Le Corbeau

I've missed you, blog.  For whatever I have been doing these last couple of weeks hasn't been nearly as fun as wandering, bar visiting and eating.  This morning I went for a run.  Blogging is like running, I thought, as I ran round in circles: the longer you stay away from it the harder it is to begin again.  But carrying on is much better than slipping backwards!  Coming soon: some articles on bars in Saint-Gilles.
 

I  have Professor Nakanba to thank for the theme of today's article.  I came home to find him there, neatly cut to size in my letter box.  "Whatever your problem, contact the Grand Voyant Medium Astrologue", said the note.  I read on, intrigued.  Now what, I thought, is a maladie inconnue?  I thought a bit longer, and then I came up with one!

Several weeks ago we were planning to go out of an evening.  This "we" is myself and some girlfriends.  We sent emails and text messages and might even have deployed facebook.  So far, so normal.  Or was it?  Fixing up this one evening took two weeks of hesitations and negotiations, and when finally the long-awaited day came around a month later I felt deflated, cheated, I wasn't even sure I wanted to go. 

Right.  But I did go, and when everyone turned up we ate and drank and I could almost forget the amount of effort it had taken to organise.  And then one of my friends said; "we're going to Le Corbeau, wanna come?"  Yes, I said, almost without thinking at all.

You see, past the grey frontage and the bulky black-suited hulk guarding the entrance this is a bar where we are - or for a couple of hours can at least pretend to be - spontaneous.  Because on a Friday or Saturday at a quarter to Midnight people get up on the tables and dance on them, without apparently agreeing anything amongst themselves at all.  No emails, no text messages, no facebook.  Just one look, and they clamber up and dance, pretty un - self-consciously.  You can almost pretend that you're that first group of people climbing on to the table podium for the first time, waving arms and shunting bottoms and making amused eye contact with all around, conscious of doing something a little out of the ordinary!  Yes, I'm here, so what, the raven is unperturbed.  No matter that this is now replayed every week in Le Corbeau, and the bar is doing very nicely out of it thank you very much, with men expected to grease the palm of the doorman on the way out (or so I'm told).  We can all shuffle a bit one way on tables, the music egging us on, making us believe that we can also do it, we can be spontaneous! 

So come to Le Corbeau, please.  Take a friend, a jacket, twenty euros, no more.  Come of a night where you feel flat and need a lift.  Drink just enough to avoid a squeeze through to the toilet (singular).  Call more friends; give them a couple of hours to get here.  If you're at a stage in life where partners need to be consulted, a babysitter arranged and dinner prepared before you can even think about it, then you've either arrived or something - that S word again - has been left behind.

As for me, I'm not prepared to give up hope of spontaneity.  Not yet!  Dancing on tables is not just for students.  

Spontaneity on tap.  Every Friday and Saturday like clockwork it comes back.

18, rue St. Michel

1000 Brussels

02 219 52 46

http://www.lecorbeau.be/

Frederic Blondeel

I know what you're thinking: lucky Bec, living in Belgium. I bet you buy sachets of chocolates whenever you want to, and slip them into your bag to eat surreptitiously at the bus shelter or at your desk.  But no, I protest, that's simply not true - cue the sympathy violin!  The only time Bec visits chocolatiers is to buy presents for others or to show others where to buy chocolates for others.  It seems a bit mean to buy just for yourself!  The best Belgian chocolates need to be savoured and shared, drawn delicately into your mouth so you can linger over the filling.  Often the shops don't even bother slipping a card in the box to identify what you've bought.  This encourages you to take your time to work it out for yourself.  Now, is that basil, thyme, earl grey or rose?

I realised I was beginning to appreciate chocolate, perhaps even to become a connoisseur, when I opened the door of Chocolatier Vandenhende up in La Chasse, where the scent of cocoa nearly sent me into a swoon (and then later his fondant au chocolat was praised by anyone I allowed near it.)  And when I first got my hands on a cup of molten chocolate in Frederic Blondeel's shop.  There are dégustation tables for sampling the various hot chocolates, including the eye-watering Fredericisme; and ice cream creations (including "Belgian Sunshine"); and shelves stocked with rich pastes and jams (think the Charles-Louis raspberry dark chocolate spread: honestly, who could return to Nutella after this?)  J'am jam indeed.

So I think this is it: my favourite chocolatier in Brussels!  And I like Frederic because he's down to earth: works hard and doesn't have time to spend fretting over precise temperature cooling when his kids are also busy helping out in the kitchen or at the counter.

On my first visit I requisition a spare hot chocolate that a departing tour group have carelessly left behind.  I try to explain myself, but the owner says "vous avez raison!"  I ask him what he is most proud of in here.  "My children", he says mischievously.  This is a chocolatier not chasing prizes and not taking it all too seriously.

You can (and I do) spend a lot of money in here.  Last weekend I came for the chocolate counter, intending to choose and prepared to wait.  Alive to the importance of letting his customers choose every chocolate that goes into their 1 or 2 or 5 layered boxes, Frederic doesn't rush us.  Instead he brings out small cups of hot chocolate to thank us for being patient.

Recipients of my Blondeel ballotins understand why this is my favourite.  Sophisticated combinations: caramel and fleur de sel, basil, thyme, oranges and lemons, rose, truffles.  Plenty of choice for those of us less keen on nutty ganaches and spirit-soaked centres (though he has these as well).  This week there's a new addition on the counter: "Would you like to try?" asks Frederic.  I pop a chocolate with melting rose caramel in my mouth.  It's divine; words tumble out in praise.  Frederic seems warmed by this.  He's here in his shop and he cares what we think.  And he's certainly working hard.  You know, next time I'm going to buy some of those caramels just for me.

