#174: World Cup City - Australia 🇦🇺
Day 7: Aussie...ice cream?
Welcome to an ongoing Brussels Notes series exploring the 48 participating countries of the 2026 World Cup, without leaving Brussels. Read the explainer, and then subscribe.
Australian Home Made Ice Cream, Grand Place, Heuvelstraat 2, 1000 Brussel
We here in Brussels should consider ourselves lucky. We appear to have, so far, escaped an invasion that seems to have infiltrated most other European capitals. I am, of course, talking about Australian bars. Unlike Amsterdam or Berlin, you will not find a Woolshed or an Outback or a Walkabout this side of the Scheldt river. You can’t buy a bloomin’ onion in Brussels for love nor money. The Australians who live in Brussels seem happy to drink at local cafés or if necessary any number of the Irish bars that are still just about surviving. Likewise, the tourists and the limited number of stag weekends that spend time in the city. Somersby cider is quarantined, more or less, to supermarket drinks shelves, and no one is serving Fosters ironically or otherwise. We will pass over the proliferation of Melbourne-inspired coffee shops and brunch places in the leafier corners of the city, because I have neither visited Australia nor do I drink coffee.
That’s not to say that The Land Down Under does not have a presence on Brussels streets. In fact, it has quite a large one, or at least a visible one: the Australian Homemade Ice Cream chain, with its familiar green and yellow livery and kangaroo logo. You can find them in proximity to busy shopping and tourism centres, places like the City2 shopping mall on Rue Neuve, or within spitting distance of the Grand-Place, where you can get a scoop and a cone for €3.50. The only catch is, Australian ice cream isn’t a thing. Italian gelato is a thing. An Irish 99 (with a flake) is a thing. Indian kulfi, Turkish mastic ice cream, Japanese mochi ice cream - these are things. So why is one of Brussels’ most prevalent ice cream chains selling itself on its connections to The Lucky Country?
Well, a cursory visit to Australia’s website explains the conundrum: the company’s founder - a Belgian - named it in honour of his Australian godmother, having opened his first outlet of the chain after returning from a trip down under. These mundane Belgian origins also go some way to explaining, when I visited the Grand-Place location one afternoon, with Brussels in the grip of a suffocating heatwave, why the words “AND WAFFLES” had been added at the end of the company’s name. That, and the ubiquity of waffle shops in Brussels’ hyper-tourist centre, I suppose. In the absence of anything identifiably Australian in their choice of flavours - what would an Australian ice cream flavour taste like? - I plump for the most exotic looking, Australian-adjacent: a scoop of passionfruit.
Was it good? Well, it was ice cream, and ice cream is never bad. Was it Australian? What do you think, ye flamin’ galah?
Tomorrow, we’re staying in the Antipodes…
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!
LOL, apology accepted. I saw the subject line in my inbox and thought, here we go. But I was pleasantly surprised at the restraint shown in his piece in terms of Aussie cliches (flamin' galah notwithstanding). I didn't know that about the origins of the Australian ice cream chain (although am familiar with the brand, having seen it in Leuven too, I think?) but I suspect 'Walkabout', 'Outback Steakhouse' (big in Korea) et al are similarly Oztraylian in name only. I would say the most Aussie ice cream flavour would be macadamia/mango (do they have it?), but I am biased, and a long-term exile, therefore slightly homesick and probably incorrect.