The Belgium food diaries I*
Fries, waffles, and a surprisingly excellent carrot soup
I had never thought of Belgium as a food country. I’d been there once before, over a decade ago when I was backpacking through Europe. I stayed in a hostel in Antwerp for one night as I was passing through and remember nothing of it except that I stayed up late chatting to my dorm-mates. Since then, I’d given Belgium next to no thought and all I knew about its cuisine was the stereotype: waffles, fries, chocolate, and beer. Sometimes when you’re travelling it’s nice to know nothing about where you’re going, because you don’t have any preconceived notions or expectations, and you can be surprised by all sorts of wondrous delights. Such was the case for me with Belgium and its food.
We landed in Brussels on a Sunday afternoon, and by the time we checked in at the hotel, it was 8:30pm local time. I’m all for embracing every moment and trying local restaurants and seeing as much of the city as I possibly can, and 8:30pm isn’t late by European standards, but we’d been in transit for what felt like days (I think it was actually only 18 hours since we left our house). We’d just come off two planes and a train, and then walked up a long, steep, cobblestoned street that was dark and populated with a lot of people shouting and smoking.** The hotel kitchen was open for another half hour so we opted for room service.*** We both got noodle bowls with chicken and vegetables and, because we were in Belgium, a side of fries (and my husband ordered his first beer of the trip). This meal, I think, gave me an inaccurate first impression of food in Belgium. The noodle bowls were huge. We could have ordered one and that would have been plenty of food — proper, American-style portion sizes. Neither of us finished our bowls. The noodles were also just fine. Not bad by any means, but not mind-blowing either. The fries were excellent.
The next morning we ate the hotel breakfast. It was unexpectedly great. Not as good as when we went up the coast on our recent Australia trip and stayed at the Beachcomber which was the best hotel breakfast I’d ever had, but it was up there in the top two. Good bread, decent protein selections, and all sorts of bits you can add to make your own yoghurt bowls. This first hotel breakfast was included in our room fee but the following two mornings we had at the hotel weren’t included. I liked the breakfast enough that I paid the following morning to eat there again (and that time I ate enough at breakfast that I could skip lunch which, as anyone who knows me in real life can attest, never happens. I don’t skip meals).
My husband’s conference was on Tuesday, so our Monday was spent mostly walking around so we would stay awake (despite our best attempts, jetlag is a bitch and we’d been up since 4am). I walked 25,000 steps that day. We went to Autoworld which had great cars to look at but a somewhat odd tea service in the cafe — the tea was presented as a glass of hot water with the tea bag on the side. At lunch that day, my husband ordered a flat white which was also served in a drinking glass which made us wonder if Belgians just weren’t into mugs. What do you have against handles on your hot beverage vessels, Belgium?
Lunch that day was at Serra, a restaurant that bills itself on sustainability. It uses seasonal ingredients that are locally sourced and organic where possible, and has a focus on vegetarian food though it does offer meat side dishes. It sounds like the kind of restaurant that I might have planned to go to because its ethos was right up my alley, but it was a lot of luck that we ended up that. We were walking back towards the hotel from Autoworld and planned on stopping somewhere along the way to get lunch. Nothing we ended up walking past was either open or somewhere that jumped and said ‘eat here!’ and we were almost back at the hotel when my husband just did a search for ‘restaurants near me’. Serra popped up. It was close, it was open, it’ll do.
Serra was an excellent, excellent surprise. I had their lunch special of the day which included soup and main. The soup was carrot with broccoli and kimchi, and the main was a mushroom risotto. They were both fantastic, with flavours and textures that worked wonderfully and delighted the palate. I would never have thought to add kimchi to carrot soup but it was perfect. It was so good that I went back to Serra the following evening for dinner. I asked if it was possible to have the carrot soup again even though it wasn’t lunchtime. I was told no, but as I was paying the bill, the host offered to ask the chef for the recipe and pass it on to me if I told him my room number (Serra is a hotel restaurant). Alas, I wasn’t staying at the hotel and I was leaving Brussels the following day. I just emailed them to ask for the recipe for the soup and risotto, so we’ll see if anything comes from that. Are recipes proprietary?
Later that afternoon, we met up with a colleague of my husband’s at one of the ubiquitous waffle shops in the central touristy area. There are many waffle shops to choose from, as one might expect in Belgium, especially in possibly the most touristy part of Brussels, and the reason we picked this one was because an hour or so earlier, they let us use their toilets despite not being customers. It felt like the right thing to do. My husband and I shared a waffle with vanilla ice cream and chocolate sauce. It was fine, but there were better waffles to come.
A brief waffle interlude: 1
The most baffling food-related thing I saw in Belgium was a particular waffle and ice cream chain: Australian Homemade Ice Cream and Waffles. We saw stores of this everywhere in Brussels, and we didn’t understand. Australia is a country known internationally for many things (mainly kangaroos and koalas, I think) but waffles and ice cream are not typically associated with Australia. Lamingtons and pavlova, maybe, but Belgium is the country you think of when you think of waffles. Why would you go to Belgium and go to an Australian waffle shop? Would it be any good? Was the shop started by Australians? What do they know about waffles? We never did end up trying them so I don’t know if they’re any good. However, I did learn when I looked at their website just now that the chain was started in 1983 by a Belgian (possibly with Australian roots? A cursory search was unclear) who had an Australian godmother. She gave him some initial financial support for the business so it’s named for her.
