Scallops with cheese and honey and irritating service

These were scallops, goat cheese, honey, and some type of salad with a sweet and sour vinaigrette (~13 euros), with everything except the salad served up steaming hot out on the cold terrace of BelgoBelge on St. Boniface.  Interesting flavors, but not really what I was expecting since the scallops must have been about the same dimensions of a two-euro coin, while loads of melted cheese oozed out from underneath.  For a small but rich snack, though, it satisfied me:

Unfortunately there were lots of service problems here, as we were served two plates of food that weren’t ours.  At least there were mussels:

Also one of the red wines was listed on the white wine menu, apparently.  Not being wine connoiseurs, we didn’t know this until what we ordered to go with the mussels came out:

But in the end, food is food, even when it’s good and not great, so of course it got eaten despite the very, very late l’addition.

BelgoBelge
Rue de la Paix, Brussels

Food: B+
Price: B
Service: C
Atmosphere: A
Languages: French, English

Pasta over pasta-burritos?

On my large rectangular plate, I had a mass of fettuccine noodles, which were piled on top of another type of pasta underneath, which were something like wide and flat pasta-burritos that encased a robust onion-tomato-zucchini sauce inside.  Around all that, a bright orange tomato-cream sauce with bits of ham lay all over the plate.  Needless to say, it was thick and rich, but it even had a little spiciness that surprised me.  At the corners were large butterflied shrimp, striated in white and orange-red and steaming hot, which tasted great when sopped with the sauce.  Finally, even further in the corners were small blocks of salty feta cheese.  Ground green parsley was sprinkled all over for color.  Interesting and very strongly flavored creation, this “pastabord Zoete Bron” (16.40 euros).

For a midday meal by the water, outside the city, it was excellent.  The sun streamed through the floor-to-ceiling windows, and the waitress was friendly, too.  Even the parrots chirping in their cages at the front door seemed appropriate. By the time I ate my plate down to the flat pasta-burrito things, I liked my food enough that, even when I found the dead gnat baked into one of the pasta sheets, I only paused for a second.  I thought a bit. Then I kept eating and finished it.

Don’t worry. I picked the gnat out.  I figured that I enjoyed it so much so far — why stop now?  So take this anecdote for what you will.  Great flavors and presentation still don’t necessarily rule out an occasional dead bug.  At least it was tiny.

De Zoete Bron
M. Noëstraat 15, Oud-Heverlee

Food: A-
Service: A
Price: B
Atmosphere: A-
Languages: Dutch, French

Good Greek in Leuven

The relatively new Greek restaurant Zita over in Flemish Brabant had romanced me with its roasted lamb chops and spiced orzo platter (20 euros), but it was the service that really won my heart.

Considering that the fried calamari (13 euros) was nothing special, and that the orzo seemed too run-of-the-mill and a little too salty, the lamb easily was the second-best part of the experience.  Those chops were cooked perfectly for me, tender and full of that deep, unique flavor that only lamb can have.  Maybe authenticity is not the primary goal of the place, but the food was good anyway.

If the menu was secondary, then the very best part was our waitress, who rolled with the punches of serving a large table of guests and brought out all sorts of dishes for us with an unusual proficiency and laid-back humor that I can appreciate.  She was an education student at the local university, so I suppose that’s no surprise.  Her future colleagues will be lucky.

Zita
Tiensesteenweg 347, Kessel-lo

Food: B+
Atmosphere: A
Service: A
Price: B
Languages: Dutch, English, French

Maybe the sampler platter is leftovers

The welcoming guy who runs Paradis du Liban over at Merode desperately worked his sales pitch the other day.  I had gone in at about 2100h, hungry as ever due to the late dinnertime.  Almost immediately after greeting and seating me, he started pushing the “assiette degustation” (20 euros) like an Ecstasy dealer.  This was supposed to be Lebanese flatbreads together with a large plate of various dips and meats, including hummus, baba ghannouj, some samosa-like things, beef, and marinated vegetables.

Nevermind that I had come in already with kefta chicken skewers and rice on my mind, or that I had told him as much.  He insisted on the sampler plate in his friendly, slightly crazy, old-man way.  I’m easily swayed, so I decided to go for it; I’d take his recommendation anyway, strange as his insistence seemed.  How could I go wrong with a variety of food?

What a pity how disappointing it was.  It’s not that it was bad; it’s just that it wasn’t very good. Definitely not worth the price.  The bread was decent, though it came from a plastic bag and wasn’t warm.  I wondered if I could buy these at Carrefour.  The meats were dry and salty, and they tasted as if they had been sitting around for a while.  At least they were warm.  The cold side dishes were nothing special, either.  I had bought better tasting hummus from Delhaize once.  One side dish of cooked vegetables was cold, too, which also struck me as odd.   The best part was maybe the rkakat, which was like a small egg roll filled with a kind of cream cheese, and even then it wasn’t so interesting.

Oh well — no big deal.  If there’s a next time, then I’m getting the chicken, no matter how nice the guy is.   That’s what I get for giving in to people who are just a bit too insistent.  I should trust my internal weirdometer more at restaurants.

Paradis du Liban
Avenue de Tervuren 7, Etterbeek

Food: C
Atmosphere: B-
Service: A-
Languages: Arabic, English, French

Cozy and Belgian

Three huge boulettes, or meatballs in tomato sauce, lay on my plate, accompanied by a side salad and metal bowl full of frites (9 euros).  The other foreigners around me were eating stoemp, carbonnade, and plates of mixed greens and shrimp, along with their golden beers, as the multilingual waitresses brought out the comfort food with ease and a smile.  The setting was small and cozy.  The brick walls were lined with local decor, and the inviting lighting reminded me of home.  How Belgian!  What an appropriate place for dinner during the last fading warm days of summer in Brussels.

Les Brassins
Rue Keyenveld 36, Ixelles

Food: B
Atmosphere: A+
Service: A+
Price: A
Languages: French, Dutch, English