3/28/05 Brussels

Megan and I woke up around 9am and the weather very much resembled that of San Francisco the past couple of weeks. It was rainy, foggy, and cold. Not exaxtly prime walking around conditions, so we opted for ordering coffee from room service and eating more of the chocolate from Antwerp. It was truely the breakfast of champions.

We didn't end up leaving the hotel until 11:30 or so, and by then the rain and fog had let up a bit. Since this was our only full day in Brussels, We had to see as much stuff as humanly possible. Besides several amazingly beautiful churches and cathedrals, we stopped in the Plaza Louise Louizapl, which is a very french-influenced shopping area on the southern border of lower Brussels. Not a lot of shops were open due to this being a holiday WEEK and all, but we were able to find a pastry shop serving croissants and sandwiches.

Our walking tour, which Megan lovingly mapped out and navigated, ended back at the hotel around 3:30, and after a nap, we went down to fitness room and worked out.

After showering, we got ready for dinner, which I was pretty excited for since we had found the restaurant earlier in the day and gotten to see its menu. We showed up 2o minutes early for our reservation despite it taking a while to walk there because Megan insisted on wearing high heels regardless of the fact that every sidewalk in this town is cobblestone.

The restaurant was called Belga Queen and it was impressive as soon as walked through the door. The door opened into a catwalk, about 30 ft. long, which led to the dining room. On the left side of the catwalk was a raw bar with 11 seats at it, all set for what looked like a full menu. One the right was a wet bar, which had candelabras at either end of it. The upper wall behind the bar featured what looked like ceiling fans turned verticle behind frosted glass and were lit from behind so all you could see was the sillohette.

After a drink at the bar, we walked down the catwalk to the dinig room which revealed that it was a converted old bank. The floor and walls were all marble and the ceiling was domed with beautiful blue glass. There were huge marble columns lined up in the center of the room and an old clock built into the wall marked where the teller boothes used to be. Although the decor was very nice, it lacked anything and everything to absorb sound. There weren't even linens on the tables. Every clink and clatter echoed though the dining room. That was flaw #1. Flaw #2, which was really just more funny than anything else, was the waitstaff uniforms. They wore these white smock things over their shirts that tied in the back. They resembled something between armour of the middle ages and the lead vest the dentist makes you wear when you're getting x-rays.

The only biger joke than the uniforms the servers wore was the service they provided. Though we were greeted and given menus by our female server in a timely manner, it seemed as though we were "passed off", because a guy came over a few minutes later to take our order. I would have understood if she was trying to go home or if she got triple sat and needed help, but she was there the entire time we were, and it was a seemingly slow and quiet monday night. I can only assume the "pass-off" went something like this: "Ugh. I can't deal with Americans tonight. Will you take them for me?"

We got our champagne and waited a painful 15 minutes for 6 oysters...raw oysters...nothing to cook here - two and half minutes per oyster...way to go guys. What pissed me off even more was that I could see our waiter and our old waitress horsing around by the server station. Go get me my fucking oysters!!!

Oysters came - Belons - which were good, but I was pleasantly surprised by our appetizers. Megan had shrimp croquettes, crispy on the outside, creamy inside, with fried herbs. Mine was puff pastry with crayfish tails and button mushrooms in a beer/cream sauce. Sound good? Wait...I'm not done. On top of that were...are those...fried monkfish cheeks? And, uh, wait a minute...is that seared foie gras? Yes. On both counts. This was one of the most confused dishes I have ever eaten. The chef had to be a schitzo. Now I'm not nessesarily against 6 components to a dish, but this one didn't make any sense to me. Why do you need cripsy monk-fish cheeks when you already have crispy puff pastry? And the plate was already covered in heavy cream sauce - there was no shortage of richness, so what the hell was the foie for? Don't get me wrong - it was all very good - but the composition was beyond me. Oh, and there were also, and I'm not exagerating, about 100 crayfish tails on the plate. This whole dish was a good idea gone terribly wrong.

Somewhere towards the end of our appetizers, I saw our waiter, in street clothes, walk through the dinig room and out the front door. What the fuck!!?? Whats that all about? Two minutes later our original waitress comes over, clears our table, and puts dessert menus in front of us then briskly walked away. Uh, OK. I guess that would have been fine...had we still not had entress coming. It took about 5 minutes to flag her down, and when she finally came over, she was chewing on something. Give me a break!! You're eating!!?? In my face!!?? As my server (and shitty one at that)!!?? "Yeah, uh, hi," i said, now getting mildly upset, to say the least. "We still have entrees coming," handing her back the dessert menus. "Oh yeah," she said, and walked away. Whoever trained these servers - if they ever got trained at all - should be hunted down and shot on site.

We got our entress, which, though the portions were out of control , were very good. Megan had braised cod over about 3 cups of mashed potatoes, and there a cool fried disk of celery root on top. I had roasted cuckoo (a Belgian poultry) over gingerbread with pear syrup, potato chips, and snow peas. Everything on the plate worked well with each other. We ended up opting out of dessert, mostly beacuse we just wanted to get the hell out of there, but partly beacuse we had the last of our Antwerp chocolates back in our hotel room calling our names.

Tonight taught me a valuable lesson in restaurants. The food was actually very good over-all, but the waitstaff just killed the experience. I felt bad for the cooks in back who were obviously the only ones putting any effort into their jobs. I used to think that getting great food was worth suffering through bad service. Tonight changed all that. Sometimes shit goes wrong - its inevitable and its part of the business. But everything that went wrong tonight - and I mean eveything - was preventable - and that sucks.