#80: First Blood
A sinful kebab to start 2025 on a clean slate
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!
Happy New Year to all my subscribers, new and old. An update/preview email of the year ahead at Brussels Notes is coming soon, but for now I’ll leave you with my gluttonous start 2025.
In the listless week between Christmas and New Year’s Day, I spent hours on my phone. I like to think that I’m immune to hype, that at the ripe old age of 38 I am impregnable to social media FOMO. The mere fact that I still use a phrase like FOMO should mark me out as too far gone for that sort of thing. And yet. And yet, when in my scrolling I came across a post from the Brussels smashburger chain Rambo, I did feel the merest twinge of something.
For one day only, the post said, Rambo would be serving mitraillettes in all their Brussels outlets until they ran out of bread. The mitraillette (French for ‘machine gun’) is a bastard mash-up of a kebab, a sandwich, and fries. It originated in Charleroi after WWII and migrated to Brussels, where it’s become a late-night snackbar staple. It’s not very complicated, half a baguette sliced open and stuffed with meat, frietjes, salad, and a sauce. Years ago, as part of the final project of my beer sommelier training, I’d investigated which beer paired best with it (Nanobrasserie L’Ermitage’s Lanterne Pale Ale, for the record), for which I had to eat many of them. But since turning vegetarian during the pandemic, the mitraillette has been off limits. I’ve written previously on these pages about my missing meat. Fast food is where I feel this longing most acutely; Brussels’ fast food ecosystem does not cater all that well to the vegetarian, and if for whatever reason you’re sick of mayonnaise or tired of falafel or you can’t eat cheese or butter, your options are limited.
Why Rambo’s post caught my attention was because they were serving two kinds of mitraillettes - meat, and meat-free. Here was a chance, I thought, for me to indulge in something I’d been denying myself for four years, and so I strategised how to make time to pass by their Rue St Catherine branch at some point on 1 January. But as I was doing so, there was a nagging voice in the back of my mind that wouldn’t quieten. It was saying, “Remember how fake meat is not good but actually bad?”. Another voice chimed in, admonishing my gluttony and telling me I’d feel bad afterwards if I went. And then I remembered a bit by Irish Comedian Dylan Moran about Catholic shame and eating biscuits. I was not raised Catholic, but some of that Catholic guilt and shame seems to have seeped through my Irish pores all the same.
The voice continued. “Wasn’t the New Year supposed to be a time for being good and sober and restrained, an opportunity to bed in good habits and banish the bad ones?” About bad decisions Mave Brennan once wrote, “the impulse towards good involves choice, and complicated, and the impulse towards bad is hideously simple and easy.” In those languorous Yuletide days, the hideously simple sounded pretty good from my soporific perspective.
Not long after 1pm on New Year’s Day, I sat down at a table for two with my back to Rue St Catherine and a red tray in front of me, on which was a silver foil package. The mitraillette I’d received from the friendly waiter was a hot and spicy and stodgy mess. Its combination of carbs-on-carbs was a familiar throwback to Irish lunches of lasagna with a side of chips and a baton of garlic bread. I’d gone for sweet potato fries instead of the orthodox potato potato - a healthier choice, I thought. The vegetables were there, I think, hidden underneath layers of Rambo’s thinly-shaved proprietary not-meat meat filling, and lashings of hot special sauce. There may have even been pickles in there too, but I tried not to think about that.
It was best eaten in one go, without drink breaks, or stops to take a breath. To pause would have been to give myself time to consider my folly, to give succour to guilt and shame, to be confronted with the rapaciousness of my hunger and of my bad decisions that had led me to this place and this meal. I tried to shovel the food into my mouth before the baguette disintegrated while wrestling with it so it didn’t spill out its guts all over my fingers, my shirt, and my lap. I was thankful the mirror on the ceiling was too far away and too warped for me to see in its reflection the depths of my depravity.
There’s a long tradition of starting the new year in Brussels on a depraved note (what does it say of my sad little life that a kebab on New Year’s Day reaches the threshold of debauchery); in the 19th century workers were often given the day off on the first Monday after Epiphany, which they would spend getting up to all sorts. Such was the revelry of this lundi perdu the city’s mayors tried to outlaw the tradition, and its celebration eventually only declined with the onset of WWI. In Antwerp they still mark Verloren Maandag with the eating of sausage rolls. My vegetarian mitraillette was certainly an improvement on that povere maaltijd.
I had it eaten in less than 15 minutes. Sitting there, catching my breath and licking the last of the sauce from my greasy fingers, I started to wonder how I’d gotten myself so tangled up living this cowed life of self-flagellating asceticism. How it was that I couldn't just sit here and enjoy the mitraillette for what it was, a bit of a treat in an otherwise grey week. Why I always bought the second best-reviewed computer or set of headphones, how I was happy to settle for the botched haircut or the disappointing lunch. Of course, I know why, really. I didn’t deserve those good things, or nice treats, and I certainly shouldn’t really enjoy them.
It’s a painful self-abnegation, which in its worst manifestations is a kind of self-martyrdom, that occludes my ability to ever really enjoy myself. I’ve tried to wriggle out from underneath it, resolving at the start of recent years to be kinder to myself, to treat myself a little more, do things I like more frequently, and let myself enjoy them in the moment. Indulge for indulgence’s sake. After all, why not? Why shouldn’t I eat it? I had nothing to do, nowhere to be, and there was little else open. The New Year’s pieties could wait.
In fact, debasing myself like this on the first day of the year would clear the decks for the rest of the month. It obliterated any lingering holiday anxiety about overindulgence and a necessary January course correction. I could only be good from here on in, having been so bad on day one. The year’s penance could begin another day. For now, I was a piggish St Augustine. I was a gluttonous King Herrod, and I had killed my good intentions in their crib before they had a chance to take their revenge.