Cool Bun

I don't normally eat burgers at lunch time.  Especially when I only have an hour or so to spare and cannot sink into a carb-induced slumber in the afternoon.  But who could resist the allure of Cool Bun, newly opened in the Schuman area, especially after reading praise from fellow bloggers about its sister restaurant?  Well you know me well enough by now: I couldn't!

We haven't reserved, but this is no problem for the waitress: we're met with a smile rather than a pained frown.  Hurrah!


The menu offers burgers as varied in flavours as they are in price - from regular with cheese to gourmet, sexy burgers at 24 or 26 euro each.  Prices match what you'd pay for a very good steak, so these burgers had better be good!  Now, should we opt for the richesse of a foie gras burger with girolles mushrooms, as suggested by the blackboard?  Or one with roquefort, or chanterelle mushrooms?  I've finally finished a translation of a gourmet French food products website, and am aware of all the exciting mushrooms out there!  I only hope I will do them all justice....

Mushrooms aside, today is not the day to spend 80 euro on a hurried lunch, and so I - we- resist.  We decide on a apple jack burger (15 euro) nd I order a mini trio (19 euro) to test a few (with sea bass, apple jack and onglet).  So back comes the smiling waitress to take our order:

What cuisson for our burger?  Mild or spicy sauce for the apple jack?  And what type of cheese?  A few minutes later she scurries back, having forgotten to ask if we'd like a special spicy mayonnaise in place of regular ketchup.

"C'est beaucoup de choix pour un burger," observes my companion.

When they arrive the burgers are visually impressive.  The presentation and cuisson are all right, and we get our ketchup.  It is the apple jack burger that looks the best: a tower of textures and colours with enormous, obviously home made onion rings perched precariously on top, all golden and misshapen and glorious.  Ah, those onion rings are delicious!  Crispy and golden with beery batter.  I admit to craving a fast food burger about once a year, but after tasting these, will I ever be able to order fast food onion rings again?  How could I?  The chips are delicious too, all golden and different shapes and sizes and mine in a separate cone.  I think these are the best chips I've eaten in my burger contest so far.  Cool Bun, you're doing very well and we're only at the carbohydrate analysis stage...

My burgers are three mini burgers in a row.  Each tiny specimen is beautifully presented and unique.  Sundried tomato peeks out of one, and I wonder how everything stays together.  I feel slightly envious of the proper fat burger sitting opposite me, but eating this is fiddly and different and I'm obliged to use knife and fork.  I have my own cone of chips and a side plate of well-dressed salad.  The meat is cooked perfectly.  It is only the slightly precarious position of the burgers on my thin boat-bottomed plate that stops me eating everything too fast.  A good thing, for these burgers are made to be savoured, and if I apply pressure in the wrong place then I fear the plate will propel everything into my lap, like a seesaw.  Tellingly when we've finished, it is only my side of the table that has been dirtied.

I stay happy and full until well into the evening.  And after we slip out, the waitress sticks her head round the door to say thank you and goodbye. 

Becinbrussels tried mini burgers for a change, but don't let her try and convince you that this is a lighter choice.  For now, Cool Bun, you are one of her favourite burger choices. She certainly adores your chips and the precise cooking of your burgers.  But how to compare a burger that costs 24 euro with one that costs 10 or 15?   In Brussels the humble burger is going places.  This is going to require some careful thought....

http://www.cool-bun.be/
rue Stevin 168
1000 Brussels

Centro Cabraliego de Bruselas

In a previous post I complained of attending Spanish conversation tables and feeling tongue-tied.  Happily recent events suggest that I am getting better (though I must add I have a Spanish oral exam on Tuesday and my progress has not yet been subject to expert evaluation!)  Last night Spanish was all around me, and I even managed to speak some, in a Spanish bar, cultural and community centre.  My second visit in a week: I only wish I'd discovered this place before.  One thing I did learn, I still struggle with numbers.  Twenty years ago, when Centro Cabraliego de Bruselas opened, there were not many Spanish bars in Brussels.  Now there are 250 (can that be right?)  And that competition-conquering-cabrales-cheese in the photo on the wall is worth 2500 euros (really?!)  Straining to catch numbers and interesting soundbites from the hosts, asking questions in halting Spanish with a few words of French thrown in for good measure.... Yes, readers, I suggest you take everything you read here (especially in relation to numbers) with a pinch of salt.  That's until I can count to 2500 properly.

