#169: World Cup City - Canada
Day 2: Poutine on a show
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La Luck, Rue Washington 74, 1050 Ixelles
It’s important from the outset to say that La Luck is not a Canadian restaurant, nor does it have I think any pretensions to being Canadian. If it is known for anything, it’s as a board game bar, with the upper floor reserved for game players. There are no Canadian nods in the place’s décor - no maple leafs, no elongated hockey sticks, and certainly no well-loved photos of Wayne Gretzky or Alanis Morrissette. Instead, La Luck’s owners have gone for the vintage market bric-a-brac look, with it stuffed with old mirrors and picture frames and sundry recycled wall decorations. In the hour and half I was there, I failed to hear any Chad Kroeger or Avril Lavigne on the bar’s soundsystem. And the service, of which I will speak of more later, does not appear to reach the level of North American efficiency, or overt Canadian friendliness.
But La Luck does serve Poutine, Canada’s only dish to achieve real international celebrity - with the exception maybe of Keanu Reeves. La Luck and its Poutine was not my preferred Canadian destination; the real “most Canadian place in Brussels” is only accessible for one month in the year, when the region of Quebec installs a food-and-drink stand at the annual Christmas market on the Vismarkt. It’s a good place to pick up bottles of maple syrup and Fin du Monde Triple, but because it exists only in December and January, it was not accessible to me. Which explains why I travelled halfway around the world to the bottom of Ixelles for a plate of fries topped with gravy and cheese curds.
La Luck offers two versions: an orthodox Poutine with meat gravy, and one with vegetable gravy. I order the latter, and I apologise to any Canadians who might consider this a grievous cultural faux pas. I expect if they do, they will be too nice to tell me to my face (or in the comments below). And this is where my night took a turn. My beer was almost gone and so were about 30 minutes before I started to get a little antsy about the whereabouts of my Poutine. It was another 15 minutes before I began to actively try and secure the attention of the three waiting staff at the other end of the bar, and another quarter of an hour after that before I managed to make eye contact with one of them and lure them to my table.
I explained, curtly, that it had been more or less an hour since I had ordered. Apologies were made, and explanations sought as to its whereabouts. A failure to transfer my ticket to the kitchen, I was informed by another apologetic wait staff. I was by now itchy, almost twitching, such were the state of my raised hackles. I like to think that, in situations such as these, I am usually deferential; these things do happen after all, and it was hardly through malice that they were denying me my supper. And later in the evening, once I had taken a walk around the block, I rued my curtness.
But what really tipped me over the edge into grudge territory was not the fact that I had seen a parade of plate after plate of fresh Poutine walk by my table, always hoping that the next ring of the bell indicating food was ready at the pass was ringing for me. It was that the delay between my drawing of their attention to the missing Poutine and the arrival of said Poutine was two minutes.
My Poutine took one hour and two minutes; the hour to wait, and the two minutes to fry a portion of fries, warm up the gravy, and sprinkle the cheese curds on top. I felt like an idiot for waiting as long as I did. What dish could stand up to that level of smouldering resentment, no matter how hot and fresh out of the kitchen it arrived at my table, scalding my palate as I belatedly dug into the salty, melting mess. Not Poutine, that’s for sure. Truly, it is the Nickelback of bar food.
I still ate half the bowl, mind.
See you tomorrow, in Mexico.
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!
Good job fully adopting a Canadian persona - too passive and polite to ask about your order and instead stewing in silent resentment and regret.
Canadian here. I'll let you off the hook for the cultural faux pas of ordering a veg version of poutine, but not for calling it the Nickelback of bar food. That's a bridge too far.
Next time you make it to the Quebec stand at the Vismarkt, see if they have any ice cider on offer. That's one of the best Canadian products that no one knows about.