#93: Thank Gado Gado it's Friday

Or, How to Eat at Wolf - part 1 of a series on Brussels food markets

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!

Continuing March’s food theme, this is pt.1 of a multi-part series on Brussels food markets. Smakelijk!

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We’re at Wolf for dinner, again. It’s always Wolf. The “Sharing Food Market” in a reconverted bank lobby in central Brussels has become the default choice for us now, whenever we know we’re going to be in central Brussels with the children and will need somewhere to eat. Wolf satisfies our basic criteria for a restaurant: a) that it is vegetarian-friendly, in the sense of having more than one meat-free menu option; b) that it is child-friendly, or not actively child-averse; and c) that it has decent beer.

We have one child whose tastes are (relatively) adventurous, one whose palate is more Calvinist, and two parents who just want to eat something with a bit of variety, a bit of flavour, fast food that doesn’t look like fast food, in a place that isn’t wipe-clean. Wolf wins out because the children can have something beige, and the grown-ups can have Syrian flatbread, or Greek tzatziki, or Chinese baos, or an Ethiopian injera platter.

We’re coming in on this particular evening off the back of spending two hours at the Ancienne Belgique listening to Flemish children’s entertainer Kapitein Winokio, and everyone’s hungry. It’s Syrian plates from My Tannour for us, pizza for N, and a bowl of buttery scampi for Z. We find a table - just about - in an antechamber off the main dining area. Above our heads, hanging between shiny stainless steel ventilation ducts and exposed electricity cabling are rosy Chinese lanterns and hidden speakers pumping out what sounds like Reggaetón.

At a nearby table, there’s a huddle of Latin American men loudly gesticulating at each and holding close a bottle of hot sauce they’ve looked to have brought themselves. Milling around in the main space by the large circular bar are tourists in Bermuda shorts and backpacks and staff with tattoos and backwards-facing blue Wolf-branded baseball caps. The place is, as usual, jammed, with the dining area’s wooden jigsaw piece-like communal tables and benches full and several harassed-looking women in headscarves attempting to navigate a passage through the crowd massed at the bar, dragging in their wake a retinue of baby harnesses, oversized buggies and greasy children.

Once we’ve sat down on our upcycled school chairs and scanned the QR code peeling off the reclaimed-wood table, I see a couple of tables over from us neighbours from our street. Their children are already halfway through their dinner, plates half empty, hands sticky and dirty napkins in a pile next to them. We share a quiet nod of solidarity. We’re too near a door which keeps letting a draught in. A child is crying somewhere, unseen. These are not the conditions for a quiet family meal. The décor is unoriginal - the cartoon wolf mascot stuck on every available surface screams corporate wackiness - and the food, when it finally arrives, inauthentic.

Wolf shouldn’t work, but it does. I shouldn’t like it, but I can’t seem to help myself.

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Wolf describes itself as a sharing food market - the idea being that you order and collect your food from one of the kitchens that ring the main dining area and take your food and eat it wherever you like - but really it’s a shopping centre food court for the social media generation, transplanted to an urban redevelopment project. Alongside the large bar in the centre of the hall, there’s a small brewery installed in the back and dining areas spun off the main hall in smaller spaces. Most of the food concessions are open on both sides, one reserved as the ordering/serving counter and the other lined with some high stools for diners who want to watch their food being prepared. Chiselled into distressed wooden displays above each kitchen are their designated “categories”: Poke/Sushi, Rosticceria, Asian, Meat, Dim Sum/Baos.

The restaurants are a mixture of established businesses running under their own name (La Piola from St Josse, My Tannour from St Gilles), established businesses running under different names or concepts (Toukoul, Bollyfood Stories), and other homeless food “concepts” (Eaters). The sense the whole set-up gives is that who occupies the concessions is less important than what they’re making and how it contributes to the overall mix of cuisines and content generation.

In an article for the New York Review of Architecture, writer Aaron Timms described places like Wolf as “culinary theme parks”. He traced their origin, in New York at least, back to the opening of Chelsea Market in 1997. These are places where, Timms wrote, a “fast casual platter is consumed, in more or less unhurried fashion, under the disinfectant light of an increasingly generic city.” Outriders of gentrification, they were intended by the asset managers and investors that owned them to add a sheen of cosmopolitanism and youth to otherwise corporate real estate projects.

