THINGS THAT GO WITH BEER.

Chips, of course. Holidays, yes. And every single thing below.

It’s unlikely that you need a guide to what foods go with a nice cold beer, but I’m on a roll here and can’t stop sharing the good things I’ve stumbled across and eaten in the last couple of weeks while travelling in Europe.

Also, beers tend to align themselves with the food of their own country.  I love how they vary so dramatically in weight, colour, aroma, sweetness, bitterness and flavour from city to city, depending on their heritage, Trappist or otherwise. But really I love them because they tell me I’m on holidays.

Hence this on-tap guide of great places to have both beer and food.

A La Mort Subite in Brussels has been going since 1902, a legendary beer hall that is now  a classified historic monument. Here’s Terry’s tartine of tete pressée, taken with a Grimbergen Blond. As he says, anything jellied goes with beer.

Café Karpershoek, the oldest café in Amsterdam, right by Central Station. This place has saved my life twice; once in 2019 with Dutch appeltart, and now in 2023 with a hot dog and a Heineken, after hours of being stuck in a tour bus with no food or drink. Thank you!

Anywhere in Flanders that does croquettes. It wouldn’t be Belgium without croquettes; this one a seasonal variation with the tiny grey shrimp of Zeeland, at a gorgeous old place in Brussels called La Roue d’Or. Like so many European cities this year, the crowds in Brussels are massive, and almost unavoidable, but this was a place of respite. And I like how they show you on the plate, what is inside your croquette.

The art nouveau city of Antwerp, which is stop-in-your-tracks beautiful – especially the train station – and rising fast on the gastronomic scale. Here, the pate en croute at The Butcher’s Son, where Luc Dickens (somm) and (Bert Jan Michielsen (chef) run a so-smart restaurant informed by the great craft of butchery and charcuterie.

An aside: Luc told me how the chef became a chef; it’s a great story.

“When he was 13 or 14 years old, he stopped on a train near the original shop of Luc De Laet (the legendary butcher) in Hove, near Antwerp.  This was before the cell phone ages.  He called his father from the butcher shop and had to wait an hour before they picked him up.  The butcher told him that in the meanwhile, he could take an apron and roll some meatballs.  He liked it so much that he went back the next weekend and the next...  Then he started working there, and he went to school to learn the craftship.”

While there, don’t miss the Secreto 07, an incredible cut of Rubia Gallego prepared by De Laet & Van Haver (who run The Butcher’s Store next door to The Butcher’s Son), that is the most spectacular dry-aged, spice-rubbed, cured beef I have tasted, with such a long and lingering rich depth of flavour that you think twice about taking another sip from your bolleke of de Koninck. But not for long.

Also taken, a dish of grilled tongue on a creamy bed of brains.

I may need some sort of public intervention to stop writing about this trip. It’s so good to be let loose on the world again, even as it makes me happy to be heading home to Australia. Ours is a very special part of the world.

Thanks for dropping by! And as always, thanks for your comments and opinionated thoughts. Special thanks to Terry for ordering all the tongue, brains, pressed meats, croquettes and frites, etc that have fed my blog (and myself).

I would also like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the lands and waters upon which I work, live, cook and play; the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. I fully support the Uluru Statement from the Heart, and for an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voice to be enshrined in Australia’s Constitution. It’s only fair, folks.