The Belgian House

Hazard, Olga, and I went out today to check out a new place with Belgian beer. The place is called “The Belgian House” and it is located across the road from Molos promenade (nearby the traffic light for St.Andrews street). The place is small, nice and cozy. Outside, the biggest distruction is the road. Inside is very nice, but it wasn’t airconditioned, and thus a bit warm. We set outside.

Waiter provided us with a good service given with a strange accent of English, not heard before by me in these places. Comprehensible and OK though.

There are two separate menus: one for food and another one for beer. The food menu is very skinny and is actually just a couple of pages stempled to each other. There’s a set dinner with a good choice for starters, main course, and the dessert. The beer menu is much nicer. It has this solid look and feel to it. It is a rather thick book in leather with beer history, Belgian history, and a connection of Belgia and beer. Every beer has its own page with history, ingredients, characteristics of smell and taste. That is nicely done.

All beer comes in small bottles (about half a pint) and poured into branded glasses by the waiter. Most of what I’ve noticed costs about 3 CYP per bottle, which is kind of expensive (local Carlsberg is about 1-1.50 CYP per pint). Hazard and Olga settled for Leffe, while I tried a couple of new ones.

The first one I tried was Maredsous. It comes in three different flavours: green cap (6% alcohol), red cap (8% alcohol), and black cap (10% alcohol). I went for red cap. It had an excellent smell of brewery, but a rather harsh taste. It was too carbonated and had strong taste of spirit in it. The second one I went for was Duvel. It was a much nicer kind. Both the smell and the taste were much softer than from Maredsous. Very enjoyable indeed.

From the food department, Vladimir had some mussles for starter and some stake for the main course. Both were enjoyable. I’ve tried a piece of stake and it was pretty yummy and juicy. Olga and I settled for a snack plate which consisted of few small pieces of cheese, meat and salami. Very appropriate for the beer.

Overall it is a nice place to go to once in a while. I think it will be more enjoyable in the winter, when it would be not so hot on the inside. The lack of draught beer and high prices for beer don’t make it a good choice for an average outgoing.