#195: World Cup City - Iran š®š·
Day 29: Date Night
Welcome to an ongoing Brussels Notes series exploring the 48 participating countries of the 2026 World Cup, without leaving Brussels. Read the explainer, check out the other entries, and then subscribe.
Super marchƩ Ispahan Bruxelles, Av. de la Chasse 9, 1040 Etterbeek
I love dates. They are, I think, the closest nature has come to a fruit that is also a bona fide dessert. I think the fervency of my love for dates is a reflection of the fact that I have come to them late in life, having somehow convinced myself in earlier years that did not like dates; I put them in the same category as sultanas, raisins, and other assorted dried fruits, thinking that they were only useful for making sticky toffee pudding but not for eating. This is down to me mistaking the fibrous hard dates you find in Belgian supermarkets packaged in large rectangular boxes and with them still attached to their woody stalks.
It was a box of Palestinian dates which led to my Damascene conversion, bought in a small mini market on the Keizer Karellaan one afternoon when Iād gone in to collect a package and came out with two boxes of dates. Unlike the supermarket ones Iād been used to, these were soft and sticky, and aside from the hard stone in the centre, chewy and sweet and delicious. Since then, I have been a hound for the dates. I do not keep a box of them in the house, because they are too much of a threat to my good intentions. Now Palestine obviously did not qualify for the World Cup, but Iran had, and Iran (I have since discovered) is the fourth-largest producer of dates in the world - Zahidi, Barhi, Sayer, Khaį¹£ouee, Rabbi, and above all the Mozafati date.
That was what I was looking for when I stepped into the Ispahan supermarket just off the La Chasse junction. Crowding the entrance, under the shopās green-and-orange striped awning were crates of garlic bulbs, ripening bananas, bags of onions and large tubers of a kind I didnāt recognise. Inside, under the banner that said āSpecialitĆ©s Iraniennesā in French and presumably Farsi, there were two narrow aisles, flanked by shelves laden with boxes of Persian halva, a large collection of translucent bottles of Iranian distilled water in various exotic-looking flavours next to dark bottles of vinegars of different kinds. Pistachio sweets and dried plums in different shades and degrees of stickiness, some with a translated import label slapped on the original packaging, others written solely in Farsi.
But I couldnāt find the dates. I walked up and down the aisles several times, trying to look inconspicuous as I was the only person in the shop, until I accepted I wasnāt going to find them alone and approached the grouch of a man sitting behind the counter by the door. I asked him in French where the dates were, and without saying anything he pointed to the glass display unit in front of him. And there, right enough, beside the plastic packets of spotted quail eggs and extruded tubes of sausage and cheese tightly wrapped in plastic, were a couple of packets of Vitatips Frische Mozafati Datteln (I donāt know why the label was in German).
I asked him for one, paid my money and had the packet open and a date in my mouth before Iād even crossed the road to jump on an approaching tram. They were, if anything, even better than the Palestinian ones, incredibly soft with a little stone in the centre that I could manoeuvre out of the fruit with my tongue while chewing on the sweet flesh. It was only the absence of a place to put these stones, and a certain level of public decorum, that prevented me from eating half the box on the tram ride home. The label on the back of the box said I was to store them in the fridge in order that they would stay edible for several weeks. I did not envisage them lasting that long, but did as instructed. And they sat there on the bottom shelf, always half open, for a week or two, and when I was feeling down, or had an urge for sugar but not chocolate, or felt I deserved a little sweet treat, or happened to be on a working-from-home day, I would open the fridge door and dip my hand into the box and pull out several of the smushy little fruits and make a little pile of hard brown stones on a saucer next to my computer. Telling myself all the while that dates were fruit, and fruit canāt be bad for you.
Tomorrow, I havenāt yet decided where weāre off to...
Thanks for reading - Iām writer Eoghan Walsh and this is my weekly free-to-subscribe newsletter about life in Brussels. If you like it and youāre not already subscribed, you can sign up here!