Which is exactly what Wolf was when it opened in 2020 as part of the real estate redevelopment of the large former headquarters of a Belgian bank on a wide corner of the Wolvengracht in central Brussels. Apartments and student accommodation supplanted offices on the upper floors of the building and the food court took over the ground floor lobby.

Welcome to Global Brooklyn

I have never been to New York, or Singapore - another city, which Vittles founder Jonathan Nunn cites as another aesthetic touchstone of contemporary food courts like Wolf. But I have been to London and Berlin and Rotterdam and know an outpost of Global Brooklyn when I see one. The term was coined by researchers Mateusz Halawa and Fabio Parasecoli to describe the “transnational aesthetic regime” of places like Wolf. Its signifiers are, the pair wrote, beautiful trash, the performance of authenticity by the restaurant and the performative consumption by diners, and the emphasis on the ethos of manual labour.

All of these are on show at Wolf. Exposed steel girders, Edison bulbs, reclaimed wood, mismatched, recycled furniture. In Wolf’s main dining hall there are leftover bank vault fixtures, an old sewing machine, and by the entrance to the toilets - opposite the merch stand - the kind of retro photobooth you might find on a street corner in Friedrichshain. Diners can watch chefs work dough into a tannour oven or pizzaiolos shuffle dough into their domed woodfired oven, everyone wearing blue or white Wolf-branded t-shirts, many with the sleeves rolled up their biceps like 1950s pin-ups. Think more Mercato Metropolitano over Borough Market, Rotterdam’s Martkhal rather than Barcelona’s La Boqueria.

None of this is accidental. It is, as Nunn wrote for Vittles of Wolf’s London equivalents, heavily curated. The owners of Wolf have been to the same places I have, and others. But, Soho, Friedrichshain, Singapore, Chelsea - none of these bear any relation to Brussels in 2025. That’s the point, though. As Timms wrote, “[l]ocalism is anathema to the regime of the food hall…the point of the food hall is to eradicate difference, to secure the city as an asset class through the imposition of a bland uniformity.” Of the Brussels holy trinity - beer, chocolate, and fries - only the former is prominent at Wolf, thanks to the on-site brewery. Chocolate is largely absent. Frietjes are an afterthought, taking a backseat to baskets of sweet potato fries served with paper cups of sriracha mayo.

I - a self-declared milquetoast leftie - should hate the place. I mean, as corporate set-dressing goes, it’s not even subtle: it’s in a bank, for god’s sake. And yet. For all that Wolf is an imitation of an imitation, third-hand cosmopolitanism, I can’t help but like it. Because it works. Because it makes us feel like we’re living in a big city. And because it’s easy and makes me feel that I’ve still got some juice left in me.

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German poet Heinrich Heine once wrote that at the end of the world he’d like to come to the Low Countries, because there everything happens fifty years later. Belgium might have caught up with the world a little bit, but there is still a sense that its hospitality industry is lagging three or four years behind some of its bigger neighbours, and that Wolf is the late-crashing crest of a wave that is already ebbing in Paris and Amsterdam. But we’re happy it’s hitting us at all.

Wolf works for Brussels - a poor, unhappy, provincial city whatever its international pretensions - in the same way other outposts of Global Brooklyn fit their cities. Halawa and Parasecoli describe the trend as a “dynamic of refraction that connects the provincial to the cosmopolitan” - in other words, they help people living in smaller cities feel like they’re living in the big city.

It’s “less about passively expressing a given social status and more about reaching for it, performatively trying to become someone or someplace.” Brussels is susceptible to Wolf because we are an insecure city, and with good reason.

Unsure of our place in this country, unsure of our politics, what language we speak, where we’re from, afraid of the creeping poverty, and the imminent collapse of the city. We hang onto any hint of second hand metropolitanism. “Look, we’re a big city too,” Wolf seems to be screaming to the locals as much as the tourists. And us diners too are complicit. “You see!” I and my fellow diners might be shouting into our fusion burritos, “we told you! Brussels is a global city! I’m still cool even though I’m a dad with stains from my child’s dirty hands down my t-shirt!”

This Wolf is a Unicorn

Brussels is a hard city to get anything done, and a hard city to make a success of anything - especially in the restaurant business. You only have to look at the fate of another food court that opened not long after Wolf to see that its success was not inevitable. The Gare Maritime Food Market opened in the old goods sheds at Tour & Taxis with a similar concept - food concessions selling street food with a communal dining area and a large beer bar. Only, to visit the vast space now is to feel as if you’ve gotten lost and ended up in an airport departure lounge. The food “concepts” have changed too frequently to make visits predictable or consistent and the food is nothing special despite the star names behind it. It is anonymous and offputting where Wolf is idiosyncratic (within the limits of the Global Brooklyn ideal) and energetic.

