#63: Why does Brussels have no good train station bars?

Staycation (III): Where have all the good guichets gone?

I’m writer Eoghan Walsh and this is my weekly Brussels Notes newsletter - for the next four weeks, while I try not to go insane from spending my holidays in Brussels - I’ll be writing about different aspects of my summer staycation in the Belgian capital (if you’re not already a part of the community, you can subscribe here).

This week, it’s the turn of the railway station bar - why we need them, and why we don’t have them.

The entrance to the old stationsbuffet at Brussel-Kongres

Why does Brussels have no good train station bars? It's a question I’ve been mulling while passing through the city’s various train stations more frequently than I would have liked. We’ve been keen to not restrict our enforced summer staycation to the capital, and so recently we’ve gotten on the train to such exotic locales as Tienen and Sint-Truiden. And transiting through Noord and Midi, I couldn’t help but notice - where have all Brussels’ railway station bars gone? Across the city’s three main stations there’s no shortage of coffee shops and fast food places, chocolate boutiques and jewellery stores. But no honest to goodness pub, a civilised refuge from the station’s travelling circus where an anxious traveller can sit and wait with a book, one eye on their beer and another on the departures board, in anticipation of the start of their journey. How is it that the once-ubiquitous stationsbuffet - the local euphemism for a railway bar, and nodding to the fact that, if you were lucky, they might have a sandwich or some hot pastries on sale - has not just become an endangered species in the Belgian capital, but fully extinct. Didn’t we used to be a country? Aren’t we allowed to have nice things?

Welsh writer Adrian Tierney-Jones had it right in a recent Vinepair article when he said that “...[i]t’s always good to accompany the excitement of rail travel with a couple of graceful pints of beer…you are part of the journey when travelling by train, and a good railway pub is part of that experience.” He should know; travelling by train in the UK might be an expensive nightmare, but station bars are one of the few things the Brits get right about rail travel. The best thing about taking the Eurostar isn’t the childish thrill of being on a train and being underwater at the same time - it’s the quiet pleasure of making sure you’ve enough time before check-in (admittedly harder now since Brexit) for a pint or two of cask London Pride across the road in The Parcel Yard pub in King’s Cross. The magic of that experience is only heightened when you think of its equivalent on this side of the channel - an overpriced Pret sandwich sat next to Sam the plaster cast zebra in a faintly menacing Brussels Midi.

This isn’t just a case of differing priorities between us here on the continent and them over there on the islands - though even Dublin’s Heuston station has made room for a proper pub between the American doughnut shop and the newsagents. Whenever I’m on a ICE train hurtling through the Limburg countryside towards Cologne, I’m gaming out in my head whether I have enough time to run down downstairs to the small bar behind the REWE shop where you can get in a quick couple of stanges of Kölsch standing up in between train connections. I still have fond student memories of washing down hot doughy plates of Lángos with sweating half litre glasses of Budvar outside Olomouc’s hlavní nádraží while waiting for the train that would take us south to Vienna, and then repeating the ceremony at the entrance to the border station at Břeclav after being kicked off the trains and made to wait with our fellow passengers for an impromptu connection.

Even here in Belgium I still remember there being open stationsbuffetten, before they were “evolved” into a Panos sandwich shop or a Starbucks. I remember visiting Brugge as a green postgraduate for a collegiate sports tournament and ending the night drinking cans of Jupiler Taurus at what felt like a club in Brugge’s train station before getting lost on the way back to my hostel and encountering some swans in the canal. I remember too that there used to be a sketchy bar in the CCN tower that until recently abutted Brussel Noord, a place where I did for some unremembered reason stop for a quick drink one afternoon before they knocked it down and rebuilt it as a KFC. There was the abortive attempt to install a craft beer bar in an echoey former post office annex to Brussel Centraal but which has been dormant since at least the pandemic, and the DIY art bar that took over the old stationsbuffet under the bridge at Bruxelles-Chapelle but which was forced by the national rail company to abandon the location out of fire safety fears. All across Brussels’ 35 railway stations the lights of their stationsbuffetten were extinguished, the spaces they once occupied turned over to storage, event spaces of local community groups, or simply just boarded up. Only two with any legitimate claim to being honest to goodness railway bars are the Filousophe in Schaarbeek’s station, which exists only because it’s part of the Train World museum that occupies the rest of the station, and the hotel bar of the Pullman at Midi (which I exclude on grounds that it’s really a hotel lobby bar, and thus is a different kind of travel experience with a different kind of clientele). 

