#168: World Cup City - USA
Day 1: is the shack all shook out?
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Le Balmoral, Pl. Georges Brugmann 21, 1050 Ixelles
Le Balmoral is a curious splotch of milk-of-magnesia pink on the otherwise austere, wealthy borderlands of suburban Ixelles and Uccle, hawking an idealised mid-century Americana that was already anachronistic when the place opened in 1989.
I should say “was”, because Le Balmoral closed on Saturday, for good. One month ago the owners announced that the restaurant - or should I say “Milk Bar”, the pink-and-turquoise neon sign hanging in one of its large windows says - had run its course. Prospective diners had 30 more days to enjoy their milkshakes and their burgers before operations ceased. Having been aware of Le Balmoral’s existence almost since I arrived in Brussels - it’s hard to not notice the dayglo American diner on the corner of Place Georges Brugmann - but never having visited, L and I took the opportunity of a childfree Saturday morning to hoof it down and see what we were missing before it was too late.
To judge by the crowd, we were not the only ones. So busy was it that after we had been directed to sit at the only available table in the dining room, on ordering a pair of milkshakes we were immediately informed by a brusque woman that we could not sit there if we were only going to order drinks, and would have to go and sit on the quieter terrace outside. We were assured that the patio heaters were on, and there was a pile of blankets we could use if the gas heat was insufficient. For all its American trappings, the Balmoral was still, essentially, Belgian.
The terrace did at least give us an opportunity to study the restaurant’s exterior. Alongside the neon “Milk Bar” sign was a matching pair in red advertising Coca-Cola, an imitation period cartoon of a wartime pin-up with excessively long legs, and a collection of plaster cast models that includes Betty Boop in a velvet dress. Sneaking inside on the pretext of a toilet visit, the interior was more of the same, in the sense that it continued the exterior’s “more is more” aesthetic.
There were enamel Dr Pepper adverts next to leggy pin-up plastercasts in american flag swimsuits and metal licence plates from a variety of US states. The owners had commissioned murals of Marilyn Monroe and James Dean astride a scooter. There was a gumball machine, and another Betty Boop. Overhanging tables at the back of the restaurant was the reconstructed front half of some model of Chevrolet. The walls were the same pink as outside, matched by alternating pink-and-aquamarine enamel tables featuring the same bevelled rounded chrome finishings you see in period American diners on prestige TV shows. The whole thing was overwhelming, which was presumably the intention; a blast from the past brought to you by the same aesthetic sensibility responsible for Main St USA at Eu rodisney.
Our milkshakes arrived - hers chocolate and mine banana - and I grudgingly admitted they were in fact quite good. As we sat and drank our shakes from their repurposed glass bottles, I had time to take in all the detail through the restaurant’s windows, and to look at the menu. La Balmoral opened 37 years ago, when the Berlin Wall was about to crumble and with it Gorbachev’s evil empire, when Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade fought off Batman and Back to the Future Part II to top the global movie box office, when Francis Fukuyama was probably already jotting down notes about the End of History, and the world looked with some kind of optimism towards the impending end of the short 20th century and a new world dominated by a solitary - American - hegemon. To judge by the menu, little had changed since 1989: it was still club sandwiches and pancakes with maple syrup and bagels and cheeseburgers. But there had been changes, even if they were not at first obvious. I noticed that the first tea listed on their laminated hot drinks menu was Matcha; in fact there was a whole section devoted to “Thés spéciaux - Infusions Japonaises”.
And then I started to think about the newspaper columns and pre-emptive think tank obituaries heralding the imminent demise of Pax Americana that had begun to appear in recent weeks. I started to think too of the new Chinese coffee shop that had opened in the concourse of the metro station at De Brouckère, and the arrival of the “Chinese Starbucks”, and the new Matcha café that had opened on Rue Danseart, and the self-service hotpot place that was installing itself around the corner. Did you know that the highest-grossing film in 2025 was a Chinese animated feature based on Chinese mythology? I didn’t until I googled it, and then I remembered that the most-played record in our house this year is probably the K-Pop Demon Hunters soundtrack.
Sure, people are still opening burger restaurants in Brussels, and Burger King’s footprint on Boulevard Anspach is just as big as that of the Korean-Japanese Ramen bar several doors down. But they’re not trading on Americana in the same way Le Balmoral did, even if its pitch to nostalgia was already hopelessly kitsch in 1989. And I couldn’t think of Le Balmoral’s demise and all those boba tea places and Kawaii stationary concessions, and not also come to the conclusion that for all that our attention is drawn across the Atlantic, that American cultural hegemony is ebbing, and Deng Xiaoping’s long-mooted Asian century finally looks to be gaining traction in Brussels.
See you tomorrow, in Canada.
Thanks for reading - I’m writer Eoghan Walsh and this is my weekly free-to-subscribe newsletter about life in Brussels. If you like it and you’re not already subscribed, you can sign up here!
The cost of living crisis will be devastating for places like these. If I recall correctly it had a large menu in a bid to emulate the American diner experience - meaning high costs - and its location for an American diner experience was bizarre. I think a place like that only probably survived because the business owners owned the property too. That's pretty much a good predictor nowadays of whether an establishment can survive, because landlords in Brussels are just taking the piss and indexation (which I partially support but is poorly implemented) gives them the right to take the piss anyway.
You will soon see basically the death of most midrange, hobbyist family business restaurants in Belgium. You will only see fast food (in the broadest sense - including chains that can achieve scale like some of the "semi-decent" asian fast food -) or high end cuisine, or finally the worst of the worst, a front for money laundering. There will be no middle ground restaurant anymore thanks to rising costs. But its also probably a kick up the arse the restaurant sector in Brussels, dare I say Belgium needs, because standards were slipping fast, service can be woeful, and compared to its neighbours it just makes very little financial sense to be a "foodie" type here.
On a positive note what a great idea for a series and I will be sure read each one.
My kids loved the Balmoral, it's sad that it is closing. But it has had weird opening hours for a while, and the owner seems increasingly grumpy, so perhaps not that surprising!