Shop: Scandinavian cuisine in Brussels

We have all heard about the healthy benefits of Mediterranean cuisine. However, our friends in the north have been gaining more and more attention in the last years, and Nordic cuisine is on an upswing not only in Europe, but on other continents as well. Even New York has celebrated the delicious tastes of Northern Europe!!

The Nordic countries, in general, are known for their clean and vast nature, and for the people living in a symbiosis with nature rather than exploiting it. No wonder that the Nordic countries, in this case Denmark, has held the title of the world's best restaurant (Noma) for several years - celebrating just that, clean food from the nature to your plate (albeit with the twist of some really professional gastronomical hands doing their magic in the kitchen).  Apart from the usual domesticated stuff, Nordic cuisine will offer wild game, fish, mushroom, berries, and wild herbs. Many people like to take a walk in the forest using the so called "allemansrätt" (freedom to roam) collecting food. Spring is the best time for collecting wild plants, and foraging is becoming increasingly popular thanks to chefs such as, for example, Sami Tallberg, who reaches out both to normal "people on the street" and to the culinary expert circles worldwide. When summer proceeds, more and more mushroom start to appear. There are no signs forbidding you to pick mushroom "for biodiversity reasons" or what have you - that would just cause riots (or laughter) up there! So people take their mushroom baskets and spend the day wandering in the forests, picking chanterelles, porcini, russulas, etc etc. Knowing which mushroom are edible and which are poisonous is something most people grow up learning! The same goes for berries, with especially blueberries and lingon berries filling the baskets and ending up being eaten as such or added to porridge, cakes, cookies, or why not being made into marmalade - or even spirits. Only your imagination is the limit! And when it comes to animals, there are a lot of people who have hunting licenses or take their fishing hobbies seriously, so there will be an abundance of wild meat or fish on the plates.

Although we still have to wait for truly Finnish, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish or Icelandic restaurants, it is already possible to indulge in Scandinavian delicacies right here in Belgium. There are a few places in Brussels where you can get products from the north.

First, let me introduce the Scanshop! There is one in Brussels next to Place Jourdan and one in Waterloo. From the Scanshop you can find products from all the five Nordic countries. You will find quite a wide variety of Nordic delicacies considering the small size of the shop at Jourdan! Especially noteworthy are the delicious - and healthy - rye breads available! I really would not like to sound like a commercial or put preference of one over another, as taste is always personal, but if you only pick up one thing from the rye bread shelf, then pick the Garlic Rye Crisps from the Finnish company Linkosuo. These are heavenly! You can eat them as such or you can serve them with cheese, pesto, mayonnaise, or whatever you find delicious! Apart from rye bread, there are lots of other products as well, not to forget Nordic sweets and chocolates. So, if you thought only Belgians were good at making chocolate - think again! Swedish Marabou and Finnish Fazer have lots of goodies to offer! In addition to food products, Scanshop also sells Scandinavian design, books and magazines. So to serve up your Nordic dinner, why not add something Nordic authentic to the setting? Scandinavian design is typically very simple and clean. No extra fuzz or mixing with crazy colours, but clean and simple lines with clear and distinctive colours. Whatever you choose, it will highlight the space without creating a fight with anything already there!

Second, there is a Scandinavian-Irish shop close to Schuman that also comes with a nice variety of goodies from the north. It is called Gourmet food and gifts and does unfortunately seem to lack a webpage. However, don't let that scare you away! You will find Nordic delicacies here as well! This shop does not have that many products from Finland or Iceland, though, so for that you may still be better off at the Scanshop. However, they have a slightly bigger section for frozen products, so if you are out of luck at the Scanshop, you may find yourself lucky here.

Should you be disappointed by the lack of Finnish products in the Gourmet food and gift shop, you can always head for the Finnish sailor's church and their store to find some goodies.

Hopefully this blog inspired you to give Nordic cuisine a try! If you want to start off easy, go to the store and ask for "gravad lax  or gravlax" and rye bread and make a small starter of that, then ask for some reindeer fillet and make a main course of that (e.g. with root vegetables), and why not ask for some Nordic berries that you can utilise in a dessert - and voila, you will have yourself a five star dinner!! There are several cookbooks available in English to help you out as well, just wander off to Amazon...

