As briefly mentioned already my 2013 in-between work travels are more gravitated towards eating and re-exploring down to earth local food styles and spending less emphasis on Michelin Starred or Gault et Millau graded restaurants! Although I still love prestigious fine dining restaurants every now and then, I find that others just visit these places just for glamour and sometimes for bragging rights. For me I am just a question child as usual and asks too many questions, in-between hoping to understand more about food and culture and about life itself!
Exploring the more traditional authentic flavours and experience is always high up on my agenda, as some of these institutions are gradually disappearing over time. It’s imperative that I can record these with some valuable photos of my experiences and 1 day I can hopefully share these online as some kind of active archive. I also really wanted to capture the traditional taste sensations before they evolve and become extinct, and to imprint them into my head before I forget their tastes..
La Maree in Brussels -
They specialize in Belgian and Flemish seafood dishes here.
Online ratings of here are in the 4 to 4.5 / 5 range. Pretty high I believe?
Bread -
Pre-packaged butters, it’s horses for courses. The bread is quite run-of-the-mill stuff here but it’s at least fresh… ~ 6/10
Hoegaarden White -
White Ale served in the bottle, I was virtually stunned by how great this bottled beer tasted when drinking inside it’s motherland. Actually in general I wasn’t overly impressed with many Belgian beers except for a few artisanal ones. The overseas draught version of this Hoegaarden is much sweeter and honeyed-liked, with the bottled version also sweeter and tamed down. This local Belgian sourced bottle was really refreshing and fairly strong on citrusy peels and minty-lemony. Having drank this bottled version and their draught beers from kegs in different cities for decades, I was still flabbergasted by how alive this bottle tasted when closer to home ~ 12/10
Local Belgian Mussels in White Wine, with Celery and Herbs -
I hope I don’t sound like a recidivist from a previous review, yet my mussel meals here so far were all let-down by an overly one dimensional aromatic white wine dominated broth, plus the mussels were more like really fragile infants and not so unami packed sweet as I would expect them to be. *It wasn’t that warm yet when I visited Brussels but to be fair it wasn’t exactly peak season either. But that still didn’t fixed the monotonous tasting broth which was too wine-dominated and I could feel I was getting drunk by every scoopful of the sauce… It was enjoyable but I have had better and even pinpoint the exact restaurant where I ate them. May be I haven’t been visiting the best places however!! As for here… ~ 7/10
Fries -
Fries came with the mussels. They were on the softer side and not too floury crispy. I sometimes appreciate a softer style of fries provided they have potato flavour and not soaked in oil. But that approach cannot fix my bemoaning of these rather white and lacking-in-potato taste fries.. Fairly generic and expected if you ask me. ~ 7/10
Endorsed by the Michelin Guide for the Recent Consecutive Years.
There is also a 1-Starred La Maree restaurant in Paris, which I was planning to visit last year and that seafood restaurant is unrelated to the one here in Brussels. It was definitely decent and executed well. Yet at the end of the day and coming down to the denominators, only the final taste will be it’s own best judge.
Price: Euro 35,00
Ease of Access: 3/5
Food: ♕♕♕♕ 1/2
Opening Hours -
Tues to Sat: 12:00pm to 14:00pm, 18:00pm to 22:00pm
Mon and Sun: Closed
Address: Rue de Flandre 99, 1000 Brussels, Belgium
Ph: +32 2 511 00 40
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