These days, the poor train user in search of a pre- or post-journey beer is forced to find proxies in the immediate station neighbourhood. Which is easier in some parts of Brussels than others. By my guess, the closest pub to any Brussels train station is the Ukkel outpost of L’Amere a Boire a few steps from the entrance to Calevoet. At Centraal your options are extremely close but ethically dubious (Brewdog), fashionable but not cheap (Château Moderne), and fun but further away (Gist). None ideal, and all coming with the extra anxiety of not being within the boundaries of the station and with only the unreliable NMBS app to keep abreast of train times.

The reasons for this gradual eradication and displacement of the consumption of alcohol in Brussels’ train stations are not complicated, nor are they particularly covert. Nor is it a spontaneous cultural drift. Comments from the NMBS, in a Knack article on the decline and fall of the stationsbuffet - the grote drooglegging (“great drought”) - make that explicit: “NMBS follows the current trends and opts for innovative and all-encompassing concepts. We focus on sustainability and health, that is what the customer expects from us. It is therefore a conscious policy, in which we want to respond to the current needs of travellers.”

A conscious policy of Panosification that makes room for Sbarro and Starbucks, but not for a Stella Artois tap. In Brussels there is the additional issue that the city’s train stations have become the locus of overlapping socio-economic and law-and-order crises. News headlines throughout 2023 and into this year proclaimed rolling states of emergencies in Midi and Noord in particular, with drug use and dealing, as well as physical violence, intimidation, homelessness, and the presence of transit migrants with nowhere else to go contributing to a widespread sense of insecurity in and around the stations. Alcohol consumption was banned in Midi, and as far as I understand still is, and at Noord the sale and consumption of alcohol between 10pm and 6am was also prohibited by the police and local authorities - alcohol, they argue, being directly linked to violent incidents. It’s no wonder then that neither the local authorities nor that NMBS want businesses selling booze on station premises. In any case, aren’t railway station bars just misery sinks anyway? Places where, as Belgian politician Bart Caron described the stationsbuffet at Kortrijk station, “a subgroup of the expanding caste of marginals in society…who at 7:30 in the morning with a day's stubble, yellow fingers and a fluffy sweater with grease stains, suck on a triple from some abbey or a fresh pint, and smoke as if it were their last cigarette before the electric chair?” Caron puts down the decline and disappearance of stationsbuffetten partly to the smoking ban introduced in Belgium in 2011, which he says decimated and “figuratively smoked out” station bar habituées.

Caron captures well enough the image most people would conjure up in their minds when asked to picture a typical railway pub in Belgium - they do still exist too, as I found out when nipping into the station bar for a quick soft drink on that recent trip to Sint-Truiden. Even railway pub aficionados like a German one quoted in that Vinepair article, accept that every station bar should have a bit of an edge to it. But, as Tierney-Jones and the article’s author Evan Rail (no pun intended) argue, “the best train station bars… function as beer palaces, railway museums, and waiting rooms all in one, with a twinned nature of being both part of the journey and the destination itself that is echoed by the dual motivations of the clientele: some drinkers in train station bars can’t linger at all, while others are going to stay all day.”

This is what we’re being denied in Brussels. We should be able to get this right - Antwerp, for all its flaws, has a great station bar - but we can’t seem to. The interstitial pleasure of a quiet station café away from the chaos of the main concourse is out of reach because the authorities in charge are incapable of taming that chaos and keeping it from the café door. Worse, by inviting in rent-seeking corporate interests to help run its stations, they have contributed to the verpauperisering - the impoverishing - of the public space.

We weary travellers should be entitled to refuges of civility, a place to recap your journey, steel yourself for the one to come, or prepare to throw yourself into the churning chaos of the city outside the station. I want to be able to disappear into WG Sebald’s salle de pas perdus, to be able to strike up a conversation with a stranger or to be let to my own devices. But because Brussels can’t but be occupied with resolving fundamental quality of life questions, it has no energy to address this marginal quality of life question. 

Instead, the city’s stationsbuffetten have passed into mythology, good for nothing but photos in an art exhibition. Let’s pour one out for the misery sinks.

---

Miscellaneous Notes

• Now it’s your turn - what’s your favourite place to go for a beer while waiting for a train?

• Trailed something interesting coming down the tracks from me and a friend, about which I cannot say much other than more will be revealed soon…