Pierre Wind: 'turn everything into a menu'

Pierre Wind became known as a television chef with an inexhaustible amount of energy. Wind is still in the kitchen of his restaurant Trammmhuys every Saturday, inventing recipes by the conveyor belt and also presenting a children's programme on taste and healthy eating. Meanwhile, he still proves to be the conversational waterfall with a Hague accent, brimming with new ideas. "And since I can't possibly implement them all myself in this life, I will gladly give away some of them to the readers of Hotelvak," he jokes. "Kicke right?"

"With my innovative spirit, I was often way ahead of the times," Wind explains. "My handicap was always that - in all my enthusiasm - I wanted to launch an idea immediately. Often, I was then too early for the market or did not yet have the right skills myself. Over the years, I have learned to put ideas on hold for a while first." Wind became nationally known for his television appearances but experimented with taste and food in innovative ways long before that. In the 1980s, for example, he made chocolate tagliatelle; a decade later, he experimented with flavour perfumes at the table. "I like to be the first with a good idea," he explains. "So I once came up with cauliflower coffee, Brussels sprout coffee, speculoos coffee. Everybody does that now, but this bald egg from The Hague was the first."  

In recent years, Wind has been championing his self-devised method that allows chefs to save a huge amount of energy. "It's cooking to boiling point. The BoilStop method. In this, you turn off the gas as soon as the boiling point is reached. The cooking process continues as normal after that. Costs a little more time, but saves at least half the energy." 

A restaurant in a hotel is substantially different from a stand-alone, independent restaurant, according to Wind. "The big difference is that you have to make a hotel guest happy for several days and a hotel has very different target groups. Both the satiated guest who has already seen everything and the guest who has saved up for years to be able to afford such a splurge. A good hotel chef knows how to appeal to and read both types of guests."

Wind believes there is room for improvement in many hotels - "really not all of them, there are fantastic, not even very expensive, hotels". "What I saw in a hotel the other day, and what I thought was fantastic, was that all the staff had one or more flags on their name card with the language you could address them in. My brain then immediately goes to work with me. So then I thought: you can also use icons to indicate their speciality. Or which department they work in. Or the subject they know a lot about. After all, our industry is all about communication, right? Hospitality is communication." 

Should Wind ever open a hotel himself - "Which I don't plan to do by the way, don't be afraid" - the first thing he would change would be breakfast. "Many hotels offer a breakfast buffet. Nothing wrong with that in itself. But do you know what the problem is? The first day you love such a deluxe breakfast with all the trimmings. The second day it becomes less special and the third day you think 'I know this now'. Don't I? Well, so you can solve that very simply."

Whereupon Wind explains how he envisions every breakfast table having its own griddle. "A bit like cooking on one of those hot stones. So as a guest, you can decide every morning how you want your breakfast. Saves food waste too, because you can give each guest a raw egg that they fry, scramble or boil themselves. If you do that combined with the possibility that guests can choose a more luxurious upgrade in addition to the basic breakfast - where the chef prepares something at your table, for example - I think you have a golden formula on your hands." 

According to Wind, the concept of many hotels is not flexible enough. "You need to be able to offer more than just a bed and breakfast. The variation in choices now often revolves only around the luxury or size of the rooms, but not in everything around it. I would offer menus. And not just with food on them, but the complete hotel experience. Offer your guest a choice for everything: the room, the service level, food, excursions, everything! And you can then also charge just fine for that. Because you prove that you are truly engaged with your guest. I think the bulk of hotels now don't get out of it what is achievable."