#75: The Most Christmassy Pub in Brussels
Kicking off the Christmas season with a festive classic
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This week - in fact, for the whole month - we’re celebrating the holiday season in Brussels. Starting off with something from the Brussels Beer City archives - about probably the most festive café in central Brussels. And maybe one of the less-known, too.
“Well way up North where the air gets cold
There's a tale about Christmas
That you've all been told
And a real famous cat all dressed up in red
And he spends the whole year workin' out on his sled…”*
The leatherbound menu at the café Le Saint Nicolas says in scrawled-in biro that they’ve a special Christmas beer on tap. What it actually says is that the beer changes every year so you’ve to ask which one it is. Only, when I do go and ask the elderly man shuffling around behind the bar, he doesn’t pull a glass under one of the tap fonts but turns away and pulls out a bottle of Gordon Xmas from a fridge behind him.
Just up the road I could be sitting in the back bar of the Mokcafé drinking a freshly tapped chalice of rich, beautiful, russet Bush de Noël. But instead I’m here, assenting to the offer of a treacly bottle of the original Belgian Christmas beer, my first of the holiday season, at the most Christmassy bar in Brussels. What has this country - this city - done to me? I used to hate Christmas.
I must have walked past Le Saint Nicolas, on the narrow Little Butter Street just downhill from Brussels’ Grand Place, innumerable times and never noticed it. The café is opposite the compact St Nicolas church, and its entrance is overshadowed by the large rainbow flag hanging outside a neighbouring LGBT bar. Whether it was named for the church or the Greek saint who delivers pepernoten and mandarins to good Low Countries children in early December is immaterial, because the owners have leaned fully into the latter as Le Saint Nicolas’ overriding leitmotif. A sign hanging over the entrance has Sinterklaas in white beard and red mitre painted on it, and the rest of the bar takes its cue from there.
There’s a plush foot-high Sint statue behind the bar, and alongside the enamel signs advertising Chimay and Brugse Zot on the walls are engravings, sketches, and watercolours depicting Saint Nicolas in various festive tableaux. Faded Orthodox icons hang alongside felt nutcracker figurines and at the back of the bar, opposite a bleached tapestry, is a triptych of glass cabinets - a bible in one, a mitre with matching white gloves in another, and a the wooden mould of a speculaas Sint in the third. A small blackboard on the mantelpiece near my table has the wifi code written on it in white chalk: ZWARTEPIET.
The café’s geometry - long and narrow, with raised tables opposite the bar and small four-seater booths down the back - feels out of place with its more squat, boxy neighbours. It feels out of time too, somewhere that was forgotten in Brussels’ rush to blandify the city centre for out-of-towners. It isn’t quiet - the radio balring Lana Del Ray sees to that - but there is a subduedness to the place that belies its location barely 50 metres from the wooden shacks of the city’s Christmas market. The combination of pulsing red-and-green disco lights and glitterball scattering a stereoscopic yuletide lightshow across the bar only adds to the off-kilter atmosphere.
Being out of space and time, the tourists have left Le Saint Nicolas largely to the locals, and from my vantage point at a table near the toilets, everyone else looks like a regular. Two men arrive in, swaddled in scarves and thick coats, sharing a hug and an easy camaraderie with the boss. A huddle of Dutch-speaking lads at the bar engage them in a bit of back and forth, but the two groups, and the Romanian family sat nearby, keep largely to themselves. I am, judging by the cups of coffee and the Jupilers, the only one drinking with the season.
Before I moved to Belgium, I’d have scoffed at the idea of going to a Chrtistmas-themed pub like Le Saint Nicolas for a Christmas-themed beer like Gordon Xmas, even as some kind of expression of annoying millennial irony. I used to hate Christmas. I used to hate having to remember whether this was the year I was spending Christmas with my dad in Kerry and New Year’s with my mum in Cork, or vice versa. I hated that, either way, I’d miss out on crucial events in the social calendar of small-town Irish teenagers - illicit drinking pre-midnight mass, or the wren boys and a day in the pub on Stephens’ Day, or New Year’s Eve roaming the town aimlessly until someone set off fireworks at midnight. When we stayed at my mother’s we’d often be joined by my Dublin grandad, and him being a lifelong teetotaler booze didn’t feature prominently in the festivities - save for the ceremonial dousing and lighting of the Chrtistmas pudding. Later, when I was older and of the age when hating things was a creative substitute for a personality, I kept on hating Christmas even after the familiar toing and froing had ended. I was also, as my mother would attest if she was still alive, a terrible person to buy gifts for, and a terrible person at receiving them.
But in the years since I moved to Belgium my views on Christmas have mellowed, and I’ve managed to slough off some of those childhood neuroses. I’ve been able to make a new kind of Christmas for myself, keeping the parts of an Irish Christmas I liked (the films, the real tree, stocking fillers), dropping the bits I didn’t (the christmas cake, visiting relatives, strained family conversations, and embracing some Belgian ones too. Traditions like the arrival of the Sint on December 6, dinner on Christmas Eve, and Belgian Christmas beers.
Are they the pinnacle of Belgium’s brewing tradition? Probably not. Are they less a style than a philosophy of beer? Probably. Belgian Christmas beers may be a disparate, idiosyncratic collective, but at their best they are among my favourite Belgian beers tout court. They have so much going for them. Lots of alcohol. Lots of sugar. A colour palette ranging anywhere from the burnt amber of a Bush de Noël or a Stille Nacht to the obsidian of a Gouden Carolus Christmas. These are rich, dense, absorbing beers honed for warming a cold winter night. The best of them aren’t doused in yuletide, but instead are redolent of chewy overripe stone fruits, Haribo banana foams, melted liquorice, the deep forest forest fruit flavours of a boozy plum pudding without the unpleasant texture of a boiled dessert.
Gordon Xmas may have been the progenitor of the tradition in Belgium, but it is not its best representative. Gordon’s is one-dimensional, but what a dimension. It looks as it tastes: liquid bastaardsuiker, like the charred edges of sugary crème brulée. But it has what other Christmas beers have, a deceptive drinkability. One is enough to set you up for the night, two and your legs will begin to wobble. Three, with the disco lights and the loud music and the cranked up central heating, and you’d be verging on an out-of-body psychedelic experience.
I’m only halfway down my glass and already I can feel its Christmas mischief at work, the muscles in my legs unclenching, the tendons and ligaments loosening just a little. In my belly is tingling warmth.
But it is still only the afternoon, and I’ve still got to go to the football and make dinner at home. So it’ll only be the one for me this time. I know that by the time I get to the bottom of the thistle-shaped glass, I’ll be heavy legged but jolly. I won’t stand up too quickly for fear my legs are wobblier than they appear. I’ll wave off the old barman with a smile and a festive “Merci!”, pass under the beneficent gaze of the Sint, and wait for my ruddy face to be hit with the pungent whiff of hot wine and fatty wurst as I cross the threshold.
*With apologies to Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys
Notes
Le Saint Nicolas almost made it into our upcoming Zine, Pintjes, but Louise talked some sense into me (amybe it will sneak in in a future volume). Don’t forget to join us for the launch of that next Wednesday, if you’re in Brussels. Remember, it’s a limited print run, and we won’t be making another!