#95: The Infinite Possibilities of the Foodmet
Clemenceau food market, and why we're lucky to have it - part 2 of a series on Brussels food markets
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Continuing the food theme, this is pt.2 of a multi-part series on Brussels food markets. Smakelijk!
No one is taking any photos at the Foodmet. The weedy men in their puffy jackets and tight acid-washed jeans loitering by the entrance wouldn’t appreciate it, nor the women manning the Magazin Romanesc butcher’s, for their own reasons. Everyone else is too busy shopping, or selling, queuing or cutting in line. The tired Ukranian men lugging red plastic disposable bags with fag packets sticking out the top. A Black man selling key rings with the Moldovan flag on them. The squat, sharp-elbowed women trailing study shopping caddies in various shades of tartan from one meat stall to the next. Men with grey flecks in long beards manning deep plastic vats of slick olives and bushels of long green scallions. None of these people are of a mind to take a picture for their feed.
If Wolf is what Brussels aspires to eat - and to be seen to eat - then the Clemenceau market in Anderlecht is how the city actually eats. Less Global Brooklyn than Global Brussels - by way of Białystok, Bucharest and Bukavu.
The grounds on which the Clemenceau market takes place have a long food history, having been the site of a city abbatori since the late 1880s, and the Foodmet food market - met being Bruxellois for market - has been open every Friday, Saturday and Sunday since 2015. A big brutalist concrete box of a building, it was constructed in the sprawling abattoir site to accommodate 50 food shops and snack bars and complement the existing restaurants and food stands of the weekend market housed under the slaughterhouse’s gargantuan old wrought iron canopy. Sharing its name with the metro station opposite, the Clemenceau market is really several discrete markets sprawling over 10,000m² next to the Brussels-Charleroi canal in Anderlecht. One is focused on clothes and homeware where you can get shoes and blankets and curtains. One is for second-hand goods and electronic gadgets, where you can buy video players and broken cameras.
And one is for food. Ziggurats of deep red cherries. Bushes of fresh mint and piles of overripe canteloupes. Greek honey. Moroccan olives. Iranian dates. Mangosteens, cassava, and plantains. Nuts salted, roasted and caramelised. Blood oranges and Seville oranges and if it’s the right season then mandarins and clementines too. One stand by the market’s edge sells spices in little plastic bags next to mounds of candied fruit, and its neighbour sells plastic tubs of addictive sesame halva.
Then there are the stands in the centre of the market all selling a variation of the standard fruit and vegetable offerings - onions, garlic, parsley flat and leafy, leeks (it’s always leek season), fennel, cauliflower, carrots, apples, bananas, pineapples, blueberries strawberries, grapes, and more exotic fruits the names of which I’ve never learned. At one of these there’s usually a man deseeding slick watermelons to give promotional chunks to waiting children. On the periphery are a couple of food stalls and more permanent restaurants, where quiet men eat their baguettes stuffed with smoky charred meats and drink cheap stubby bottles of beer and Supermalt with their friends.
The market hums to a constant lowlevel burr broken every few seconds by a fruitseller shouting in French - and, sometimes, Dutch - about their two-for-one offer on almonds or that a kilo of apples costs a couple of euros. Whenever I visit on a Sunday morning I find it an overwhelming sensory experience. When I was a child, we did our food shopping in the Dunnes Stores in the next town over, your standard issue well-lit Irish supermarket with clearly demarcated aisles, discrete sections, and carefully managed variety. Food markets like the one at Clemenceau were new to me when I arrived in Brussels, and they still have something of the alien about them for me. In 16 years I still have not evolved the knack for navigating them, the feel. I can manage the small Sunday market closest to our house at Place Miroir because there are only a couple of fruit and veg stands and the crowds are thinner.
But when I browse the stands under the abattoir’s roof, trying to make myself small so as not to get in the way of the older women who know better what they’re about, I am bewildered. The specialist food stands aside, how am I supposed to differentiate one fruit seller from another? They’re all selling, it appears to me, the same stuff at more or less the same prices. Is there a subtle unspoken language I’m not privy to, one that helps shoppers differentiate this stand from its neighbour? Or is it just pick and stick - choose the one that to your eye has the freshest, the least-bruised produce, the friendliest patter and maybe even a bit of Dutch, and that’s your guy from hereon in?
That is why, when I visit Clemenceau on a Sunday morning, I usually withdraw to the Foodmet building before long. With its enclosed space and limited offer compared to the outdoor market, it’s a halfway house between what I’m used to and what I’m intimidated by. The Foodmet building is a series of large open, high-ceilinged rooms delineated by rough and bare concrete walls. The names above the concessions in the Foodmet - Delafresh, Delicecentre, Royal 2000 - are vague to the point of useless, but it’s easy enough to make out what they’re selling. One section, stinking of brine and fish guts, is sectioned off for the fishmongers. I do not go there.
