If you’ve been to any beer bar or beer festival in the last couple of months, you must already have noticed the posters or flyers, for BXLBeerFest. In just a week— Saturday the 25th and Sunday 26th of August 2018 to be exact—the biggest, cleanest, freshest, and tastiest beer festival dedicated to artisan beer in Brussels, will take place for the second time at Tour & Taxis, and we sure hope you can all make it!
on draught
Bar Eliza
UPDATE: Closed permanently…
We’ve discussed a couple of buvettes and guingettes in parks before, but the hot and sunny weather forces us to drink outside again… Not that we mind! This time, we visited Bar Eliza in the Elisabethpark, a bar quite unlike the other park bars we visited so far. For starters, Eliza isn’t exactly in it for the money, but it’s ran by a couple of local foundations, of which you might already recognise community centers De Platoo and De Zeyp as organisers of the Plazey festival.
CHAFF
UPDATE: After being closed for a while, it reopened under new management. We have revisited it since, and it seems mostly unchanged.
Once again, we found ourselves in the Marolles, right next to the location of the famous flea market, this time at CHAFF. While the band was getting ready to play later on that evening, we picked a table on the first floor to have a couple of local beers—almost every brewery in Brussels was represented with at least one beer—and something to eat. Despite the large choice of rather healthy looking dishes, we decided to go for the burgers.
La Bottega della Pizza
Pizza and beer, it still is a great combination! Most pizza places, however, offer little more than a commercial lager, and certainly no draught options. At La Bottega della Pizza Sablon, there’s at least the reassuring presence of a couple of De la Senne beers on draught, alongside Dupont‘s organic saison Biolégère, to go with the wide selection of Neapolitan pizzas.
Swafff! Brussels Craft Beer Fffestival 2018
If you’ve been to any of the beer bars in Brussels, it would have been hard to miss: the beer festival summer in Brussels kicks off again this weekend with the second edition of the Swafff! Brussels Craft Beer Fffestival. It has already started a little bit with several Swafff Week events in a number of bars—still some more tonight—but the main event is in Karreveld Castle on Saturday the 19th and Sunday the 20th of May, where more than 20 Belgian and other European breweries will gather to serve us their best beers.
La Pouletterie en Ville
UPDATE: Closed permanently…
A well-known, centuries old, derisive term to describe the inhabitants of Brussels, is “Kiekefretters“, which translates to ‘chicken devourers’. However, with a name like that, there are remarkably few chicken restaurants in Brussels. La Pouletterie en Ville is one of the more recent restaurants trying to fill that gap, and very successfully, we must say!
Is one main ingredient—roast chicken, of course—and one beer on draught—Bertinchamps Blonde—really all you need?
Kumiko
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.
The Huggy’s Bar
The Huggy’s Bar is a burger restaurant chain with two location in Brussels, in American sports bar style — there was even a cycling race on when we were in — but with a difference: instead of some commercial lager, they serve a whole range of their own beers, neatly paired with their burgers. Noteworthy as well: you can have an unlimited amount of chips with your burger!
Bintje
It makes so much sense to have a beer with your chips, it is just crazy nobody thought to open a craft beer chip shop in Brussels before. Bintje stepped up to the plate, and opened their chip shop in the Chatelain area of Ixelles last December. Not only do they serve two draught beers — currently both from De la Senne — with their organic chips, there are dozens more of excellent bottled and canned beers — both Belgian and foreign — to choose from, certainly a lot more than any other bar in the neighbourhood, as far as we know!
Les Brassins
With a name like Les Brassins (The Brews), we had to visit this restaurant in Ixelles. An old sign against the wall facing the entrance promised us lambic by the pitcher, but unfortunately that was all it was: an old sign, amidst many other old beer commercials, not quite representative of the current beer offer… Luckily there were some other beers available — even some from the newest generation of Brussels breweries — and a baker’s dozen of meat dishes to choose from, some fish dishes, salads and pastas.