#181: World Cup City - Egypt 🇪🇬

Day 15: The Nicest Man in Brussels

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.

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EGYPT v Belgium

Mr Falafel, Rue des Bogards 6, 1000 Bruxelles

Mr Falafel may be the nicest man in Brussels. At the very least he is the smilingest man at Place Fontainas.

I’m three-quarters of the way through my plate of falafel and salad, stuffed and beginning to think about how much food it would be okay to leave uneaten so as not to cause offence, when the owner of the restaurant - the eponymous Mr Falafel, I assume - comes over to my table with a half smile and a fragrant cup of mint tea, black tea bag and pair of sugar cubes on the side. On the house, he says, and walks back into the kitchen. I don’t even like tea. I drank as much of it as I could.

It is a little gem of a place, Mr Falafel’s. In a small shopfront just off Place Fontainas, heading up the hill in the direction of the Sablon. When I arrived in on a Tuesday evening, I had it to myself. There was some kind of Arabic-language variety show running on a TV hung up in the corner, beside a menu in three languages: English, French, and Arabic. It’s not really a menu though, because it just lists the ingredients of a falafel, with a picture of a pita stuffed with falafel and salad. And that’s all there is to order; a portion of falafel, cooked in the small kitchen immediately behind the counter and served in a thin, half-open flatbread, your choice of sauces from a row of big squeezy plastic bottles, and a salad to go with it from all-you-can-eat salad bar.

Mr Falafel himself is beavering away in the kitchen when I enter, next to a pile of the largest white onions I have ever seen, bulbously fecund. But he’s immediately out front upon noticing me standing there, welcoming me in a halting mix of Dutch, French and English, and gesturing me to take a seat, any seat I would like. He proffers a plate and reminds me in French, and then a second in time in English, that the salad and the sauces are “a volonté“. He points to the drinks fridge and I pull out a bottle of Lara mango juice. It’s €10 all-in, but no need to pay now, just pay at the end he says.

So I fill up my plate - hot picked chilis, smooth tahini, a large dollop of hummus and several slices of beefy tomato - and take my mango drink and I sit down and wait for the falafel to arrive. It doesn’t take more than five minutes before he arrives with seven scalding examples, fresh out of the fryer and stuffed in a brittle pita that’s wrapped in a paper doner kebab pocket. Is falafel Egyptian? Wikipedia tells me that’s its most likely origin, but also that the food’s origins are subject of fierce pan-Levantine gastronomic debate. What is not up for debate is that Mr Falafel, the restaurant as well as the eponymous owner, is indisputably Egyptian. There are giant hieroglyphs painted on the walls, alongside photos of falafel lush and richly green as the Nile delta (I have never been to Egypt).

Two burly men barrel into the shop with a loud Salaam, one lugging a large white plastic bucket by his side, the other, younger of the two hauling two cardboard boxes on one shoulder. They are in and out in a whirlwind of loud Arabic and smiles all around. Another man has joined Mr Falafel in the kitchen in the meantime, tidying up the delivery and cleaning in the kitchen. In through the door walks another diner, with his tracksuit pants rolled up over his ankles and a half empty blister pack of tablets gripped in his left hand. He hangs back a little from the salad bar, but once the owner comes out they begin a short back and forth in Arabic, before the chef breaks off to step back into the kitchen. A few minutes later the underling comes back out with a pita filled with fresh falafel and invites the man to choose his salad. No money is exchanged and soon the man is back out on the street.

“Did you not like your tea? Maybe I should have given you a coffee?” he says in English when I return my tray and half-drunk glass to the serving counter. He is teasing me, and says it with a big smile, but I fumble an apology and try to hide how much food I’ve left on my plate, ashamed that I have disappointed him.

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Tomorrow, we’re sticking around in Africa...

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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!