A peek into the kitchen of….
Armijn van Nierop
With the BonBiza as the centrepiece at a barbecue or event, Armijn enjoys cooking privately or on location. Artisanal & personal, that is what he and his company stand for. You can also simply pick up his culinary creations. For pick-up, catering, and cooking on location, everything is personally organized by Armijn van Nierop and his team.
Armijn van Nierop
Armijn van Nierop is based in Arendonk and his company has been in existence since 2016. “Before I started my own company, I was head chef and F&B manager at Hostellerie Vangaealen Heeze for 15 years. Before that, I worked at Chalet Royal in Den Bosch (former star restaurant). I worked day and night but liked working on-site with guests so much that my company, Armijn, was born from there.”
“We make as much as possible by ourselves; craftsmanship is of great importance.”
Within Armijn, there are two spearheads: personal & artisanal. “The personal touch is reflected in everything, if we provide a party or dinner for you or if you come to pick something up, everything is personal. We know our guests, we visit them and build a certain bond with them. If we notice that one of our spearheads is missing or we cannot meet the standard, we will not do it. Cooking for 1000 people at a festival, for example, is no longer personal and artisanal and we reject that. We started in the summer of 2016 and soon had a full agenda. Then corona came along and we had to make a big change in direction but because of that we now have a nice take-away.”
How did you get to BonFeu?
“Since I opened in 2016, I met the owner of BonFeu as a customer of mine. This is where the relationship started and during the corona time, he thought it would be fun to set up a BonBiza at our place that would attract attention. This was my first contact with the product and a year later I started to barbecue with the BonFeu. That was when I started using the BonBiza for business for the first time. We are now 1 year on and this has resulted in us actually taking the BonBiza with us on location throughout the outdoor season.
I am regularly asked to promote products or work with certain products but I am not really a fan of that. If I don’t stand behind it 100% myself or don’t use it, I can’t conform to it. The BonBiza, on the other hand, sold me straight away! The BonBiza provides direct heat and produces a beautiful product when you bake with it. During a big barbecue, the cooking unit kept working well and then I knew, I wanted to work with this. I can rely on it and it is of such high quality that I wanted to link my name to it. That’s how the cooperation started and ultimately the product itself, the BonBiza, proved itself.”
“My tip is to clean the plate immediately after use and oil it with corn or peanut oil to create a non-stick coating.”
The BonBiza can practically support a whole dinner.
Before I started working with the BonBiza, I had no real experience with plancha baking. I even canceled big barbecues because it was not quite my style. Now I have realized the added value of cooking outside and I like to take the BonBiza with me on location. Of course, your experience as a chef really shows because, in the professional kitchen, you also work with all sorts of cooking equipment. But the BonBiza is different and produces a different product. Because the griddle gets so hot, you bring out the natural sugars that are in vegetables, fish, and meat. You can then move your ingredients to other heat zones. This gives you a unique effect that you will never achieve with a gas barbecue, let’s be honest.
A big advantage of the BonBiza is that the plate heats up very quickly. It is a very direct and fast way of cooking and if you put a lot of wood on it, you can start within half an hour. Compared to a gas barbecue, the BonBiza looks cozy and you can leave it in your garden when you are not using it. We prepare dishes with ingredients like the heart of the tuna (coeur de tuna), scallops, or oysters and finish them on location. Our tepid lime dressing on oysters, for example, which we partly make on BonBiza, is very popular. Finally, we also take the season into account and now it is the time of the Bouchot mussels, for example. This is actually a small French mussel that we serve as an amuse bouche by first stewing it in a large pan on the BonBiza.”
“With live cooking, guests can see you at work, which gives a whole other dimension.”
We offer personalised services
“When we organize a beautiful party, we can dress up the whole garden and place the BonBiza at a central point in the garden. We then build the rest around it, the culinary experience is really the focal point. The BonBiza then actually supports the whole afternoon or evening in the kitchen up to and including dessert. When guests buy a BonBiza from me, I deliver and install it personally and it often gets a central place in the garden. I then immediately give the explanation I think is necessary for the customer to get off to a good start. This is where our spearheads ‘personal’ and ‘artisanal’ come in again.
Cooking on location is our core business, but taking care of parties, a complete event or dinners from A to Z is also possible. Besides cooking on location and catering, our guests can pick up dishes, complete dinners, or other products at the take-away from Thursday to Sunday. All this can also be ordered via our website armijn.be.
Pick-up
Catering
Private cooking on location
Contact Armijn van Nierop
Would you like to know what culinary surprises Armijn could organise for you? Please contact Armijn for the possibilities.
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