Les Asturiennes

Eating Out

Les Asturiennes -

By Lavin.


This is a pretty-looking Spanish restaurant, with a very arty website and modern-looking decoration that needs exploring.

Now, forget about Spanish omelette, chorizo, and high-price low-quality tapas. This is proper, modern Spanish cuisine. The octopus -which often tells you a lot about how attentive to detail a kitchen is- was perfectly cooked. The hake on a bed of spiky crab meat was so good that you could nearly hear the waves and the seagulls.

I liked the large portraits of Asturian women -on whose honour the restaurant is given its name-, the lounge-sounding music and the clean lines and light. I was not that impressed by the concrete ceiling from where old-looking chandeliers hang, but I am sure that the owner/interior decorator would disagree.

Much has been written about Spanish cuisine becoming so good that it is getting the French cooks worried. Well, it is indeniably better than 10 years ago, but it will not be me who will compare it with other cuisines.

Cuisines are all different, and you may find that you like both French and Spanish, or Italian, or British (yes, there is a British style of cooking, and it is very good), or Japanese or from anywhere in the planet.

Each of us will find whatever food they like in different places and styles, and the merits and demerits of each will be discussed and those who can will experiment and cook and compare. But I do not find much use in making leagues of cuisines, unless it is on grounds of quality.

Lastly, this restaurant is pricey, but by all means, try it out, because it is worth it.

Doudou - Folklore from Mons - Wallonie - Belgium

by Lavin

There is this folkloric celebration in Mons, in South Belgium, called "Le Doudou" that takes place during Catholic's Trinity Sunday. What the name means or where it comes from, I don't know, but it certainly arises passions among the locals.

The festivity is based on the procession of Sainte Waudru (Saint Waltrude), in which dozens of colourful pageantry-clad locals participate. The finale is a battle between Saint George and the Dragon, locally known as "Le Lumeçon".

More information about the town of Mons can be found in the link here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mons

To sum up, it is a celebration that binds lcoal people closer, gives them a sense of belonging to certain roots, and among other things, a good opportunity to party.

As an external observer, it was a jolly good thing to be part of. You can click on the picture below, and it will take you to a series of pictures I took during the event.

As usual, comments about your own experience, or questions about this "Doudou" are welcome to be posted in the blog.

Doudou 2007

Blog layout

I am currently experimenting with the layout. Bear with me.

Belga Queen

Rue Fossé aux Loups 32 Wolvengracht 32
1000 Brussels

By Lavin

Baroque and Flawless. Almost.

'Behold' is the best verb I can come out with to summarise what this restaurant is about, i.e. to see or to look at, but often used for places or things deemed worth it. Belga Queen in Brussels is the antithesis of McDonalds, the Abel of each Cain, the mother of all grandiose restaurants, the ideal restaurant to have a stag or hen night and then get arrested by the police when you had one too many. It is the Habitat of all Ikeas, the Trappist of all beers and the Jabugo of all hams.

It is large, decadent, with its broad columns holding a central nave and two aisles where light not so much as comes in but falls from the sky. It just needs a replica of the fresco at The Vatican where God gives the breath of life to Adam through his finger, and you would have got your food temple for the faithful.

There are brains behind the visual impact of this restaurant: space, a clever combination of dark and light colours, transparent WC-doors which become opaque once you lock the door, a communal place for washing your hands, a turn-over wheelbarrow coated in what it looks like a mix of concrete and tempura as the central piece of art -if you like that sort of thing-, a kitchen where you can look into, the "de rigueur" empty, trendy bar, and the attentive, unobtrusive staff.

However, there are also less savoury parts in this restaurant: waiters in mock monk habits look plain silly; wine at five times’ retail prices may be Ok if you work at the European Commission and you receive the equivalent of Zimbabwe's trade deficit as your tax-free monthly salary, but for the mere mortals is just excessive; their design of cutlery is a bit kitsch -meat knives resembling Spanish cutthroat razors, what were they thinking?-; sofas where you are so far removed from the table that you have to choose between having back support but only staring at your food, or eating your food but sitting as upright as a broomstick: you can’t have it both ways.

What about the food then? Well...the bread was freshly baked and tasty ; the butter came from suitably subsidised Belgian farms -supposedly to pamper to those EU ‘Commissionists’ and the Agriculture lobbyists who get 40% of the entire EU budget -, the wine was rather good, the Carpaccio was bland and it came with what it looked like a lump of baby food on top, and in fact tasted like a lump of baby food; the beef was perfectly cooked and tasted superb, the chips were originally served in a grease-proof paper cone -how very Belgian-, dangling from a purpose-built metallic holder, and the rhubarb ice-cream with ginger and a lemon-scented, sugary-coated cookie was magnificent: unctuous, deep, flavoursome, not too cold, neither watery, not lumpy: a perfect bliss of a pudding. Sadly, the espresso tasted as if they mixed it up with chewed tobacco and motor oil, but hey, have you ever seen a perfect queen? Nor have I.