Restaurant: I Latini

I Latini is an Italian restaurant at Place Sainte-Catherine - one of the few non-fish restaurants in the area. The place is not super cozy, though, especially if you sit in the back of the restaurant. Although you have a view into the kitchen, the bright lights coming from there kind of spoils the candle light atmosphere. Don't accept a table in the back if you go there. On the other hand, sitting up front on a cold day may not be for people with chilly feet either. However, service is really friendly and helpful! The restaurant offers an amuse, which in our case has been quite delicious, so expectations are high from the start. As for the food, it is good but not heavenly - you will not start singing opera out of euphoria. However, you have to give a plus for not having one of those "thirteen in a dozen" Italian menus. It is definitely not a "Garfield wants lasagna" pasta craving restaurant, such as many family style Italian places, so choose to visit when you want to eat your Italian food with style rather than diving into a heart warming bowl of pasta.

I Latini is a place worth visiting if you are in the area and do not crave for seafood. After all, you cannot have lobster every day, can you? (Of course you can...)

Grades given by Good Food in Belgium:
Food: 4-
Atmosphere: 3-
Friendliness of staff: 4
Would I go there again: yes
Would I recommend the place: yes, even for business dinners.
Value for money: yes

For more reviews, check out TripAdvisor.

Restaurant: Enoteca da Valentino

Enoteca da Valentino is a nice little Italian place hidden in a small street behind Porte de Namur. The service is really nice and friendly, a bit slow at times, but nothing to get you annoyed. The food is good; not "gourmet kinda good", but good enough to keep even your Italian friends happy and content! The pasta dishes on the menu are not the most creative ones, but fortunately they may have specials of the day to - well, save the day! This is one of those places you can go to when you want to relax with some good food and some nice wine, and you can even bring your friends without feeling ashamed of having made a bad pick for the evening.

Grades given by Good Food in Belgium:
Food: 3+
Atmosphere: 4
Friendliness of staff: 4
Would I go there again: yes
Would I recommend the place: yes for relaxed dinner with spouse/family, friends, business lunch and even business dinner if you already know your business partner (and don't need to impress)
Value for money: yes

Click here for reviews by TripAdvisor.

Restaurant: Sensi - for a sense of being yelled at!

There are restaurants that take customer service to a whole other level - but not in a good way! We had quite an experience at SENSI concept store!

To start with, we really wanted to like the restaurant! It had that kind of laid back atmosphere where you think you can enjoy a nice evening with food, wine, friends and even some music. You are willing to accept that things don't go as planned and that everything on the menu is not available, because c'mon - c´est la vie! And to be fair, the young people of the staff were super friendly!

The rest of the evening, well... First of all, it was ice cold in the restaurant, because they insisted on keeping the door open for people to come in for their buffet option. But seriously, when it is cold outside it will get cold inside if you don't shut the door. As a customer, you don't get to keep your body temperature up by running around in the restaurant, as you will be sitting at your table, freezing. And once you freeze, you stop enjoying your stay. There is no reason to keep the door open as you can advertise your existence with blackboards and signs and whatnot - like most other restaurants do!

Then we ordered some starters and the main course. We wanted to share our starters, so we ordered one plate of meats (Italian sausages and hams) and one plate of cheese. We even asked if we could do that (share) and they said yes. Then each person wanted a pasta as a main course. Pretty simple, you would think. At first, we were positively surprised as they brought us some extra appetizers on the house, and they were really delicious! Then, however, they bring us the pasta, without having brought the appetizers that we ordered. Ok, no problem, we are flexible - we said that we can start with the pasta and have the meat/cheese plates afterwards.

The pasta dishes were kind of lame. For example, the pasta with pesto and ricotta had a nice taste, but there was way too much sauce. Never ever drown your pasta! The pasta with truffles was just boring; looked like pasta and sand, and it didn't really have much taste. The pasta with vegetables looked nice and tasted ok. Mediocre dishes, but okay, you can live with that.

Then they bring the meat and cheese plates and they were awesome! There was a lot to eat and we even joked about them bringing this after the pasta as customers would otherwise cancel the main course. So we were really happy with this one!

Coffee was ok, tea was kind of like boring tea from a bag with some weird foam on top. Meeh. And no desserts available.