Quai aux Briques 24,

1000 Brussels

+32 (0)2 502 21 31

http://www.frederic-blondeel.com/

Open Sunday to Friday 13:00 to 18:45
Saturday 10:30 to 18:45
The tea room closes slightly earlier.

Maxburg

So far in Brussels I must have eaten Italian, Vietnamese, French, Thai, Japanese, Spanish, Belgian, American, Portuguese - and probably trendy fusions of all of the above.  But what to eat on a freezing February day, when I'm meeting my new conversation partner for dinner?  Well, German of course.


It surprised me to learn that there are very few German restaurants in Brussels.  The one in my neighbourhood seems to have closed down.  The German restaurant that people know of, the one that Colin Powell and Joshua Fischer visited, is the Maxburg, in Schuman.  Understandably the German owners are still rather proud of that.

From the outside the bar is white-washed and looks German enough.  Inside there are roughly painted white walls, and people (Commission folk, probably) are even speaking German.  I take my place at the bar next to a guy with a pony tail and a leather waistcoat.  He looks like he's been parachuted in from a bar in deepest Bavaria.  But he is the only one.  The others have had any national appearance traits morphed into a generic style: the Eurocrat!  How many Germans are there here really?  I cannot tell.  Anyway, ponytail man looks me up and down approvingly and raises his glass.  Perhaps he thinks I'm German too? 

I order a Bitburger (on tap), but the server doesn't understand my German, and answers in English.  My German conversation partner arrives and we take our place upstairs to look down over assorted people watching Stuttgart play Bayern Munich.  It takes a long time for the server to remember us, and we try and summon him using the languages at our disposal.  Finally we discover that he prefers French.


And so, the Maxburg turns out to be a not-so-German German bar!  This probably makes it a really typical Brussels restaurant experience, because whatever cuisine you are eating, you can get by with speaking English or French.   There really was no need for me to dust off my German and inflict it on anybody.  What a truly international city this is!

Still, there is plenty of time to talk while the servers forget us again.  I'm happy to find a German friend who doesn't speak English so perfectly that I am ashamed to utter a single word of his mother tongue in his presence.  And he is from near Dresden, a city I visited on a solo inter-railing trip in 2004.  Our conversation covers football vocabulary, the German for red and white cabbage (rot und weiß Kraut, predictably!), German political parties and fairy tales, and the fact that Nigel Farage memorably called Herman Van Rompuy a nasser Waschlappen (a damp facecloth).....

Despite the indifferent, lazy service, the food when it arrives is just what we needed: meat in a rich sauce with bratkartoffeln and kraut.  I have Rinderroulade and my friend has hausgemachter Rindergullasch; the former being a beef roll and the latter a German version of the carbonnade.  Both are apparently eaten in the Dresden area.  I'm interested enough to know I'll return another cold day for Thuringer sausages or to try one of the long list of Schnitzel on the menu.  And did I say that there is a shop next door selling German products?

Bitte ein Bit.

 

rue Stevin 108
1000 Brussels
http://www.maxburgbrussels.be/Willkommen.html

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. 

Pierre Marcolini

Entering this temperature-controlled mausoleum of chocolate you could be pushing open the heavy doors of a Louis Vuitton flagship store, to be met by staff in their livery and a feature chandelier.  It is intimidating.  Well, it would be if it weren't so full of people like you and me, shuffling around in trains, no poodles or fur coats in sight; everyone is just trying to keep out of each other's way.

Imagine, if you will, a shop that is trying to conserve a certain hauteur, an image of its own exclusivity.  Delvaux-designed presentation boxes, chocolates and desserts arranged behind glass like jewels, assistants in white gloves fingering delicate creations, but tourists steaming up the glass and irritating girls with their cameras keep ruining it for them.  Sigh.  But the staff cope with all this admirably well.  The tills keep ringing, and there are larger, cheaper selections upstairs too.  My guess is they could teach Louis Vuitton a thing or two.

So imagine my amusement when a power cut sends staff scuttling around, and customers are suddenly deliberating shades of dark chocolate - in the dark.  After a brief interlude a switch is tripped and the lights and chiller cabinets are working again.  But the spell of perfection has been broken.  The staff re-arrange their customary smiles (it's too busy to do otherwise): it's OK, the chocolates only lost their lifeline of cool air for a few minutes, all will be well.  But then, it happens again!  The humming stops and anxiety once again plays across faces.

I've just visited around five chocolate shops in one day (for research purposes), and as all this is going on I remember the advised temperature range for storing chocolates - between 15 and 18 degrees - so says the brochure for Mary Chocolatier.  Now this is a really unhelpful temperature range, I think: too cool for room temperature and too warm for a fridge....

In truth it's too crowded here to really feel comfortable, whatever the temperature.  I want to ask more about Pierre and his chocolates, but I'm put off by the card thrust into my hand: I don't want to call someone in VIP relations.....  All I'd get is some pre-packaged saccharine tale, and it won't be the man himself!  I'm beginning to feel that Pierre is just too swish to be my preferred chocolatier...

Upstairs there is plenty of choice - from the 54 EUR mummified truffle teddy bears grinning inanely (I wouldn't like to be shut in here with them at night!) to sleek black selection boxes (around 25 EUR), marzipan fruits, and 7 EUR tablets for those who can't decide what to buy.  A discovery or voyage (découverte or voyage) box would seem a very good place to start.

I say it is hard to find presentation as good as this.  And the chocolates are delicate and refined and delicious.  They taste expensive and they are!  You should definitely stop by, but don't end your chocolate explorations here.  There are plenty more chocolatey offerings to sample once you leave this rather chilly mausoleum behind.  And only you can decide who is worthy of your crown of Best Chocolatier in Brussels!

You can also watch this space to find out mine.