#153: Mediterranean City
Le Marseillais & Mazette, Place du Jeu de Balle, Saturday afternoon
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Here’s another short excerpt from the latest edition of PINTJES, the award-winning zine Brussels-based illustrator Selkies and I produce about Brussels café culture. If you missed out on a copy at the launch in December and live in Brussels, drop me a line and we can do business ;).
Do I like Pastis? I’m not sure I’ve ever drunk it. But I know what it smells like, and it smells like the interior of Le Marseillais. In the café on the corner of Rue Blaes, Pastis’ sweet aniseed smell has seeped into the weathered wooden floor and sticky tables of this Provençal transplant.
Are we even in the Marollen anymore? The bar doesn’t so much wear its Marseillais emotions on its sleeve as shove them in drinkers’ faces. I sit at a table under a framed front page of L’Equipe, Basile Boli bearing down on a ball, and me. From the ceiling and the walls hang baby blue Olympic Marseillais scarves and jerseys, and in the window facing the street someone has placed a baby blue swimming rubber ring imprinted with the club crest.
Does it matter? Calligraphy on a mirror advertises “les Pastis du moment” and a 140-strong selection, “comme à Marseillais” - azure Pastis 51, white Casanis, red Berger, and yellow Pernod Ricard. Outside, where it’s still Brussels, the market is reaching its tourist-fuelled crescendo. Inside, it’s just me, my drinking companion, and the man behind the bar.
The man behind the bar nudges me away from ordering a glass of Ricard in favour of something more artisanal, and a touch more expensive, though still served in the iconic yellow decanter. A man slides through the crack in the entrance and settles into an incomprehensible conversation with the barman. I decant the Pastis into a stovepipe glass with some water and sup at the milky liquorice. I do not like liquorice, and now I also do not like Pastis. But I do like Le Marseillais.
Across the square, on the other side of the old fire brigade barracks, Mazette is filling up as the market winds down. Before it was Mazette, I knew this place as the Skieven Architek - a Marollien pejorative borne of residents’ disdain for architects and their grand plans. Back then, its facade was covered in a dense ivy canopy, and I came here with my father not long after we’d moved onto the square. It was a dusty old place then, one foot already in the grave.
Not long afterwards the Architek closed, the ivy torn down, and its corner plot lay idle long after we’d left the square. But now it’s occupied by Mazette, a cooperative bakery-cum-brewery-cum café. By the door, the little terrace is filling up with market stragglers and hungry shoppers. Inside, the walls are dressed in tastefully exposed brick and a wood-fired oven dominates a corner of the bar like a big brick bolus.
A chalkboard advertises traditional Brussels pottekeis, which comes with a splash of Mediterranean olive oil. Elsewhere are the merest hints of fleamarket greebling - a stuffed badger, a lifesize Marsupilami cuddly toy - alongside the retro-inspired food and drink illustrations of a local artist. On the speakers Bowie croons “Keep your electric eyes on me”, and someone has propped a Grand Jojo vinyl sleeve on a nearby shelf, with googly eyes stuck onto the singer’s face.
It’s open now long enough to have lost its new car smell, but the Mazette does feel as if it has one foot in the old Marolles and another in the new Marolles, the one creeping inexorably down the Hoogstraat from the Sablon.
A man comes in out of the cold and makes for the bar counter. There’s a glass cloche by the tap handles, from under which he finagles a couple of chocolate chip cookies before walking back out the door without acknowledging the staff or anyone else in the café.