As a teacher at the Academy of Regional Gastronomy in Hasselt, Belgium, she is known as the chef who develops recipes around beer. She's also a trained historian, who searches for old recipes and local habits in cooking and brewing, She extensively travels around Belgium to find the information and the exceptional beers she needs in her classes.
Prof. Jo Van Caenegem was the first to radically reverse the art of menu-development. She starts from a beer, and tries to create a nice dish, that matches perfectly with the chosen beer. In her way, the beer is the central piece on the table, and the food helps the guest to better appreciate the beer. She recommends to choose first the beer you want to drink, and than the dish you will devour with it. She repeatedly proves over and over again that the differences in taste are so much wider in beer than in wine.

The creation of a perfect match of food with a specific beer instead of wine, demands much more knowledge and craftsmanship from the chef, who really must understand the characteristics of the beer. More tasting and testing is required to achieve that perfect match.

One of her favorite lines is also, that people learn more easily to appreciate and taste a new beer during a dinner than just by drinking it at the bar. The combination with the food, accentuates the richness of tastes and aromas of the beer. She has two points of view in developing the beer-food combination: contrast or harmony. An example of contrast is to drink a sour MORT SUBITE Gueuze with a dish, decorated with a soft creamy sauce. A harmonious combination is a gingerbread dessert with the GULDEN DRAAK dark triple. During a course session, Jo Van Caenegem, offers 10 beers to her students, who are asked to develop a food dish for every beer. What a fun adventure!

At one of our most successful beer-dinners in California, organized by the Wine House in LA at the 2424 Pico Restaurant in Santa Monica, we were pleased to find some of the best food-Belgian beer combinations this side of the Atlantic. Congratulations for David, chef and co-owner of the Restaurant. Have a look at the menu of the evening.

(Newsletter October 1997)