Sidney Schutte opens The Gym in Amsterdam in November

Sidney Schutte opens The Gym in Amsterdam in November, in a former gymnasium beside The College Hotel, with its own entrance and no long tasting menu.

When the project was announced in May the opening was set for September. The restaurant's own site now gives November. Two months is not a scandal in a building being stripped back to the brickwork, but it is the kind of slip that decides whether a restaurant opens into the autumn season or into the run-up to Christmas.

The format is the news. The Gym runs mostly a la carte, in what the house calls a lively, informal room. Schutte, 49, has said the top segment is changing, and the menu structure is the part of the argument you can book: high-level cooking without committing three hours and a set price at the door.

A tasting menu asks for three hours. The room that drops it has to earn them.

What Sidney Schutte is dropping

The tasting menu, in effect. He spent twelve years at Spectrum, the two-star Amsterdam dining room, which is exactly the format he is now stepping away from. His cooking leans on Zeeland roots, with fish, shellfish and seasonal vegetables doing the work that luxury produce does elsewhere.

He also takes on the hotel. Schutte oversees the culinary direction of The College Hotel, an Autograph Collection property run with Corendon Hotels & Resorts, which means breakfast, lobby snacks and the terrace between the two buildings carry his name too. The renovation is being done with the studio D/Dock, and the group has set up a training partnership with ROC van Amsterdam.

The star map behind the timing

Dutch restaurants find out where they stand on 5 October, when the Michelin Guide ceremony returns to MECC Maastricht. The Gym will not be open. Opening after the ceremony means a full year before the guide can rule on it, which is either bad luck or a quiet piece of scheduling.

Schutte already holds stars abroad, in Mexico and Malaysia. Whether an a la carte room in a converted gym reads the same way to an inspector as a tasting menu is the question the format was designed to ask. Elsewhere, chefs are moving in the other direction: Matthias Marc has left Paris for a nine-room house in the Jura.