#101: Park Life!
Or, The Unbearable Lightness of Being Drunk in a Park. Previewing Pintjes Vol.2
This is a sneak peek at the next edition of Pintjes, a collaborative zine celebrating Brussels’ bar culture by me (the words) and Selkies (the illustrations). This edition is all about park bars - guinguettes, pavilions, buvettes, and pop-ups.
Join us for the launch at GIST on Wednesday 28 May - details here.
What’s the best beer I’ve ever had? Easy. Zinnebir. Predictable, sure, but no less true for it, even though my answer is less about the beer than about the circumstances of its drinking. Not a singular drinking experience, but an accretion of them, layered one over the other like a frame of multiple exposed film until they coalesce into one memory. A memory of me, and Zinnebir, on the terrace of Bar Eliza.
I think of all the times I sat next to that dilapidated pavilion, perched awkwardly on uncomfortable reclaimed wooden furniture as above me late-afternoon sunlight filtered through the high canopy of oak and linden boughs. I listen to the squawking of nest limegreen parakeets and the squealing of unseen children. My own children are still in school and it’s a while away yet before they’ll need collecting. It’s Friday, and in front of me is a freshly-poured glass of Zinnebir, foamy and sweating just a little in the afternoon heat.
Bar Eliza operated out of Koekelberg’s Parc Elisabeth, part of a wave of new bars that opened as the city embraced officially-sanctioned outdoor drinking in the 2010s. Some of these were housed in seasonal pop-up tents; others, like Bar Eliza, occupied previously abandoned or unloved pavilions and sheds. Many were, as in Koekelberg, volunteer initiatives plugged into the water and electricity mains and cobbled together with a couple of beer taps, a fridge, and a lot of thirsty neighbours.
Brussels has a lot of parks - by some measures it’s one of Europe’s greenest cities. It’s also a grey and wet place, one where we withdraw indoors to see out the wintertime in damp and cold hovels and awaiting the arrival of Spring and with it the return of the guinguettes, the pavilions, and their terraces. We may not be as practiced at it as our counterparts in Berlin or Munich, but we’ve taken park drinking to our hearts.
Bar Eliza was gloriously ramshackle. Like the Buvette Saint Sebastian or Parckfarm or Kiosk Radio, it was a little miracle, a vibrant act of resistance against the city’s maddening, stultifying immobility. By all the logic of this infernal city, they shouldn’t survive. And yet, they do.
At least, some do. Bar Eliza celebrated its last summer season in 2019, and we’ve been waiting nearly six years for the permanent replacement promised by the commune. More recently, guinguette season was in jeopardy because of the inability of Brussels’ politicians to form a government in time to authorise the permits.
It’s a rare thing these days that us Bruxellois can agree on the evolution of our city, but we can agree on this: our new park bars have been an unalloyed positive addition.
So, cherish them, the sun, and their terraces.
Bliss it was in the dusk to be alive. But to be slightly tipsy in a park was just heaven.
