De Cuijt Michelin star arrives 18 months after opening
Koen van Weert and Yukyung Lee reopened a 1914 canal-side restaurant in Mierlo in April 2025. Michelin gave it a star on 5 October; the phone took 96 bookings in a day.
The De Cuijt Michelin star was awarded on Monday 5 October in Maastricht, less than 18 months after chefs Koen van Weert and Yukyung Lee reopened the canal-side restaurant in Mierlo, North Brabant. Dinner there costs €135.
De Cuijt is one of seven restaurants to receive a first star in the 2026 edition, which counts 119 starred addresses in the country. The other names are in our full list of the Michelin Guide Netherlands 2026.
The restaurant stands at Burgemeester Termeerstraat 50, on the Eindhoven Canal, on a site that has served guests since 1914. It reopened on 16 April 2025 after a complete renovation that swapped a brown-café interior for pale wood and a Scandinavian-Japanese look, Geldrop-Mierlo24 reported at the time.
A kitchen that was busy filling chairs took 96 bookings in a single day.
Two chefs who met at Jordnær
Van Weert grew up in Mierlo and worked in starred kitchens in Nuenen and on Texel before moving to Jordnær in Copenhagen, where Lee was already cooking. “She was very strict with me when I started,” he said on stage, according to Omroep Brabant. The star was handed over by Eric Kragh Vildgaard, the chef of that three-star restaurant.
Michelin's inspectors describe cooking rooted in French technique, with subtle Korean influences, and put the sauces first. Their examples are pork cheeks with leek hearts in a pepper sauce finished with Armagnac, and glazed lobster tail with a brioche proved for 48 hours and a beurre blanc with elderflower and gochugaru oil.
What the De Cuijt Michelin star costs at the table
The card published this month lists one set menu, €135 at dinner and €105 at lunch from Wednesday to Friday, built on fish and shellfish from Zeeland and vegetables from south-east Brabant. À la carte dishes run from €52 for sweetbread and apple to €95 for king crab and caviar.
“We were not thinking about a star at all. We were busy filling chairs, earning the money back and cooking for the guests,” Van Weert told Omroep Brabant a day later. He said they had been advised to prepare a celebration menu just in case and did not see it coming. The menu on the website is now called the Celebration menu.
Before the De Cuijt Michelin star, Gault&Millau already rated the kitchen at 14.5 points. According to Geldrop-Mierlo24, it is the first star ever for Mierlo. Elsewhere in the province the news was less festive: Sense in Vught lost its star after switching to a more accessible concept, Omroep Brabant reports.
The broadcaster counted 96 new reservations within a day of the De Cuijt Michelin star. For a kitchen that says it was mostly trying to fill chairs, that question is settled for a while.
