#150: Edible City

Or, the return of Brussels' best noodle-makers.

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Before by arse had even hit the molded red plastic seat, I realised I’d picked the wrong table. I’d thought about sitting upstairs, but the ceiling is low and when it gets busy at lunch the place becomes too loud. Outside the terrace was a crush of tourists and noise from the construction side next door, where they’re building a new Eataly. In any case, the best place to sit in Au Bon Bol is on one of the sticky little tables by the entrance, directly across from the kitchen.

Only, I seemed to have chosen the wrong one, because I couldn’t see over the counter. So I scooched to the next table over by the door to get a better look.

I’ve been coming to Au Bon Bol long before I knew anything about Ramen or Soba or Dashi or any of the other words that have recently crept into our culinary vocabulary. Here, they just do noodles - you can have them in a soup, or you can have them fried, with the meat of your choice, or a heap of vegetables (no mushrooms, thank Christ). And the noodles are good too, especially those that come in a warming hearty broth that I am happy to convince myself is vegetarian despite its depths of gummy richness.

I had palpitations the last time I passed by for lunch only to be confronted with a boarded -up door and closed sign, and beyond those through the restaurant’s window evidence of a demolished kitchen. I feared that it had become just the latest victim of the creeping conceptification of the surrounding streets; in between that visit and this an outlet of a Levantine buffet chain, which had replaced a small Vietnamese restaurant, had itself been supplanted by a Korean-themed Soju and barbecue restaurant, to go with the Japanese Ramen place several doors down, and the twin Italian restaurants across the road.

Happily, the closure was brief and Au Bon Bol has since reopened, with everything in its right place. One of my favourite Netflix shows is a Chinese documentary series where the makers visit various corners of the country exploring the regional hot pot varieties and the small, careworn, and often family-owned, restaurants that make them. Before its recent glow-up, Au Bon Bol would have been right at home among them. And after the glow-up very little of significance has changed.

There is some new faux marble cladding on the walls and on the counter, and the hum of a new extractor fan provides a constant undertone to the laughing and shouting in Mandarin of the cooks and waiting staff gathered in the kitchen. Otherwise, things remain unchanged. The menu is unaltered, though it does look like they’ve had new ones laminated. It still smells of hot oil, dusty flour, heady broths and steeping herbs. The little plastic tupperware containers are still in the same place they were on the table as before, with their dumpy bottle of sriracha sauce and a small sticky tub of ruby chili oil and the little holder for the beige plastic chopsticks. Outside, through the big plate glass windows I can see the same ubiquitous graffiti that’s always been there on the facade of the hotel across the street, proclaiming “J’existe”.

The kitchen looks more or less unchanged too, with the cookers towards the back and the noodle preparation station right by the window, soaking up the bright afternoon light. The noodle-making station looks unchanged too, right by the window. As much as I love the noodles at Au Bon Bol, I really come here to watch the noodle-makers.

Once I’ve given my order, I sit and wait for my noodle soup, and watch. There is one woman at the counter, constantly replenishing its healthy layer of flour. She starts with a big springy bolus of dough scooped out from an adjacent mixer. She drops it and stretches it and repeats the motion, letting gravity do her work for her in elongating the dough. Then she twists the dough and gathers it up into her fingers in a thick braid. Every now and then she shares a distracted word or two with a colleague before refocusing on her work. Now she’s rolling out the fat braid of dough until it is thin, before twisting it and hooking it and stretching it between her fingers until the cord of dough that was formerly one dense thread becomes dozens of thin chewy wires.

It does not look like particularly taxing work to her, nor does she seem especially bored by it. She just looks concentrated, focused, allowing her muscle memory and her technique honed over years of the same movements to take over, making the complex braiding look almost autonomic.

She cuts them with the sharp end of her dough scraper and dust them with a handful of flour and then collects them into a coil like a bleached cinnamon roll and puts them to one side for the next bowl of soup before beginning again.

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