“Spain,” Belgian chef Viki Geunes told a group of London foodies at the Galleria Illy, “is more technique and less product. Whatever I do must add value to the product.”

By evoking Spain the two-star Michelin chef at ‘t Zilte in Antwerp was asserting his opposition less to the contemporary cuisine of an entire nation than that of its most famous chef, Ferran Adrià. And by aligning himself instead with “the Nordic kitchen” and its obsession with exceptional vegetables from local producers and small farms he had one particular Nordic kitchen in mind, Rene Redzepi’s Noma. For his 15 September pop-up audience Geunes espoused a more grounded modern gastronomy, much as he does for diners every night at his new restaurant up on the ninth floor of The MAS – Museum aan de Stroom, overlooking the docks of Antwerp’s newly fashionable Eilandje district.

Geunes’ Galleria talk was improvised within the loosely structured hour it took him and his assistant Cindy Cuypers to assemble some 50 tasting samples of a new dessert composition created for the occasion. Appropriately, each was plated on a coffee cup saucer.

About halfway through his show-and-tell Geunes began to piece together a full-sized version of his chocolat au café aérien, crème nantais et baies d’argousier, only not on a serving dish. He assembled it beside the saucers, directly on the white tabletop.

The elements of the dessert translate loosely as follows:

• chocolat au café aérien – aerated coffee chocolate
• crème nantaise  – drained farmer’s cheese and cream cheese with lemon, vanilla, egg yolks, sugar & cream
• coulis de baies d’argousier – a sauce of anise muscat syrup and sea-buckthorns
• parfait de café au sésame – a frozen parfait of Illy espresso and sesame paste with beaten egg whites and  whipped cream
• crumble of almond, sugar, coffee and egg yolk
• chocolate chips made with Xanthan gum, agar, glucose and sugar

Beyond those mysterious red dots composed of sea-bruckthorn coulis, the revelation of this dessert, with its delicate crunches and ethereal creams, was how the pronounced acidity of those exotic berries countered both the fattiness of the cheese and the nuttiness of the crumble, the sesame and even the coffee. For Geunes the self-taught chef coffee isn’t only a drink in a cup, or a specific flavour. It’s a set of perfumes that can infuse a dessert, a fine olive oil or, by extension, a marinade for langoustines with a particular nutty, toasty or lightly bitter character. At ‘t Zilte he’s advancing coffee as a cooking ingredient by moving it backwards in the timeframe of a meal, from after-dinner note to dessert flavour to main-course infusion.

Following the demo many attendees returned for seconds of Geunes’s astonishing dessert ensemble. After an hour’s seduction a saucer-sized portion was barely adequate. The chef himself eyed the larger table version of the dessert with wonder and longing. He too seemed mystified by the splendid result, a constellation in coffee, chocolate, cheese and sea-buckthorn on a white sky.

I asked him if he might be inspired to serve out desserts in a similar manner at ‘t Zilte, as the chef Grant Achatz had famously done at Alinea in Chicago. Turns out he was having exactly the same thought. But much as was intrigued by the idea Geunes reluctantly conceded he wouldn’t be trying it any time soon. Forward-thinking diners in Chicago or London might be ready to eat dessert directly off their Michelin-starred tables but not yet their counterparts in Antwerp.