Belgians love eating pizzas at least as much as any nation, but most of the time they go for—not always successful—copies of the Italian originals. Otomat decided to take another direction, and now creates decidedly un-Italian, but nevertheless very tasty pizzas. Besides that, they’ve given beer a central role: Duvel yeast as an ingredient for the dough, and plenty of beers to pair the pizza with, even some local ones!
UPDATE: Closed permanently…
We’ve had ramen and gyoza before, but we had no clue what donburi, kara age, or onigiri were, when we first read it on the menu of Kumiko. Although the food menu is definitely Japanese, you can’t simply call the place a Japanese restaurant: there is a cellar bar more suitable for drinking than eating, and a nice courtyard terrace. There is some Japanese macro beer available, with the brewery in the same block, a Brussels Beer Project beer would be the obvious choice here, unless the CraftWorks beer tickles your fancy more.
In Belgium you can’t get around Duvel, and even we drank our fair share of this extremely foamy beer before moving on to either very local or foreign beers from microbreweries… But when we heard that Duvel was now available on draught in Brussels as well, we decided to revisit the original Belgian golden strong ale once again, and we headed to Manneken Pis, or more specifically, Manneken Pis Cafe, as it was recently renamed when it became the newest Duvel Moortgat showcase.
Bia Mara, didn’t we write about that one already? Well, the one in the centre was one of the first venues appearing on this blog indeed, but recently, they opened a second restaurant in Ixelles, mostly offering the same menu. So why bother writing another article? Because Bia Mara – Place de Londres has one thing the one in the Marché aux Poulets hasn’t: beers on draught!