Beer and all that’s dear to Brussels Raising a finger in a Brussles bar will get you a glass of beer. But one must leave space for gourmet dishes when visiting the seductive city

Beer and all that’s dear to Brussels

Raising a finger in a Brussles bar will get you a glass of beer. But one must leave space for gourmet dishes when visiting the seductive city

Brussels wears an alluring and decadent scent. Easy to understand, when you consider that Brussels international airport is the biggest chocolate selling point in the world. And that the meals in Flanders are famously languid and always hearty. As I walk through the city’s main eat street, the narrow Rue des Bouchers, I follow my nose into a café dishing out, what to many, is Belgium’s national dish – moules or mussels. “Use a shell to scoop them out,” says an enthusiastic waiter. “Eat them with instinct. Abandon your fork.” In Belgium, fries accompany just about everything, including mussels. Legend has it that the treat was created here in the 1750s in the Mosane region, when the winters were extremely harsh. With conditions that were unfavourable for fishing, the region’s inhabitants decided to cut potatoes into slices resembling a small fish and fry them. The original, hand-cut Belgian fry is usually 1 cm thick, soft on the inside, crisp on the outside and does, in fact, resemble a very small fish. Because food and drink are big parts of the lives of people, there is an elaborately developed code around it. If you’re in a crowded pub and raise your little finger, it gets you a standard glass of the house tap beer. If you want the smooth and dark-coloured Trappist beer that has been made for centuries by the Cistercian monks, you need to call the abbey at least two weeks in advance. Now because the average age of a monk is 65 years and the number of recruits to monasteries is on the decline, you can sense the worry that people have about the fate of this popular beer. The demand created by this scarcity is reflected in the fact that people buy Trappist beer at 30 euros and are able to find a buyer for it on eBay for 300 euros. But the fate of Trappist beer notwithstanding, you’ll get every variety of beer from Gueuze to Kriek. As one local put it, monks in France might have dedicated themselves to wine-making, but in Belgium, they’re devoted to beer. A gourmet pilgrimage to Brussles is peppered with delightful dishes like a bag of speculoos — biscuits spiced with cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves. Or, the infamous creamy chicken-based stew called waterzooi. For the more daring and adventurous, there is bloedworst — black pudding made from pig’s blood traditionally served with applesauce. As far as food experiences go, Brussels is seductive. I could nibble off the ear of the chocolate version of the Mannekin Pis right now.