Lapin a la Gueuze at Coin de Mer in Brussels
I think my friend was already starving as he didn’t have the patience to wait to properly go through the restaurants in this area before we make a decision. There was a particularly friendly waiter who convinced us to eat at his restaurant. What probably sealed the deal was the free beer offer. Fine, how bad can it be? I have no idea what Belgian food is and this place seems to offer it. I did come to try out some local food but I won’t know if it was bad or not. We ordered our main dishes but our waiter kept asking if we wanted some soup to go with our mains. For some reason, I wasn’t able to put the brakes on that and we ordered soup.
Bouillabaisse at Coin de Mer in Brussels
We also had two appetizers which were basically garlic bread and another much harder kind of bread. The shop was not very big but it had quite a lot of patrons. What concerned me was that most of the patrons were foreigners, curiously enough, most of them were Asians. This rang alarms bells inside of me, but what can I do? They had a little heater inside the shop, it was a still a bit chilly in Brussels and the heater was much appreciated. Service wasn’t that bad, our food came out quite fast. My soup, which I expected to be just a small bowl of plain soup turned out to be a full seafood soup and it wasn’t that much either. I suspected that it was a main course in the menu.
Anguilles au Vert at Coin de Mer in Brussels
For my main course, the Lapin a la gueuze, which is rabbit stewed in beer. You could have mistaken the rabbit for chicken but that’s how it looked. The meat however was much tougher than I expected. The sauce was a bit sweet I didn’t know how it was supposed to taste like but I didn’t think it was that bad. My friend had Anguilles au vert, which is eel in green sauce. The dish does look as unappetizing as it sounds. It is supposedly one of the traditional food you can find in Belgium. The eel dish looks much like another vegetable dish which I wasn’t particularly fond of but the taste was totally different. The eel had a very strong flavour and it was almost overpowering. I had eel before but it was mostly in Japanese food. This was my first time to try it cooked like this. My friend wasn’t very happy with the food and was only trying it out because it was unique. I guess, that was the last time we would be trying that dish.
Appetizer at Coin de Mer in Brussels
Billing time came and we were shocked to see how much we supposedly spent. We already knew how much the mains cost but the soup apparently cost more than the main dishes. Apparently it was bouillabaisse and it cost 27 euro. Unsurprisingly, the appetizers were billed as well. The beer was also billed but we had that removed since the guy promised us it was supposed to be free. Anyway, it was a bitter pill to swallow as we realized that the meal was too expensive. We felt cheated by the waiter since he kept pushing stuff to us, but that is how it works and we fell for it. Let this serve as a warning to anyone who ventures here. Know what you are ordering and don’t fall for their dirty tricks. As long as you are in control, you should be fine. Will I still eat there? Probably not.
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