Another, reeking of sawdust and iron and soundtracked to the hammering and chopping of meat saws on gristle, is for the butchers - Halal and very much not Halal side by side. One butcher just does smoked meats. Another specialises in offal, with honeycombed pouches of tripe hanging behind the counter. Another trades in pigs knuckles, beef ribs, and pork bellies. A stand with Romanian and Moldovan flags hanging from the ceiling sells smoked Transylvanian meats next to big white tubs of Romanian cow cream, Romanian smoked cheese and Timisoara beer.
Flags are a big thing at the Foodmet. Not just Romanian flags and Moldovan flags but Croatian flags, Belgian flags, even a cheese shop draped in red-and-white Swiss flags. The busiest stand on most Sundays is bedecked in Portuguese, Angolan, Mozambican, and Cabo Verdean flags. It sells home to Brussels’ Lusophone community - chalky cheese, cans of Sumol, Nesquik cartons, and frozen bacalhau. Most of its customers - loud men in green Palmeiras jerseys - are happy though just ordering a cold stubby of Super Bock and stand around talking and eating among the wicker baskets of dried beans. On either side of it are a pan-Slavic supermarket selling pickled beets and little green cornichons, tufts of dill and unidentifiable sachets of sauce with cyrillic script on theme, and a Magrebian fruit and veg stall selling excellent little bouquets of chilis. Across from them is a bakery selling sugary Polish donuts and sticky cornuri cu gem caise (Romanian croissants with an apricot filling).
It might be less manic inside the Foodmet compared to the rest of the market but on a Sunday morning it still fairly crackles with a gregarious energy. You can eat here, but dining has been pushed to the periphery. Either side of the building’s main entrance are restaurants selling sausages and grilled meats, pizzas, fried seafood and smoked fish with staring jellied eyeballs, and spinach-stuffed filo pastries. These places create a more permeable boundary between Foodmet and the rest of the market, giving it the feel of a logical, organic extension. There is curation here - someone has to decide after all on the mix of concessions - but it is of the subtle kind. The complex is just scaffolding, an artificial reef installed on the abattoir grounds brought to life by the businesses and customers that populate it. And because these customers come predominantly from the working class communities in Anderlecht, Molenbeek and the rest of Brussels’ croissant pauvre, this means it’s become home to Romanian cheesemongers, Central African butchers, and Maghrebian spice counters.
It’s easy to romanticise or essentialise the Clemenceau market and the Foodmet, to proffer it as a more realistic reflection of workaday Brussels than the second-hand Global Brooklyn aesthetic of a place like Wolf. Clemenceau is popular, and busy, because its prices are low and its customers are poor. You’d get good odds that the stacks of cigarettes that everyone seems to be carrying in their bags have not passed through the normal customs controls, and that there are probably other shady activities going on. Recently, Clemenceau has been in the headlines because of the series of deadly gang-related shootings that have taken place around the metro station next door. Interviewed in their aftermath by local TV, marketgoers were keen to just get on with their lives, having enough to be dealing with already. But for all the fears of “no go” zones in Brussels, there is no edge to Clemenceau. It’s just a market of the kind that every good city should have, and many hundreds around the world do.
Yes, it does put me on edge, make me feel uncomfortable, and force me out of my comfort zone. But that’s less about the market and more about me and my hangups. It’s also why I like going, and push myself to go. To shop, and not to gawk. Unlike Wolf, which makes me feel provincial with its aspirations towards cosmpolitanism, the Foodmet makes me feel like I’m living in a big city, a diverse one, with people I never meet and food I’ve never seen before. It restores my confidence that I am a part of it, too. Vittles founder Jonathan Nunn described a similar market in London as being a place where “the possibilities feel infinite, like you could turn up one day and find something you’ve never seen before.” Where you could buy a punnet of scotch bonnet or some gnarly cassava or rice paper rolls or okra (maybe not) or sesame halva or a couple of spiky dragonfruit. And you know what to do with them.
Come back next week for part 3 - when we’ll see if lightning can strike twice…
Thanks for this vibrant writeup of the Clemenceau food market and Foodmet. I especially like your point that, “there is no edge to Clemenceau. It’s just a market of the kind that every good city should have.…”
Each summer, I have been sending my U.S. university students through the Marché du Midi on a Sunday morning, encouraging them to use an ethnographer’s eye, rather than the invasive gaze of the voyeur. The last couple of years however, I have turned over the thought of sending them through the Clemenceau and Foodmet markets to, as you say, force them further out of their comfort zones. At best, the students will come to see, smell, taste, hear, and perhaps touch a world far different from their own.
Lusophone.. new word for today! Great read, 20+ years in Brussels and never ventured further than Gare du Midi market. Need to expand my horizons.