[title type="h5"]
Tuesday, April 15, 2014.
It's Tuesday, And This Is Belgium.[/title]
Maybe I've been fooling myself into thinking that I have a good sense of direction. Maybe my cranial capacity is shrinking. Or if could all be related to jet lag. Evidence of at least one of those conditions was clear during the hours we drove our rental car around the center of Brussels. The longer we tried to find our hotel, the more lost we became. But we have been here before, had a car that time too, and don't remember having such an ordeal.
We lacked one important piece of information: a simple Bing with the route mapped. Such things didn't exist in 1989, but I remember that we had a printed route map to the hotel then. I still could have found our way if only the streets of Brussels (and any every other city in Europe) had signs identifying them, as they do everywhere in the U.S. Even when we thought we knew what street we were on, we rarely knew which direction we were headed. This problem became truly mindbending when we finally found the hotel then--trying to double back to it--we got lost yet again. Streets in these old cities are nowhere close to being a grid. They curve, change names every few blocks, and meet at every angle other than ninety degrees.
It felt as though the entire day had elapsed by the time we were safely in our room. But it was only a little after noon. The morning's ordeal had us so frazzled that it was hard to relax. I was at the wheel the whole time, and it took hours for me to calm down enough to get even a decent, jet-lag-healing nap.
Mary Ann said she should have been driving. Perhaps that's true. But our rental car was a VW with a five-speed stick shift. MA has driven one or two of those in the past. All but one of the eleven of the cars I've owned had the now-misnamed standard transmission. Shifting comes naturally to me.
By late afternoon we managed to pull ourselves together. With advice from the hotel concierge, we headed into the late afternoon in search of, among other things, the restaurant where we had a memorable dinner twenty-five years ago. But neither of us could remember its name. I recalled that it was just off the Grand Place, but not in it. I also knew that the restaurant was in the middle of a long, low building that looked something like a train terminal.
[caption id="attachment_42067" align="alignleft" width="360"]
A seafood house in Brussels.[/caption]While searching, we looked over a bunch of other places, and saw that Brussels remains a city of seafood-eaters. It routinely offers at least as many attractive fish species as we have in New Orleans. Beyond the menus of restaurants, we encountered quite a few markets with many varieties of finfish, with a particular interest in flatfish. Turbot, sole and lemon sole were everywhere. Lots of shellfish, too.
But the premier seafood interest of Belgium remains mussels. Some sellers of the bivalves said that they were past their prime for this year, and would not be as good again until next fall. Both of them quoted the old saw about months without an "r" in their names.
All this so far was in an area of the city historically used as a public market. Streets had names (although rarely signs) like "Marche de la Poulets," which pretty much told the tale of what went on there decades or centuries ago.
Then Mary Ann made a discovery that would reshape the visit. What I thought was a coffeeshop proved to be a chocolatier, specializing not only in chocolates as such, but also hot beverages made with chocolate, coffee, alcohol, or all three. They make all the chocolate in house in a bigger apparatus than I expected to see.
The chocolate shops began to line up along the streets, forming a market area of their own that veined the neighborhood like the mold in a blue cheese. Each of them claimed to be the best, the oldest, the most authentic, and variations on those and similar claims.
[caption id="attachment_42068" align="alignnone" width="480"]
Belgium is a land of chocolate.[/caption]
That clicked definitively with Mary Ann's chocoholic proclivities. She went into every one of the shops we passed and lingered happily, asking questions about the chocolates and buying a half-dozen pieces in each, bagging them all up separately from the works of the previous shops. She waxed gleeful about what a wonderful day she and Mary Leigh--no less a slave to chocolate than her mother-- would spend deciding which are the best chocolates in all of Belgium. Which indeed is known for its chocolate.
[caption id="attachment_42069" align="alignnone" width="480"]
Grand Place in Brussels.[/caption]
Purely by accident and after the fact, we found that as the density of chocolate shops increased, we came closer to the Grand Place. And there we were, in the center of the cobblestoned square block, its old buildings built in a style distinctive to this part of Europe, but grander than most. Many columns and finials were covered with gold leaf. The Grand Place gave off an aura of longtime wealth and substance.
