Mamma Roma (place Jourdan and elsewhere)

There are various articles about 'Brussels' best pizza' and where to find it. I'm not interested in undertaking such a large-scale quest, despite a few preliminary inquiries (in the Schuman area, I advise you to try La Brace and not to bother with The Meeting Point). That said, I see no reason not to draw attention to good pizza when I find it.

(good picnic food, too)

Kasbah (rue Antoine Dansaert)

This time, back to Brussels, and indeed to rue Dansaert, right in its traffic-heavy, slightly scruffy centre. It's a bit clichéd to say that the Kasbah restaurant, with its curtained-off entrance and dark and lantern-lit interior (not good for blog photography, alas), is a blessed retreat from the noise and disorder of the city.

[Out of Brussels] Au Flan Breton, Tervuren

If you go down to the woods today...you'll find Tervuren, a pleasant if faintly sleepy town about twenty minutes by tram outside Brussels. Its main attraction, Belgium's Africa Museum, is currently closed for restoration, but it still proved to be a nice spot for a woodland walk. Initially, however, there didn't seem to be many options for lunch (one café was advertising steak and chips, but it turned out that we would have to wait until the following day for this weekly - monthly? - treat) so we were relieved to find Au Flan Breton, a small café with a bakery next door.

Les Marmites du Monde (rue St Boniface)

Some areas of central Brussels are a bit low on decent restaurants, but the St Boniface district is not one of them. After a morning wandering round Etterbeek and Ixelles, the Firestarter (an occasional presence on my old blog), his fiancée (congratulations!) the Perfumer, and I were faced with far more choice than we needed. In the end curiosity won out, and we decided to try Les Marmites du Monde, which claims to serve cuisine from Belgium and Mauritius.

Au Bon Bol (rue Paul Devaux)

One afternoon a couple of Sundays ago I was in a street near Sainte-Catherine when my attention was caught: in the window of a small Asian restaurant, a woman was making noodles, twisting and twisting great lumps of dough until they became long, stretchy strands. Her action was mesmerising and we stood watching for a while, regretting that it wasn't yet dinner time. So when I returned to the area, with an appetite, Au Bon Bol seemed an obvious choice.

(photo from here)

Café de la Maison du Peuple (parvis de Saint-Gilles)

The original maisons du peuple were built at the end of the nineteenth century as centres for the working classes of Brussels to meet, learn and relax, but most of them have since been demolished or at least repurposed (more history here). One of those still standing, on the parvis de Saint-Gilles, is now the all-day cafe and bar of the same name. Its busy schedule of concerts and other cultural events and the large numbers of people working (or, at least, Facebooking) on laptops that it hosts suggest it continues to serve as a multi-functional venue - in a 2010s sort of way. 

A glance round at decor and customers alike will reveal that the hipster quotient here is quite high, but that doesn't stop (should it?) the atmosphere being friendly and the service efficient, even on a lively and warm evening when staff had to deal with a busy interior and a packed terrace outside (to make their lives easier no doubt, you order at the bar). You won't get a three-course meal, but in addition to basic breakfasts and weekend brunches there's a reasonably wide selection of light meals, as well as several desserts (even though I didn't try it on this occasion, I do like a place that doesn't forget about pudding).

Two of us considered a croque monsieur but eschewed it for the slightly more unusual croque biquette (6E), where ham and cheese were replaced by goat's cheese and courgettes, and an optional drizzle of honey. This clearly echoed the flavours of the Moroccan pancakes found at the Gare du Midi market and elsewhere and was just as successful - the goat's cheese, perhaps a little bland on its own, was richly enlivened by the honey. I was also impressed by the bread, fresh, clearly of very high quality (rather than out of a plastic bag), and very hearty - the the sandwiches were filling enough to make dessert not only unnecessary but impossible.

Speaking of bread, I was impressed that a deliciously crusty but light baguette arrived at the other end of the table to accompany some courgette and goat's cheese quiche (6E) and a bowl of courgette soup (4E) - no stale remnants here. The quiche was very rich in flavour, and didn't stint on vegetables; its flakey pastry base also won praise. The soup, on the other hand, was nothing more exciting than liquidised courgettes, but at least it didn't claim to be anything else.

As I said, this isn't a place for elaborate meals or lengthy menus (the abundance of courgette dishes suggests a kitchen that prefers not to spread itself too thinly, although of course there's absolutely nothing wrong with making the most of seasonal produce), but what we ate was a lot more than carbs to soak up cocktails - it was fresh, tasty and carefully executed cuisine.

Café du Maison du Peuple
39 parvis de Saint-Gilles

8.5/10

Ergon (rue du Parnasse)

Greek finances are never really out of the news at the moment, but there's not a lot that your average Belgium-based food blogger can do about them, apart from drink a brand of (very good) beer from Santorini sold to reduce the Greek national debt. The relationship of Ergon, a small chain of restaurant-delicatessens, to its parent country's economic situation is less clear, but if one of the aims of its newish Brussels branch is to bolster Greece's reputation in a city that has recently hosted some tense negotiations, in most respects it's not doing too badly.