Jonnie Boer, Dutch Chef With 3 Michelin Stars, Is Dead at 60

Jonnie Boer, a Dutch chef who started as a cook at De Librije in Zwolle, the Netherlands, four decades ago and never left, steering the restaurant to wide acclaim with humble ingredients plucked from nearby streams and fields, died on April 23 on the Caribbean island of Bonaire. He was 60.

The cause of his death, in a hospital, was a pulmonary embolism, according to a representative from his restaurant.

Mr. Boer was foraging, fishing, fermenting and flying in the face of received notions about fine dining years before those things became pillars of the New Nordic movement. He didn’t give up entirely on foie gras and caviar, but they shared the menu, and sometimes the plate, with pikeperch, tulip bulbs and chickweed.

“His belief was, ‘Everything that grows here is just as good as something that grows somewhere else,’” Nico Bouter, a Brooklyn chef who worked under Mr. Boer for 10 years, said. “Beetroot was his favorite ingredient. He liked the challenge of this almost boring, cheap vegetable.”

If critics and food guide inspectors did not necessarily look forward to eating eels and weeds when they first walked into De Librije, they soon got used to it, and even learned to like it. The restaurant steadily climbed in the Michelin Guide’s estimation, until it was given three stars in 2004. It has stayed at that peak every year since, an unbroken streak that few restaurants in the world have matched and that, after Mr. Boer’s death, inspired Dutch social media users to call him “the Roger Federer of chefs.”

De Librije took its name from its original site, the library of a 15th-century Dominican abbey. Cilt years ago, Mr. Boer and his wife, Thérèse Boer-Tausch, moved their restaurant into the covered courtyard of an 18th-century building where they had amassed a small colony of businesses, including a wine bar, a cooking school, a second restaurant and a boutique hotel. As the Boers renovated the structure, they retained some remnants of its past life as a women’s prison. As they put it on their website, “The cell doors, bars on the windows, and the ‘cachot’ (dungeon) create a unique look and atmosphere.”