m in their hands.

Toast is in mine: a skinny piece topped with halibut fin, bittersweet orange purée and apricot oil. Hidden in the serving vessel underneath it is halibut “brandade” with some crunchy, fizzy little things that feel like pop rocks.

More bites come two by two. Shrimp and crab from the North Sea — the latter redolent of citrus, and the former on a funkier tip with brussels sprouts, kimchee, and toasted, pulverized wild rice. Cod tongue then cod skin, perched among the vertebrae of a cod spine. The succession is delicious and arresting. Jonnie’s laying snacks on snacks, and I’ve gotta have it.

The rest of the menu finds cohesiveness in the mirror, the last courses reflecting the first. It’s raw scallops to begin with, laced with black garlic and a warm broth of smoked celeriac. Cod comes later, with slices of raw hazelnut and a puddle of wildly expressive sunchoke-flower “tea.” Neither dish feels familiar at first. But my tongue and my brain start to dig, and they uncover in each a certain sweetness that is nothing if not alluring.

Beef tartare is to be eaten with one’s hands — de rigueur in this age of René. But I must also eat it off my hand, for it’s been “plated” there by the waiter, between my thumb and forefinger. I smile.

Beef again later. A thin cut from an old milk cow, the fat barely melted on a hot stone dusted with cèpe powder. It’s powerful, but it’s pretty. Jonnie slaloms between the two, a boxer alternating uppercuts and hugs.

The bone marrow and mushrooms that come with that dish keep an unexpected bedfellow in bergamot. A spiral of goose liver coils around juices of magnolia and fermented carrots. Hare à la royale comes with a bit of blood pudding so smooth that the ferrous duo feels positively elegant.

The cheese course is composed, calculated, corporeal but not copious — epoisses, rabbit kidneys, and chorizo dosed out judiciously. Desserts hit the table, as do playful party favors like a cream-filled “kiss” and a white chocolate-and-cèpe “mushroom.”

The waiter, I should mention, is a goddamn ninja. Stefan is his name. All afternoon he’d materialize like Obi-Wan’s hologram, drop some Jedi knowledge on me about water mint or bahārāt or the chef’s version of Maggi seasoning, and vanish only after all my follow-up questions had been thoroughly answered. His English makes me feel stupid, and his descriptions make me feel smart.

Now I feel a bit tired. I stayed up until six this morning in a hotel suite far nicer than I deserved (think hot tub, rainfall shower, private sauna…). So I’m pretty sure I washed myself approximately five times. And somehow Risky Business was re-enacted roughly thrice? Not really sure how that happened, or if it did.

But Stefan would not judge me for such revelry. He’s just come over to my table one last time, and laid down an edible “joint” — Dutch humor. He makes one stride away, and abruptly stops: “Here. Take two.”

Funny: I’d say De Librije was worth a double-take.