Parents' Visit, Au Thé de Pékin

My parents came for a visit last week. They'd spent some time in Brussels before, so were willing to skip the usual tourist destinations. We spent a lot of the week scouring open-air food markets, as my parents are possibly even more serious about food than I am. (They were super-psyched to find herring matjes and an abundance of white asparagus.) One thing that's funny about my parents is that, almost 40 years after emigrating to the United States from Taiwan, they still cannot travel without seeking out Chinese food. So a trip to Brussels Chinatown was mandatory - for a meal, and to set me up with a local purveyor of Chinese supermarket foods. Before their visit, I had gotten by with visits to Super Store Tagawa (Chaussée de Vleurgat, 119) but was eager to find both a Chinese supermarket and go-to restaurant. As usual, the 'rents delivered: we had a fantastic meal at Au Thé de Pékin (Rue de la Vierge Noire, 16-24), and I will be going to the smelly (and thus authentic?) Kam Yuen (Rue de la Vierge Noire, 2-4) for all future Chinese cooking needs.

At Au Thé de Pékin, I would stick with the non-dim sum menu; I read somewhere that all dim sum in Brussels is frozen and brought here from Paris, although I don't know whether this is true of ATP's. What I do know is that they don't bring it around steaming on carts, but that's probably due to lack of volume and demand. That being said, the dim sum assortment for two was perfectly passable and included some verifiably juicy xiao long bao (loosely translated, little juicy buns). In even better form were the gan cao niu he (stir-fried wide rice noodles with beef), kong xin cai (sautéed water spinach), ji ding (chicken) with cashew, and shrimp with vegetables. My mom even went so far as to pronounce the dishes "possibly better than Joe's Shanghai," our predictable but trustworthy New York mainstay. I agree, except for the xiao long bao.

Hiatus Over, New Blog

You may have been wondering where I've been lately, with nary a post since early this month. Well, the honest truth is that I've been incapacitated by nausea - make that "morning" sickness of the morning, day, and night variety. Now that I've entered my second trimester and the cat's out of the bag, feel free to read about my (mis)adventures in becoming a parent in a foreign country.

Passover, Au Pays des Merveilles

Passover's coming up next week, and I was thinking of trying to help J throw together a seder - until I realized I have absolutely no idea where to procure the ingredients. (The koshermonger?) I am not Jewish, but J is, and in New York we occasionally hosted a seder for a mix of Jewish and gentile friends, usually with a ceremony obtained from the internet (as opposed to the Maxwell House version used by J's parents). One google search led to another, and eventually I found a list or two of Jewish traiteurs and kosher restaurants in the area.

Along the way, I also found a fellow expat's blog which mentioned a bagel place in Saint Gilles, Au Pays des Merveilles. Driven by a mixture of homesickness and yearning for Jewish food (J has always said my stomach is more Jewish than his), we paid a visit today. The weather was unusually sunny and warm, so we sat on the terrace outside. The waiter, unfortunately, was neither service- nor detail-oriented. After screwing up the order for the table next to ours, he brought me a rather strange concoction: cream cheese with little pieces of red onion mixed in, with golden raisins and sliced apple on a poppyseed bagel. I had ordered a sesame bagel with cinnamon, honey, raisin, and walnut cream cheese. Go figure. That said, the bagels were tasty enough (more like Bruegger's or Einstein Bros. than Murray's, Ess-a-bagel, or H&H, but still), and it's fun to order an everything bagel as "un bagel everything."