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.

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Guinguette Royale

After a short dip, the temperature is in the high twenties again, so it’s a perfect opportunity to check out another al fresco drinking establishment. Being centre based, we had to travel quite a distance for our previous visits to park buvettes. Luckily for us, the Guinguette Royale is in the Parc de Bruxelles or Warandepark, the largest public park in the centre of Brussels. Our visit to the buvette in the Bois de la Cambre in mind, we didn’t expect our beers to be served in glass, so we grabbed our reusable cups, and headed to the Parc de Bruxelles for a lunch in the cool shade.

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Woodpecker

It’s almost summer, and in the past month, we even had a little heatwave already. A shaded terrace in front of a bar can be a nice spot when that happens, but it’s even better to get away from all that heat retaining brick and concrete, and find some shade under the trees in one of the many public parks of Brussels. In more and more parks, we now see buvettes (re)opening, serving cool drinks on those hot days. In the park of Bois de la Cambre, it’s the team of Woodpecker that keeps us  hydrated, serving pints of Zinnebir and Jambe-de-Bois.

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Buvette Sint-Sebastiaan

DSC_0154xBeer gardens are not a very Belgian thing, and to my knowledge, in Brussels there are no real ones, the kind with large communal tables under the trees. So where to go then, if you want the luxury of proper seating and freshly poured glasses of beer — instead of bringing a growler and a blanket to a park — but you’d still like to sit in the shadow of trees, instead of that of parasols and buildings, and with a better view — and smell — than just cars? Our recommendation is Buvette Sint-Sebastiaan, in the Parc Josaphat.
You even get to see archers shoot at ‘birds’!

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