Sebath Capela is in his ‘Elements’ at Indrani Lodge

Sebath Capela, one of Belgium’s promising young chefs is finally ready to showcase his new playground. At Elements, a new restaurant within Indrani Lodge a few kilometres away from the landmark lion monument in Waterloo, Belgium he is improvising with nature and all its elements to serve a very interesting menu focused on vegetables grown on the property and protein that comes from small farms close to the restaurant.

Elements is part of a project created by Philippe and Jessica Brawermann, a couple who bought a farm in the Belgian countryside not far from Brussels and turned it into their home. Today, they’ve invested in a wellness hotel with 12 rooms, a 36-seat restaurant, a 20 seat lobby bar and a yoga studio among others.

Their vision had been that of going past the buzzwords of sustainability and really focusing on making the property as ecological as possible. The lodge, restaurant as well as 39 neighbours benefit from a joint heating system using biomass and geothermic technology made from collecting wood that would otherwise go to waste. Heating is provided by this system while electricity is generated by solar panels and a battery system enables them to serve the neighbours that form part of a co-operative that has been built to serve 39 households, the hotel, the restaurant and the internal swimming pool.

Sebath Capela, is a perfect chef to ensure the whole project is coherent. Having training at Bouchery, he then worked at Sang Hoon Degeimbre’s L’Air du Temps and more recently at the now closed Bon Bon by Christophe Hardiquest. In the latter, he went from the position of comis chef to sous-chef gaining experience not just in gastronomy but also restaurant management. He felt ready to chart his course and moved to Indrani Lodge to manage the pop-up restaurant before Elements opened. The three restaurants he worked in all had one thing in common, their focus on local and vegetables as an essential element in cuisine.

At Elements, he does just that. The dishes are mainly vegetable based with the possibility of adding one meat dish to the menu from producers he knows and who work closely. Sebath uses the produce grown on the property as inspiration and adds texture, flavour, bite through different techniques used on the same ingredient.

The dishes named artichoke, cabbage, cauliflower, potato or carrot might sound simple but the flavours are complex, rounded and the menu balanced.

At the restaurant you are able to decide whether you want to know what you are eating or to try and find out before turning a small paper that’s left on your table when the dish is served. Want to have a bit of fun testing how good your palate is and trying to identify the ingredients? That’s possible here.

There is an open kitchen that works in harmony even though the restaurant has only been open for a few days when I visit. Sebath Capela is enjoying what he is doing. He works without pressure, enjoying what he is doing and also serving what he likes to eat. “What’s most important for me is to have fun. To be coherent in what I am doing,” he said.

I ask him what will happen in winter when vegetables might not be plentiful and whether he is fermenting vegetables to be used in the austere winter months.

He tells me that winter is not necessarily bad and there is always fresh produce to look forward to. Moreover, he is fermenting not because it is in vogue but rather because he wants to add flavour, texture or crunchiness to a dish. He opens a jar at the end of the meal and lets me and my 11-year-old daughter who is accompanying me for the dinner taste a carrot that is being fermented. The carrot is crunchy but at the same time tender.

You could say Sebath Capela has found his element at Elements. He is happy using his creativity, his perfectionism and his ethics to offer a real farm to table experience. He serves a three course lunch menu EUR 39 and a menu up to six courses which includes one meat or fish dish at EUR 79.

At the end of the dinner, the owner Philippe Brawermann proudly takes me to the basement of the restaurant building where there is the heating system that saves up to 260 tonnes of carbon per year which is the equivalent of one million kilometres in CO2 emissions by car. “This type of project is one of the first of its kind in Europe,” he tells me.

With the cost of electricity and heating rising over the past months, Indrani Lodge and The GreenDyle Co-operative that was set up could end up being a model for other such projects.

1 Chemin de la Waronche, Loupigne, Belgium