And then, for all its panache, pomposity, élan, baroque style and nicely-presented dishes, two minor errors in the dishes were spotted in as many visits. Its namesake relation at Gent still gets the upper hand: a hideously-restored facade masks a superbly decorated interior with a flawless cuisine. Its sister in Brussels however has a great facade, but its cuisine betrays a slightly lack of care to match its surroundings. If it would be applying for its next Michelin star, I'd give it to Gent.

Verdict: 4/5


Legend (whit apologies to A.A. Gill):

5/5 Queen Victoria
4/5 Queen of Africa
3/5 Beauty Queen
2/5 Drama Queen
1/5 Queen of the Damned

Northwestern Spain

I went to Northwestern Spain for a couple of days to enjoy their landscapes, gastronomy and culture. If you only know the typical "costas" in the Mediterranean, you do not know what you are missing. It is amazing to see how each part of the country is different from each other, yet there are plenty of cohesive elements. I am posting a couple of pictures to show any reader what it is like. Unfortunately it rained most of the time, but then, it wouldn't be so green otherwise, would it?

Vini & Cucina

Steenweg op Waterloo / Chaussée de Waterloo 86 - 41180 - Ukkel/Uccle - Brussel/Bruxelles

by Lavin

The place that leaves you wanting.

The restaurant looks good, with a modern-looking chocolate colour wall to absorb the light from the spot lamps, mixed with spacious wooden and metallic racks holding boxes and bottles of wine. The tables were a bit too close to your neighbours, but overall it was nice and cosy for a restaurant with very little window space. It didn't feel claustrophobic or dawdy, and the noise was at agreeably Med levels (i.e. you could hear the buzz, but you didn't have to shout to hold a conversation).

Equally, the waiters were nice, didn't mix up the orders -they mixed up the wine, but they rectified on the spot-, and were attentive and unobstrusive.

So then, why oh why, when your decoration, your service, your location and even the name of your restaurant is so right, can your menu not deviate an iota from the menus of run-down pizza&pasta places with tacky decoration, and even tackier furniture, to where tourists flock en masse? I read the menu once, and I could have repeated it without hesitation, repetition or deviation, because I've seen it countless times in the centre of each and every town. I am sorry, but this will just not do. I want something better, exciting, something that keeps me in thrall while I imagine what it would taste like, something that would make me book my next dinner before I even got the dessert. Italian cuisine, is not just pizza & pasta, which take less than 5% of all recipes in my Italian cooking books.

Does this mean that the restaurant was not good? Not at all. I had a very decent Bruschetta that though they were smaller than Weetabix, they packed a lot of taste and some other savoury appetizers that also seemed fit for Lilliputian children. My pizza, however, was fit for Gargantua after fasting for a week, it had a better-than-average home-made dough, and the three quarters of which I managed to gulp down were delicious.

I further remember ingesting undue amounts of very good white and red wine -a good Montepulciano if I remember well-, and that I was talking more than usual with some very good friends, including the mama of one of them, who gave the dinner a distinctly family reunion flavour. The icing of the cake was a very good espresso. I never saw the bill, because as well as being very interesting people, my friends are also extremely nice, and didn't let me pay, but let me just say that it was good value for money.

However, sometimes people have the restaurants they deserve. I suspect that if the owner of Vini & Cucina (great name, many namesakes around the world) upgrades the menu and starts offering, I don't know, fresh anchovies on a bed of pasta baked in the oven, or a decent risotto, or some nice dish from any of the three main Sicilian sub-types of cuisine, he/she might have the emptiest Italian restaurant in town, because when it comes to food -and trust me on this-, it's very difficult for many people to stray off their comfort zone.

Let me put it like this. The bathroom, which according to a friend of mine is a very good rule of thumb to find out how good a restaurant is, had a very good-looking Villeroy&Bosch-alike sink, but the tap was from a DIY shop. So close, and yet so far.

Verdict: 4/5. The kitchen that could have been Queen.

Legend:

5/5 Kitchen scene in The Postman always Rings Twice with Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange.
4/5 Chic Kitchen.
3/5 Kitch kitchen.
2/5 Marx Brothers' kitchen.
1/5 Devil's kitchen.

Wedding

Two very good friends of mine got married recently, and the event was as happy as they look. I am posting a couple of pictures, as they have no objections to it.