Jonnie Boer, a Dutch chef who started as a cook at De Librije in Zwolle, the Netherlands, four decades ago and never left, steering the restaurant to wide acclaim with humble ingredients plucked from nearby streams and fields, died on April 23 on the Caribbean island of Bonaire. He was 60.
The cause of his death, in a hospital, was a pulmonary embolism, according to a representative from his restaurant.
Mr. Boer was foraging, fishing, fermenting and flying in the face of received notions about fine dining years before those things became pillars of the New Nordic movement. He didn’t give up entirely on foie gras and caviar, but they shared the menu, and sometimes the plate, with pikeperch, tulip bulbs and chickweed.
“His belief was, ‘Everything that grows here is just as good as something that grows somewhere else,’” Nico Bouter, a Brooklyn chef who worked under Mr. Boer for 10 years, said. “Beetroot was his favorite ingredient. He liked the challenge of this almost boring, cheap vegetable.”
If critics and food guide inspectors did not necessarily look forward to eating eels and weeds when they first walked into De Librije, they soon got used to it, and even learned to like it. The restaurant steadily climbed in the Michelin Guide’s estimation, until it was given three stars in 2004. It has stayed at that peak every year since, an unbroken streak that few restaurants in the world have matched and that, after Mr. Boer’s death, inspired Dutch social media users to call him “the Roger Federer of chefs.”
De Librije took its name from its original site, the library of a 15th-century Dominican abbey. Ten years ago, Mr. Boer and his wife, Thérèse Boer-Tausch, moved their restaurant into the covered courtyard of an 18th-century building where they had amassed a small colony of businesses, including a wine bar, a cooking school, a second restaurant and a boutique hotel. As the Boers renovated the structure, they retained some remnants of its past life as a women’s prison. As they put it on their website, “The cell doors, bars on the windows, and the ‘cachot’ (dungeon) create a unique look and atmosphere.”
The Boers’ establishments moved to their own rhythms, which often had a rock backbeat rarely heard in restaurants that hope to impress Michelin inspectors. Desserts at De Librije were assembled tableside, on a rolling cart inspired by Mr. Boer’s favorite record, Van Halen’s cover of the blues song “Ice Cream Man,” with the band’s winged logo painted on the side, below the song’s title.
Mr. Boer wasn’t afraid of a carefully timed drug reference, either. De Librije sent diners off into the night with edible herbal joints inside glass pre-roll tubes, and the restaurant was placing small morsels of beef tartare on the back of diners’ hands, like bumps of cocaine, years before Manhattan was swamped by caviar bumps.
The dining-room playlists Mr. Boer collaborated on with Hans Stroeve, a local D.J., would progress from deep house music early in the evening to “Livin’ on a Prayer” and other raised-lighter stadium anthems as it got later.
“If Jonnie felt like guitars in the restaurant, you heard guitars in the restaurant,” Mr. Stroeve said.
Jan Boer was born on Jan. 9, 1965, in the village of Giethoorn, about 70 miles northeast of Amsterdam. His parents, Lebbertus and Hennie Boer, owned a cafe called De Harmonie, and young Jan would sometimes wander into the kitchen to fry duck eggs or eels he had turned up while exploring the waterways.
His education and training as a cook took place entirely in the Netherlands. After attending culinary school in Groningen, Mr. Boer spent three years working at a fine-dining restaurant in Amsterdam. In 1986, he answered a help-wanted ad and was hired by the owner of De Librije, who promoted him to chef soon after. The dining room was rarely full, he later recalled, which gave him time to experiment at the stove and gave the owner, who was in his 60s, time to contemplate retirement.
Mr. Boer met Thérèse Tausch, a hotel-school student, at a disco, twice. The second meeting took. After she began working as a server in De Librije’s dining room, he would pick her up at the bus stop in his Opel Kadett sedan. She appreciated the ride, but the car often seemed noisy to her. After a few weeks, she discovered that the banging she heard coming from the luggage compartment in the back seat was made by young lambs that Mr. Boer was driving from the farm to the slaughterhouse.
The couple offered to buy De Librije in 1993, applying to a local bank for a loan — “the only time in my life that I wore a tie,” Mr. Boer said in a 2017 interview. They married three years later.
With his wife overseeing the wine cellar and the service in the restaurant they now owned, Mr. Boer overhauled the kitchen to revolve around local oddities that few Dutch chefs bothered with: pimpernel, pine tips, meadowsweet, birch sap, bog myrtle. What he wasn’t able to serve right away was salted, fermented or made into vinegar. Eventually, what he gathered in the wild, often during weekend excursions on his black Harley-Davidson motorcycle, was planted in De Librije’s greenhouse and kitchen garden.
“He was always looking for products from the neighborhood,” said Arjan Bisschop, a Dutch chef who went to work for Mr. Boer in 1998. “In the 1990s, that was very unusual.”
Mr. Boer’s preference for homegrown flavors extended to the dishes he served, which drew from Dutch tradition at a time when many ambitious chefs in the Netherlands still defaulted to French ideas. One of his signature desserts was a disassembled apple pie based on his grandmother’s recipe, with pan-fried apple cubes and whipped-cream rosettes laid out alongside sleight-of-hand components like trompe l’oeil vanilla beans made from vanilla gel and chocolates in the shape of star-anise pods.
As Mr. Boer’s reputation grew, he masterminded in-flight meals for KLM Royal Dutch Airlines and “Taste of De Librije” menus for Holland America cruise ships.
The Boers never cloned De Librije, but they opened two more-relaxed restaurants in Zwolle, Brass Boer and Senang. Brass Boer also has outposts on the Dutch-speaking islands of Curaçao and Bonaire, where the couple owned a beachside brasserie, Club Tropicana. And in 2022, the Boers’ company bought Brasserie Jansen, a 10-year-old restaurant in Zwolle.
Recently, Mr. Boer began enacting an orderly succession plan for the empire he owned with his wife, giving a stake in the company to De Librije’s head chef. He also gave stakes to the couple’s daughter, Isabelle, and their son, Jimmie, who both survive him, along with his wife and two brothers, Roelie and Berrie Boer.
After a memorial service at De Librije, Mr. Boer left the restaurant for the last time in a blue-and-purple coffin his friends had painted with his name and an image of a skull and crossbones. The coffin was placed on the sidecar of his Harley and driven to the cemetery, escorted by a dozen motorcycles and two of Mr. Boer’s Porsche convertibles.
Pete Wells was the restaurant critic for The Times from 2012 until 2024. He was previously the editor of the Food section.
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