Mary Ann both agree that the Grand Place in Brussels is a fascinating and fine spot. I was reminded of what Napoleon called the Piazza San Marco of Venice: "the drawing room of Europe."
Now that we were in the neighborhood for certain, I scoured the streets looking for the mystery restaurant. At the same time, I worried that we may have become lost once again. From the Grand Place, streets eminate at the corners in eight directions. I think we tried all eight at one point or another, finding four more, then eight, sixteen. While trying to fogure our next mover, we found that we were standing right next to the restaurant we were looking for. it. I needed only one look to recognize it.
[caption id="attachment_42064" align="alignnone" width="480"]
Taverne du Passage in Brussels.[/caption]
Taverne du Passage will remind any New Orleanian of Galatoire's. It lacks only the ceiling fans and the big mirrors. But there were the tile floors, the desk in the rear of the dining room manned by a guy in a suit, waiters rushing around and joking with you for a brief moment then moving on. And the menu of dozens of local specialties.
As if I needed more convincing, there at the top of the menu was the very dish I had here in 1989: anguilles au vert. "Oh my God!" Mary Ann said back then. "What is that? It looks like. . . eels in green sauce! Ugh!"
"Good guess!" I said. "That's exactly what this is. Eels in green sauce."
"Okay. I am going to look away from you," she said. "Tell me when you're finished eating that and they've taken it away, and then I will look back at you again."
I spared her the eels in green sauce this time. The waiter told me that what I heard about mussels' being out of season was nonsense, and that a big enameled pot of mussels with a side of pommes frites would be the perfect thing for me to have for dinner.
We started with potato croquettes with cheese, a Belgian specialty that leads the menu almost everywhere you go. MA decided that these were not very good. In front of me was the vegetable soup of the day, today's being cauliflower potage. It was marvelous in its simplicity.
[caption id="attachment_42070" align="alignnone" width="480"]
Mussels in the Taverne du Passage,[/caption]
MA's entree was lemon sole meuniere. Lemon sole is not the same species as Dover sole, but a very good fish that she liked. The mussels were disappointing. The sauce was the problem. The best mussels in the Belgian style come with what they call a wine sauce, which actually contains at least as much cream as wine. This was really just the mussels' juices with a lot of celery and onion. Didn't make much of a statement, although the mussels themselves could not be criticized for either their corpulence or their number.
More surprising were the frites. They were as ordinary as could be found in the most everyday fried seafood joint at home. They had the texture and flavor of standard American frozen french fries. Last time we were here, the fries were what we remembered best. Fresh-cut potatoes, crisp and wonderful, served with mayonnaise on the side. We would look mostly in vain for comparable fries to those, but kept finding only the frozen kind. How is this possible! Belgians are so famous for fried potatoes that its neighbors make fun referring to fry-eating.
I told the waiter that for dessert I wanted a Grand Marnier soufflee. He surprised me by agreeing to fetch it. But it wasn't on the menu! Turns out it was a frozen soufflee. He said if I wanted that, I really should get the nougat soufflee instead. Which I did, and which I enjoyed a good deal.
Taverne de Passage opened in 1928, said the waiter. The grandson of the founder ran it now. I told him my origins and said he should try Galatoire's--which the Taverne du Passage resembles to a degree. I didn't mention that Galatoire's is twenty-three years older.
We stopped at a few more chocolate shops as we headed back to the hotel, still going in what I thought was the wrong direction. Mary Ann's bearings were better than mine. She took us directly back, heading in a direction I could have sworn was the opposite of the one we should have been on.
It was pushing ten o'clock, and we were thoroughly exhausted. We repeated the routine we performed on our first night here on our honeymoon, which is to say that we slept ten straight marvelous hours.
[title type="h6"] Yesterday || Tomorrow[/title]
Written by Tom Fitzmorris April 15, 2014 03:01 in
