#60: Kalimera Brussels!
A café that’s also a portal to an alternate, Mediterranean, Brussels
I’m writer Eoghan Walsh and this is my weekly Brussels Notes newsletter about the experience of living in the Belgian capital (if you’re not already a part of the community, you can subscribe here). In this week’s article I talk about “thin places” and portals to a multiversal Brussels.
On a recent Sunday lunchtime I found myself sat with a small beer by an open window at Bij/Chez Jansens & Jansens and waiting for the soup I’d ordered for lunch. There was a welcome breeze coming through the open window, welcome because I’d been caught on the hop by the unexpected arrival of a long-delayed summer, and after a sticky Sunday morning walking around Kuregem I was hot.
In front of the bar the pavement was a mess because they’d dug it up for a new bike lane but they hadn’t put down any asphalt, so the café had had to put its mottled school chairs arranged two-by-two in the rubble alongside a couple of uncertain tables. Down the street towards the station the eternal roadworks for the metro line that might never be finished were quiet because it was Sunday. Cars were piled up awkwardly in a makeshift illegal parking lot, and across the street, between the trees, there was a boarded-up shopfront and visible through leaf cover was the word “gnoles” printed in large black letters on a yellow background sandwiched between two bands of red.
I was hungry and already feeling the first flush of the beer, and my mind began to wander. Sitting in this faintly Greek café, I started to think about something that had crossed my Twitter feed earlier in the week, the concept of the “thin place” - that there are places where the distance between the temporal and the immaterial is compressed. Places that, essentially, carry in them a significant spiritual resonance. Writer Oliver Burkeman described them as places with “emotional residue” where the “walls are weak” between dimensions.
I wouldn’t normally subscribe to some of the spiritual otherworldliness behind the notion of the thin place, but I wasn’t ready to dismiss the theory that there are places in the world that can, if you are in the right frame of mind, give you a feeling of being close to another dimension, an alternate branch of the multiverse to the one in which we inhabit. Maybe it was the heat and the beer. Maybe I watched too many episodes of Sliders when I was younger. Or maybe it was because sitting and drinking in Bij/Chez Jansens & Jansens and places like it - less thin places than portals to other possible worlds - always get me thinking whether this is what more of the city might have looked and felt like if the Spanish had never left 300 years ago, and Brussels had remained a Mediterranean outpost in Northern Europe.
Look past the admittedly abysmal weather and it’s not such a fanciful idea. The city was run by the Spanish Hapsburgs for centuries before Bavarian prince Max Emmanuel and the rest of the royal court ceded control of the place to the Austrian wing of the family monarchy. There are still remnants of Spanish that survived in the now little-spoken Marolles dialect and echoed in several street names. And not to lean too hard into stereotypes, but consider Brussels’ surfeit of churches and the laissez-faire Catholicism. Its casual disregard for the public realm, loud and chaotic streets, abominable drivers, shoddy infrastructure, and the hardwired je m’en foutisme attitude which is really just a northern mirror of Iberian mañana culture. Bruxellois love food too and are good at making it and eating it, in a way that makes their decision to stick with the Spanish and not the Dutch in the 17th century schism more relatable, and their decision to revolt against their northern neighbours two centuries later understandable.
It also could explain how successive new arrivals from around the Mediterranean bowl after WWII were able to make their homes here - first the Italians and the Spanish from the northern rim, and later the Turks and Moroccans from the southern. The Greeks came too, but never in as great a number as their neighbours. And while there were Greek enclaves in Molenbeek - where the last Greek bar is about to close - and around Noord station, there is no extant Greektown to rival Lusophone Saint Gilles, the Hispanic area around Gare du Midi, or Turkish Sint-Joost. There is a strip of gyros takeaways down a back alley behind the Grand Place, but that’s for the tourists and the nighttime crowd.
Around the corner from Jansens & Jansens is the subdued Greek Orthodox Cathedral of the Archangels, but otherwise the café is a bit of an anomaly, surrounded on its street corner by Brazilian butchers, Asturian social clubs, and the Express Afro-Indian supermarket. But in any case the place has worn Hellenism lightly since opening in 1985. It has all the hallmarks of a typical Belgian brown café: hard wooden benches worn concave in the middle, beaten up terrazzo linoleum, and wood panelling aged and cracked like old lizard skin. Tacked onto this are subtle Greek touches, like a sun-bleached yellowish map tacked onto one wall, and a blue-and-white sticker of the Greek flag stuck on a mirror in amongst ads for Chimay and Radio Contact.
Neither of the two women working - one behind the bar, one floating around the kitchen - the Sunday I was in appeared to speak Greek (I heard a mix of English, Dutch and French, depending on the customer they were addressing). The food menu, written in fading marker pen on a whiteboard screwed into the side of the kitchen, is the most obvious indication of the café’s Greek heritage, though with an overt Belgian influence. Tarama and spaghetti bolognaise. Calamari and cheese croquettes. Tzatziki and frietjes. The kitchen isn’t hidden away in a back room behind the bar, it's the first thing you see when you enter the café. Under a rusty extractor fan are a pair of gnarly gas hobs and twin fryers, in front of which is an old deli counter, glassfronted and streaked with age and grime, the kind of one you might see in an old grocer’s, or where a night shop might store the strange cheeses and yoghurts I’ve never seen anyone buy. I could see my soup on one of the hobs, warming up in a flimsy little pan, disturbed occasionally by one of the wait staff so it didn’t stick to the bottom.
The man at the table next to me had a plate of cucumber, tomato and feta alongside a big basket of bread, and I could smell the peppery olive oil from across our tables. Was hot soup on a close day really a good idea? Too late, because my soup gets delivered, starchy and sweet and with an unmistakable if unorthodox aniseed hit of dill. Sitting there in the bar, looking out the window and eating my soup, I wasn’t thinking how much I disliked dill. I was thinking of Hersonissos, of the strip of bars along the harbour, drinking Ouzo and Raki by the sea on a hot night, and cradling a monster hangover the next morning.
I’m bumped out of my reverie by a man with a bulky Berghaus suitcase and pink summer shirt sitting down opposite with a sweaty pint of Maes and a guidebook. He can see the station from where he’s sitting, and the red iron railway bridge over the boulevard, but I can only hear the rumble of the trains rolling over it into Gare du Midi. With the heat and the food and the smells and trains and the waiting tourists and the chaos outside I could trick myself into thinking I was in any station neighbourhood between Cadiz and Athens.
But I wasn’t. I was still in Belgium. What gave it away? It wasn’t so much that no one was smoking, or drinking coffee (everyone was, like me, on beer). It’s that no one was talking to anyone else (or themselves). The place was dead quiet.
As I’m getting down to the dregs of my soup a loud crowd of younger people come through the door with an eye on half a dozen chairs and a couple of tables. Outside the clouds rolling in from the north had already chased the heat out of the day.
The spell was broken. It was time to depart this astral plane and return to grey old northern European Brussels.
Miscellaneous Notes
Normal service is - almost! - resumed after I went through a bit of a mild depressive period there at the beginning of the month. Back on a relatively even keel now, and newsletters should return both to the weekly rhythm and the Wednesday publishing slot.
I am still hoping to get to La Rose Blanche before it closes, and would love to catch the documentary made a few years back about the bar, and the now-vanished Greek community in Molenbeek
Expect staycation-related content - a lot of it - in upcoming entries as we’re not going on holidays this year. In a related note, I need recommendations about what to do in this city - drop suggestions in the comments, or email me ;)