On Routine (II): Greenwich Me Time

One Brussels café that is highlighted in bold on my mental map of the city centre, another one that isn't - and why "soul" might be what distinguishes them

On Easter Tuesday last year, I found myself adrift in central Brussels with nothing to do. Not a scenario I find myself in very often, and when I do I’m not sure what to do. It was late afternoon, so I’d no work to do. I had no errands to run or kids to pick up, as they’d decamped to The Netherlands on a family holiday. I was not, as is usually the reason I’m downtown, on a mission from one place to another, working to the tempo of a ticking clock. I had no clock at all in fact, my phone’s battery having given out. I was walking down the Rue des Chartreux - though I prefer its Dutch name, the meatier Kartuizersstraat - when I realised I had dead time on my hands, and I panicked. I don’t deal well when structure falls away. I thought about ducking into the little boxy Italian deli to calm myself with a couple of bottles of chinotto, a terrible affectation I’d brought back with me from a holiday in the Bay of Naples during the pandemic summer of 2021.

But I kept going down the street past the statue of the pissing dog until I was in front of a bar with large marble tables and a big menu stand blocking the narrow footpath. Tight, gold san serif font painted on large plate windows behind the tables spelled out the name: Greenwich Modern. I knew of this place, its reputation as a chess café. I’d walked past it hundreds of times, but I’d never once been inside. But usually when faced with dead time I end up going for a beer somewhere. I paused at the entrance, moved to go in, then reversed back out again. The Greenwich was unknown to me, an uncharted spot on my mental map of downtown Brussels cafés. But what had I to lose? I stopped hokey cokey-ing and crossed the threshold.

Inside, it’s very teal. And clean. Which is understandable, as it’s undergone significant renovations in recent years. The cushions of the banquette on which I sit down are deep green and marshmallow soft. They curve in a thoughtful arc around the wooden partitions separating one sturdy marble-topped table from its neighbour. The walls are green too, dotted with botanical-themed glass friezes and culminating in a teal high-domed ceiling with gold leaf cornices and mouldings. From across the street pink neon light leaks through the windows from a neighbouring tattoo parlour. There are trees too, frond-ish plants of the kind you see in old photos of 19th century Brussels cafés. It’s a big space comprising two rooms, with a larger dining room space in the back under a glass ceiling. But it’s not heavily populated. There are discrete groups of loud Italians, Spanish and Dutch speakers - tourists, by the look of their puffy jackets and flustered manner - dispersed around the front room. Underneath the lingering new car smell is a hint of emulsified eggs and chip fat coming from the hidden kitchen. 

Despite the clatter of their conversation and the Bossa Nova oozing out of the speakers, it’s quiet. That this new iteration of the Greenwich is not pitching itself as a beer bar is evidenced by the bar crowded with spirits bottles and the separate cocktail station. But they do have beer, and I order a Mort Subite Blanche. Service is slow but apologetic; there’s only one person taking and delivering the orders. 

It’s nice here, and while I drink I write in my notebook: “why have I not been here before?” How, despite its reputation and its location, had I not been in for a drink in over a decade, when I’ve pretty much gone to every single bar within a 300 metre radius of its entrance. Well, I’d never been there because I’d never been there, if that makes sense? When I first arrived in Brussels and undertook my cartographical survey of its downtown bars, unconsciously compiling the collection of places I would rotate through over the next decade, I'd failed to even consider the Greenwich. It might have been closed at the time, and when it reopened my list had already calcified, my habits were set, and it had not made my rota of reliable places I liked to go.

And because I didn’t know it, I was reluctant to visit. I like, as I made clear last week, predictability. I like knowing what I’m going to find in a café, what I’m able to drink, and what the other customers are going to be like. I knew none of these things about the Greenwich so avoided it. There was something else too; the other places on my list, I knew - or thought I knew - what drinking there “said” about me. If I suggest meeting someone at Le Coq for an interview, I’m trying consciously or otherwise to project an image of myself for my interlocutor (in that case, probably someone who’s probably Dutch-speaking, in the creative industries, likes good beer, and thinks he’s got some cachet from drinking at a “rough diamond” so close to Brussels’ tourist hypercentre). 

