Duranton's, on the Avenue Louise, is now "run" by Monsieur Pierre Strobbe, who took a first prize at the Brussels cookery exhibition. The restaurant is pleasantly situated, and on Sunday, if you wish to go to the races in the afternoon, it is very convenient, being on the direct route to Boitsfort. There are three rooms on the ground floor, in which you can lunch. That on the right, a small narrow room under the orders of Charles, from the Black Forest, is the smartest. He will introduce you to some special Kirsch—from the Black Forest. The cooking in all the rooms is the same, and it is good. Order your cab to be at the door half an hour before the first race.
The Laiterie is in the Bois de la Cambre. In summer time it is indeed the most pleasant place to dine in Brussels. In the Bois there are several places that supply lunches, dinners, and light refreshments, but the Laiterie is the only one that is really first class. For seventeen years it has been under the management of M. Artus and his son. The establishment is the property of the town of Brussels, and is well kept up in every respect. Here on a Sunday as many as 1500 chairs and 400 tables are often occupied. In the evenings the gardens are brilliantly illuminated, there being 1100 gas lamps. Music is discoursed by a Tzigane orchestra, and the late Queen of the Belgians, who often used to stop her pony chaise at the Laiterie to hear them play, subscribed from her private purse 200 francs every year to these musicians. Dinners are served at separate tables, under Japanese umbrellas, and the cooking is excellent; but it is as well to secure a seat as near to the main building as possible, to overcome that objection to al-fresco meals—cold dishes. The wines are good, and M. Artus has some fine Ayala—'93, in magnums—unless it is all drunk by now. There must be something about the cellars of these out-door places peculiarly favourable to beer, for no pale ale in the world can compare with that drawn at the bars of the Epsom grand-stand, and in Belgium there is no bottled Bass so fresh and palatable as that which one gets at the Laiterie.
If my friend were staying in Brussels longer than a week, the other restaurants to which I might take him would be the Taverne Royale, at the corner of the Galeries Saint Hubert, where some real 1865 cognac can be had at 75 centimes the glass; the Frères Provençaux, in the Rue Royale; the Restaurant de la Monnaie (a large place, generally noisy, with not the most rapid of service); Stielen's, in the Rue de l'Evêque; and the Taverne Restaurant des Eleveurs on the Avenue de la Toison d'Or. At the Taverne de Londres, in the Rue de l'Ecuyer, there is always a fine cut of cold roast beef with English pickles.
On Wednesdays all the Brussels restaurants are crowded, it being Bourse day, and in a wide sense "market" day, when over 5000 strangers, mostly men, come into the city from provincial towns. In conclusion, I may mention that I have failed to discover the restaurant where George Osborne gave his "great dinner" to the Bareacres a few days before the battle of Waterloo. Thackeray records that as they came away from the feast, Lord Bareacres asked to see the bill, and "pronounced it a d—— bad dinner and d—— dear!" Probably the place, therefore, is extinct; for happily the double pronouncement can nowadays be seldom applied to any of the restaurants mentioned in this chapter.
H.L.
CHAPTER V
HOLLAND
Restaurants at the Hague—Amsterdam—Scheveningen—Rotterdam—The food of the people.