In keeping with the hordes of young Spaniards and older ones grouped around the bar, I and my French and Belgian companions tried to join in.  The result was sometimes confusing, leading to a lot of hein?, eh? and you what, quoi?!  Great preparation for an oral exam though, this, as we ate greasy-fingered, drank and pestered our busy hosts with a question here and there.  The people working here are all volunteers, and you can see photos of several of the founders on the website, including my favourite (exceedingly patient) man in glasses.  The centre is heaving; so no wonder it is only open Friday to Sunday.  Any more and it would not be possible to cope.

Where else in Brussels can you get cerveza for 1 euro?   And a gin and tonic for 3 euros?  I suspect there may be some subsidy at work here, or probably it is just that the Centro is run as a social enterprise, not for hard-nosed profits.  I think there may have been mention of subsidy, but I missed it in the soup of chatter and laughter and very jolly accordion music in the background.  As far as I can tell, the name cabraliego is a reference to a small village community near the Picos mountains in the Asturias: homage to the handful of villages permitted to produce the famed blue cabrales cheese. 

3000 euros?  Actually, we may have the numbers right.  "Cheese: it's a way of life", says one contestant in the annual August Cheese festival.  I even spotted one of our friendly volunteers from the Cabraliego on stage (one of the contestants, or judges?)

 
Before you proceed into the long depths of the venue in search of a table, it's worth pausing at the bar, bedecked with plastic bunting flags of the Asturias region.  You could be in Spain here, really.  Older men linger around the bar, and the walls bear photos of proud cheese-clutching Asturians.  Proceed a little further and you're really in rural Asturia, with a wall of black and white photos of farming landscapes and wood-mounted coats of arms.  But it keeps going: continue through to the Asturian community centre, all rows of tables, plastic chairs, and happy people.

Find a space wherever you can.   And order tapas from the kitchen bar right at the back.  Generous plates arrive of jamón, and calamares - no, surely not tapas these, but a ración!  Sticky tables, sticky hands.  One of the volunteers explains how our neighbours are pouring Asturian cider from a height to "get the air into it".

Of course tapas is not usually a cheap option for eating out in Brussels, but tapas bars are growing in number and seem to becoming a gourmet choice.  I was in one the other week with exotic meat on the menu and a pianist accompanying our meal with Chopin.  But for authenticity, atmosphere and finger-licking tastiness  - and principle - Cabraliego, you win.   You give Asturians, Spaniards and others with an interest in Spanish culture a place to go.

Take me there!  Please.

 First time round 5 of us ate and drank for 11 euros a person.  Second time round, trois, it was 15 euros.  Third time, seven of us demolished everything on the menu and three bottles of rioja, leaving nothing but a pile of bones behind.  For 21 euros each: you can't argue with that.


rue Haute 171
1000 Brussels
+32 (0)2 511 05 59

Le Pantin

Happy New Year!

I didn't venture far for my first outing of 2012.  Another of my favourite local bars, Le Pantin, has been given more than just a lick of paint in recent months.  It used to be a place that you'd pass in the middle of the day or late at night and a couple of people would be sitting playing chess in the window next to a flickering candle trailing tendrils of wax.  I was dismayed to see the place boarded up following the introduction of the smoking ban, but luckily Le Pantin is resurrected!  It is now less gloomy inside, and there is a new upstairs mezzanine cosy seating area, but otherwise nothing important has changed.  Drinkers sit happily amongst clown pictures, sketches, bookshelves and chess boards, and there are some wooden farmyard (Ark?) animals perched above the bar.   Hats, rings, scarves and beards abound, and there's a fuzzy, buzzy, Bohemian atmosphere: rather different from the cool beats and din of Café Belga.  Rather, here's a place to while an evening away, very contentedly.

You could always learn chess.  It's a new year, high time to develop some new skills, and so I begin.  The rules were explained to me some years ago but need to be explained again.  I am tentative.  I can almost feel my brain struggling to predict several moves in advance while I try to recall which piece can move where.  I may be a beginner, but I don't want to look like a fool.  Then, I manage to cobble together a two-move plan and there is a moment of success!  I take my opponent's Queen.  I am so proud of myself that I refuse to let him re-play his move, and he retaliates by refusing to offer me advice for the remainder of the game.  Soon afterwards it is Check-Mate, and I lose.  But I leave the bar more alert than I would otherwise have been.  I am a beginner, I don't mind losing this time.

 "C'est un jeu diabolique!"

I should add that Le Pantin has a very extensive beer list.  New Year, new beer!  I chose a Duchesse de Bourgogne brune, which is slightly acidic, reminding me of a Gueuze, but without the fizz.