Back to the food we actually ate and not just the food we looked at and wondered about
The next day, Tuesday, was the day of the conference. I was on my own, and I happily wandered around the city all day. I went to libraries and bookshops, bought more books than I intended on buying, skipped lunch, and ate at Serra again for dinner — this time, a mushroom ravioli and slow-cooked salmon. The portions were small (the host even warned me that the portions were small) but they were perfectly satiating. This is a theme that would continue for the rest of our trip: the portions, apart from the first night at room service, were never massive. They were maybe two thirds or half of what you might expect at an American restaurant (this varies wildly depending on the kind of restaurant you go to, both in America and presumably Belgium), but they were enough. They left you feeling satisfied and not stuffed.
Every meal I ate in Belgium, even at the restaurants that weren’t Serra and didn’t advertise local sourcing of seasonal ingredients, felt like they were made from good quality ingredients cooked well. It was like that at a couple of pub-like restaurants, in small towns as well as larger cities. This was my overarching takeaway about the food in Belgium. I still can’t accurately describe Belgian cuisine or tell you what a typical Belgian meal would be. But the common denominator of Belgian food seems to be this: good ingredients, cooked well, and not too much.
This was true of the breakfast we had at Peck 47 on our last morning in Brussels, Caesar salad and tuna steak with rice pilaf that we ate at Ernest on our way out of Brussels, the beef stew I had at K Zeppos in Antwerp, the apple and goats’ cheese salad at Brasserie De Polder in Duffel, the money bags and pad Thai at Miss Kang, and the burger and chips at La Vieille Demeure in Durbuy. None of these were fine dining establishments — at least, they let us in while we were dressed in jeans, t-shirts, and sneakers. But all of them served fantastic food. I didn’t have a single disappointing meal in Belgium. I think the same can be said for my husband. He also ate food.
A brief waffle interlude: 2
My husband met someone from Belgium at the conference who told him about The Smallest Waffle Shop in the World. They were apparently talking about waffles and how we hadn’t eaten any in Belgium yet that were better than the ones we make at home (hotel breakfast waffles and that touristy shop in Brussels were the only two we had eaten at that point). The Belgian acquaintance recommended The Smallest Waffle Shop in the World which was in Antwerp and happily, we had plans to go to Antwerp**** so we made the trek. We bought a waffle each. These were Liège waffles which I’ve learnt are different to what is commonly known as Belgian waffles (or Brussels waffles). Liège waffles are smaller, made from a dense brioche dough with pearl sugar, and are typically served without toppings.
This was an excellent waffle. It was crispy on the outside and chewy in the middle, moreso than the waffles we make at home and the other waffles I’d had in Belgium. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and it was also the proprietor of the waffle shop who pointed us to K Zeppos when we asked for lunch recommendations, so it was a great food experience all round.
Why we even went to Antwerp in the first place
Apart from waffles and fries, the other thing I associated with Belgium and food was chocolate. We went to Chocolate Nation, the world’s largest Belgian chocolate museum. The museum was done well and we had a great experience. The self-guided tour was good (didn’t talk too much or too little), the exhibits were clear and engaging, I learnt things about chocolate. And the chocolate tasting at the end tasted very, very good. We bought quite a lot of chocolate in the gift shop afterwards.
This museum introduced me to ruby chocolate, a chocolate that was introduced as a new and distinct chocolate in 2017, to sit alongside the dark, milk, and white categories of chocolate. It’s made from a particular kind of cocoa bean that gives it a pink colour and mildly fruity taste. Apparently chocolate experts are debating whether this is truly a fourth kind of chocolate or a marketing gimmick. Whether or not it was a marketing gimmick, it tasted good.
It occurs to me that I have waffled on (ha) quite a bit now and we haven’t even touched on things like supermarkets, groceries, and how much we spent on food in Belgium (of course I tracked it). So this means Belgium Food Diaries II shall be forthcoming.*****
*Yes, I know I published a post just yesterday. Belgium Food Diaries II will probably also take less than two weeks to land in your inbox. I just want to write it all down before I forget everything and I want to chuck out all my receipts. I’m probably breaking every rule about publishing schedules but ah, fuck it.
**The next day, when we were chatting to hotel staff about where to go and what to see, we asked them if there were any areas we should avoid. They pointed in the direction of where we had come from the night before.
***I suppose this is one way to feel like a proper grown-up/old. My 20-something-year-old self never opted for room service.
****We were in Belgium for five full days. For the first two days we stayed in the Brussels city centre. When the conference was over, we hired a car and drove just out of Brussels and stayed with a friend/former boss of my husband’s. While we had the car, we drove to Antwerp, Duffel, and Durbuy. Antwerp was about an hour and a bit north of where we were, and Durbuy was an hour and a bit south. Getting to those two cities meant we basically travelled the length of Belgium. It would have taken less than three hours to drive from the northernmost part of Belgium to the southernmost tip. As an Australian now living in the US, I find this such a wonderful novelty.
*****I think I need a better system for footnotes. This is too many asterisks. You’d never find it done like this in a published book.