Up to this you could say that you were in for a mediocre restaurant experience with some lows and some highs. You still had the idea that you could come back, but perhaps once the weather gets warmer. But this is when things started to go really bad. We asked for the check. When the check came, they had charged us 120 euros for the starters alone! This was ridiculous; one plate cost 15 euros, so the cost should have been 30 euros. At first we thought it was just a mistake, so we asked the staff to have a look. This is when hell broke loose! The woman in the restaurant started to literally shout at us in Italian! She kept screaming at us and claimed that we had ordered two plates per person and not two plates for all of us. She even brought out the smaller plates and started to waive them at us, like we were stupid customers or something. Like it would be ridiculous to order such small plates for several people. (Well, excuse me, but it would be ridiculous to order two such plates per person, and an honest restaurant would at least have informed the customer of what they were about to do). As she left our table she even kept on screaming at us from halfway down the hall. It was something like none of us had ever EVER experienced in a restaurant before. After a while we got her to bring back the menus and we again pointed out what we had ordered.

Now here's the thing. The restaurant made the mistake. We understand that it is unfortunate, but these things happen. Man up to your mistake and don't yell at the customer - especially since we had even asked when ordering whether sharing was possible!!! Also, had she been friendly, we would most definitely have left a huge tip to cover some of the pain, because the plates were delicious. But being screamed at - well, it destroyed our evening. We did not even want to stay for the jazz evening. Nor do we want to go back ever again. It didn't help that she later on kind of apologised. Especially since we ended up paying 18 euros too much anyway, but we were so tired being yelled at that we just wanted to leave...

So, rating this restaurant is not easy. I am trying to be as fair as I can and not let one person's behaviour affect everything, but we all know that service is half the restaurant experience.

Grades given by Good Food in Belgium:
Food: 3 (2 for the pasta, 4 for the rest)
Atmosphere: 1+ (3 had they kept the door shut)
Friendliness of staff: 1 (4 for the young people, "minus one hundred" for the lady)
Would I go there again: NO!!!
Would I recommend the place: No!
Value for money: no

And I truly feel sad to write this review, because as I said in the beginning - we really wanted to like this place, and had the service been friendly, we would have left remembering the highs and forgiving the lows. But there is a limit to everything! 

The reviews on TripAdvisor are very good, which is why we also had high expectations. 

Restaurant: Prego

Prego is an Italian-style restaurant in three different locations. The one tested here is the one at Place Jourdan. The atmosphere is modernist with a bar at the front and the restaurant at the back. Service is friendly, but nothing that will make you feel extraordinarily well treated. You even have to drag yourself to the cashier to pay instead of having the check coming to the table (at least if you pay by credit card). The menu is on the narrower side, however, the pastas offerred are at least a bit more inventive than you will find in your average Italian (tourist friendly) restaurant. The food is relatively good; nothing to complain about, but nothing that will rise an urge to go and give the chef a big hug. Let's put it this way: it is a safe choice, but not the most exciting one.

Grades given by Good Food in Belgium:
Food: 3
Atmosphere: 3+
Friendliness of staff: 3
Would I go there again: maybe, if someone else suggested it
Would I recommend the place: for having a night out with friends, yes. For business dinners, maybe no. Business lunch may be okay?
Value for money: yes

For more reviews, check the TripAdvisor. It seems they are more critical to the place than we are, but maybe we had better luck...

Take away: Yoko wok

Yoko Wok is a small thai take away restaurant in Waterloo, close to the international school. You may combine the fillings to your own liking, creating a wok that is just what you yourself want to have. And they are delicious!! And huge, so unless you are hungry like a tiger, you will have a meal for the next day as well. Or you can share your meal!

In general, service is fast, but the place is popular, so you may want to place your order by calling them first, and then just pick it up.

Good Food in Belgium recommends this place for anyone who wants good thai take away and live within a 15min drive from Waterloo!

Restaurant: Basta Cosi

Basta Cosi is an Italian restaurant at Place Chatelain in Ixelles. When weather permits, it provides a terrace where you can sit and enjoy the square, especially on Wednesdays when there is a market. The food is okay and portion sizes are generous. It is nothing to die for, but you will not die from it either. You might die while waiting for it, though, since service is not always the fastest on the planet. However, service was not unfriendly in any way.

Grades given by Good Food in Belgium:
Food: 3
Atmosphere: 3+
Friendliness of staff: 3- (minus for speed)
Would I go there again: yes, if in the area. Would not travel there just to go here.
Would I recommend the place: not really. I would not discourage anyone from going, but I would not jump up and down for anyone to go there. It is ok.
Value for money: a bit pricey for what it's worth.

For more reviews, check TripAdvisor.