Even the accusations that it’s an outrider of gentrification can be undermined. Yes, it’s part of a larger residential housing scheme, but one that is replacing office blocks in a dead corner of central Brussels, barely a couple of hundred metres from the city’s central boulevards. Nor is it replacing or undercutting an existing food market; the old fish market at the Vismet, the covered market at Place St Géry, and the Centrale Hallen market pavilions were all demolished or closed down at least 40 years ago. The worst you can level at Wolf is that it’s part of the further Disneyfication of downtown Brussels, where the city’s governance and investment is directed towards luring, and servicing, tourists. But that is only partially true, to judge by the various accents and languages you hear on any particular visit.

Maybe it’s the insecure provincial in me talking, but it feels like a small miracle that Wolf exists. That it exists, and that it works. That people are here eating, locals and tourists alike. Spaniards and Belgians and knots of foreign exchange students alongside office workers on their lunch break. That it has survived and thrived in a city struggling to maintain an even keel, which has taken a decade long beating from terrorists, a pandemic, and an energy crisis. It may be that Wolf turns out to be a unicorn, unique and unreplicable, which makes me all the more inclined to defend it.

Really though, I may just be intellectualising my love of the place to give myself cover. More than a class warrior, lately I am an exhausted parent, and my radicalism has been dulled by a decade manning the barricades of early childhood. I am at this stage of my life an easy mark, and Wolf has my number. That’s why I keep coming back. Eating out is also supposed to be a treat. I don’t want to decamp the home dinner table battlefield to a new, less familiar and more public battlefield. I do not want to be screamed at by a truculent eight year old in front of strangers, and pay €35 for the privilege. It’s also a rare celestial event when all our appetites align, so the concentrated choice Wolf offers is a godsend.

It has the kind of buzz and exoticism that children find entertaining - controlled and sufficiently familiar, and just a little raucous. They enjoy it, we enjoy it, and we don’t have to pay through the nose for the experience. Yes, it offers a variety of the heavily-curated kind, but it’s enough to satisfy wary children, and I can get my culinary kicks elsewhere if I need to. Yes, the place is designed for instagrammability. Yes, the food has been disconnected from its original context and diluted in the process. Yes, it looks, feels and smells like any of the 1,000 other outposts of Global Brooklyn you’ll find across continental Europe. But Wolf works, for me, for my neighbours, and for all the other families crammed in there on a Saturday evening.

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I’m back again a few weeks later, this time on my own. I tell myself it’s because I’ve seen on Instagram they’ve a new beer on, but in reality I’m probably just too tired to make a decision on where to eat and so slouched there out of habit. From the Bollyfood Stories stand I’ve ordered a vegetarian “naanwich”, and the black puck I’ve been given which will light up when my meal is ready has a sticker on it with a stylised cartoon of a Sikh man surrounded by the words Bollyfood Stories in English and Hindi. On a nearby table there’s a large, rowdy group of English-speaking Lads. A stag weekend would be my best guess, as they’ve all got on cardboard cut-out masks of a man that is presumably the groom. One of their number is loitering by a bouncy castle that’s been inflated in the back room, but is empty of children. I hear another one say to his friend, “This place is pretty cool”. The sound system is playing Young Folks by Peter Bjorn and John.

Maybe it is all just another tool in the arsenal of international capital. Maybe we are just, as Aaron Timms says, “self-lobotomizing one Laksa at a time”. Maybe we will, as he argues, be too busy eating our baos and our avocado toasts and our really very crispy sweet potato fries to notice the city around us is becoming increasingly inhospitable. But I don’t know, I think Brussels has a ways to go yet.

My puck flashes and I collect my wrap. Taking a break to mop up sauce spilling all over my fingers, I gaze up at the enormous face of a cartoon wolf. Five years it had taken me to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath its pastel whiskers. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two moutabal-scented tears trickled down the sides of my nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. I had won the victory over myself. I loved Wolf Sharing Food Market.

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Come back next week for part 2 - where I visit the place that shows you how Brussels really eats and not how Brussels would like you to think it eats.