What would the Greenwhich say about me? I didn’t know, and wasn’t prepared to find out. Was I, however, prepared to give it a second chance? Maybe. The place did have some cracking toilets, honest to goodness Water Closets built into a wrought iron cage, the steps leading down to them worn into smooth, matching grooves from a century of pissers. But I wasn’t sure. Sitting there on a sunny April afternoon the Greenwich felt like it was missing something. What that something was became clearer to me a while later when - finding myself again with some dead time last week - I went for a beer somewhere that has prime real estate on my regular café route.

Superficially, the Greenwich and À La Mort Subite have much in common. They’re both of the same early-20th century vintage, and share similar features - the two-part doorway with the little antechamber separated by a curtain, freestanding metal radiators, mirrors on the walls, high ceilings. They both are designed somewhere between Art Nouveau and Art Deco, though I’ve also read it described as neo-Louis XVI. There’s stained glass here too, though largely relegated to the toilets.

The beers are the same as well, more or less coming from the eponymous brewery and its owner Heineken. And I order a Mort Subite Blanche too. Seems only right. On the early Tuesday evening I’m in, the crowd is not altogether different either - I can hear a smattering of Dutch, Italian, and hurried Spanish from the tables around me. But unlike the Greenwich there’s no piped-in music, and their conversations are hard to tune into above the screeching of the coffee machine, the clinking of bottles, and the general din of the place. The Mort Subite is loud. Its waiters wear matching black waistcoats, some wearing ties and others bowties. There are many of them, certainly more than at the Greenwich, and they are a surly bunch, brutally efficient without being rude; one at the table next to me clicks his pen and cocks his hip, while an Italian couple to makeup their minds.

The Mort Subite has been buffeted by the same economic winds as the Greenwich through the years, and especially during the pandemic, but has managed to keep itself more or less intact. Well, intact isn’t quite the word. Though the place feels solid, like it might survive an earthquake, it also looks worn out. Tables are chipped of their varnish. The benches have a firm groove worn into them by a century of resting arses. The mirrors are streaky, and the closer to the toilet you sit, the stronger the smell of bleach becomes. The walls are yellowed and the pictures of King Gambrinus are equally jaundiced. On the pillars holding up the roof chunks of wood are missing, the plaster is cracked, and there are ragged holes where coathangers have fallen off. Upstairs the balcony is closed off - I have never seen it open - presumably for safety reasons.

But the Mort Subite isn’t really worn out, it’s worn in. It looks every inch the interwar Parisian café it masqueraded as in the 2015 film The Danish Girl; the same place choreographer Maurice Béjart described in the 1960s as “an old café full of old mouldings and faded mirrors whose name exploded in pseudo-erotic-gothic red neon.” I can imagine the waiters would probably consider any attempt to update or modernise the interior a personal affront.

The Greenwich on the other hand is, and I apologise in advance for the neologism, what the Mort Subite might feel like if it had been yassified, if it had been subjected to a glow-up. It is clean, or cleaner, and tastefully decorated in the contemporary style while being sensitive to the café’s historic fabric. It feels, I think, like it is trying to be two things at once - modern and traditional - managing neither, and having had its soul exorcised in the process. The Mort Subite, for all its flaws and its creaking joints, steadfastly remains itself in the face of trends and its own decrepitude. A brilliant, alive, and lived-in place, with soul by the bucketload. That is why it is on my internal itinerary of reliable bars, highlighted in bold and with a big star over it.

Thinking I was maybe being unfair to the Greenwich, I wanted to stress test this theory the next time I was on the Kartuizenstraat. But I was out of luck. Because the Greenwich, at least in the guise in which I visited, no longer exists. When I pass by on the way for more chinotto, the lettering on the window now says “Café Delune”, and checking online its Instagram account says “closed until further notice”. Such a shame. It could have been a contender.

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Miscellaneous Notes

• My other downtown “reliables” are, if you’re interested: Le Coq, Les Brasseurs, Toone, A La Bécasse, Gist, Mokafé (if it’s Christmas or I’m with the children), and The Lord Byron (more on this next week, maybe). Where am I missing?

• Another thing that got me into chinotto, which I was reading during that holiday, was Helen Atlee’s brilliant The Land Where Lemons Grow.

• One of Brussels’ newly-appointed stadsdichters (city poet laureate) Lisette Ma Neza has published the first of 19 poems she’s been commissioned to write for her term, which runs until 2026.

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