#73: The Best Cafés in Brussels - A Zine

Introducing Pintjes Vol.1, launching December 11

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! But in the meantime, do we have an announcement for you…

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WE MADE A ZINE!

Around midway through the July just gone, a thread of posts featuring illustrations by my Brussels-based friend and illustrator Louise (AKA Selkies) passed by my Twitter timeline. They were sketches of her local pub in Schaarbeek, and I remarked to her in a reply how much they reminded me of the line drawings from a famous old book about Brussels’ café’s and estaminets at the start of the 20th century.

This descended into a mutual love-in, and before we knew it we were sat over drinks talking about our respective love for print, for the warmth of the analogue object in a digital world. Soon we were fleshing out an idea for a potential collaboration - a zine, produced by us (words by me, illustrations by Louise), with a bit of a DIY aesthetic (thank you, local print shop), and with an extremely limited print run (when it’s gone, it’s gone.

We called it Pintjes.

And what is Pintjes? It’s a limited-run zine about our favourite Brussels cafês, focusing each time on a different location or area in Brussels, and featuring a series of pub vignettes by me and excellent illustrations by Louise.

Vol.1 will focus on downtown Brussels, the (approximate) site of the city’s founding, and the neighbourhood that’s home to some of our favourite boozers, which also happen to be among the best in the whole city.

It’s also where we’re going to host the launch event for Pintjes Vol.1.

When: 11 December, 19.30

Where: Lord Byron, Kartuizersstraat 8, 1000 Brussel, België

What: Zine launch + extremely limited sales of prints of a selection of the illustrations in Vol.1 + drinks at Brussels’ best Belgo-Greek bar (Thanks Luca)

To whet your appetite, here’s a sneak preview of Pintjes Vol.1, to give you a sense of where it’s coming from, and where we hope it will go.

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SNEAK PREVIEW - Maan Onder Water

What makes for a great pub? What is it about a particular café or bar that makes it stand out from its rivals? The patron saint of beer writers George Orwell knew well enough. For him, the ideal pub meant a fire in the corner, dimpled mugs of Bitter, ideally in pewter and held with a handle. It meant pub games, space for children and families, some food available from a small kitchen behind the bar but nothing so fancy as to require proper table service. Quiet, or at least the absence of artificial distractions from the radio (and presumably if he had been writing a decade or two later, television too). Bar staff that know the clientele intimately (not like that), and who are obliging when it comes to servicing their customers' needs (no, I said not like that).

Orwell’s ideal pub was a backstreet boozer called the Moon Under Water, but in the eponymous essay he wrote in 1946, he admitted that it was exactly that - an ideal. Something to aspire to, an aspiration which no pub that he knew of in London had yet achieved. That nowhere exactly ticked off every item on his checklist. Still, what was important was the cumulative effect of the presence of as many of these criteria as possible, because they were what made up the atmosphere of a place. And atmosphere was everything - more important even than the beer a pub might serve.

The atmosphere - the vibe, even - at Orwell’s imaginary Moon Under Water pub was strong. But, hold on, what has any of this got to do with Brussels, I can hear you yell from the comments section? It’s 80 years since Orwell’s essay, he’s dead almost as long, and anyway, wasn’t he writing about interwar London pubs? This is a zine about Brussels! Just hold on, I’m getting there. Now, I will concede that some of Orwell’s requirements were and are idiosyncratically English. For one, the beer on this side of the Channel is different (read: better, and stronger); you’re unlikely to find a pint of draught stout around town outside of bars specialising in new-wave independent beer. 

Open fires are a rare - extinct? - treat too, and only marginally more likely to be found are beer gardens. There just isn’t much space for that sort of thing, at least in the centre of town. We have to make do with curbside terraces, though the city’s bar owners do have a particular genius in managing to eke out space for terraces from the smallest and most unlikely footpaths. The staff are often surly too, especially if you’re an unfamiliar face, but not in a personally injurious way - it’s just another exemplary aspect of Belgium’s customer service ethos.

But here’s the thing. Orwell’s thought exercise is a good one if you are trying to work out what makes for a good pub or café, regardless of where you are. Which is, ultimately, what Pintjes will be about, answering that question: what makes for a great Brussels café? Or, more personally, what for us makes for a great Brussels café? And the only way really to answer that is to go visit them, sit in them, drink in them, talk nonsense in them, write in them, fall out of them. Absorb them, and their vibe. Their atmosphere, as Orwell might have said.

So that’s what we’re going to do, starting with this first volume, and these first five cafés chosen for the proximity to the dead centre of Brussels - where the city was born, and where it still lives (just about) today. 

We already have some ideas of what makes a great Brussels café a great and Brussels café (you’ll find a checklist at the back of the zine), and we’ll nod to them in this and future editions (fingers crossed). But we’re going into this with an open mind. And maybe at the end of it - if an end to these adventures ever comes - we’ll have an idea of what our own Moon Under Water - or Maan Onder Water - might look like.

Launch, Pintjes Vol.1 - details here

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