I rode from restaurant to restaurant—I’d already mapped out their locations—only to find that, for some reason, Thursday night was like a holiday in Watou. Everything was closed.
Eventually I saw a light glowing in one restaurant, and the door was cracked open. Inside, a woman paused from shuffling through a pile of receipts to glare at me over the top of her bifocals.
“We’re usually open,” she said, “but tonight we’re going to a meeting.”
She could have been going to any type of meeting, but I imagined a town meeting filled with people arguing about things like restoring the church steeple and creating a speed limit on the cobblestones. Maybe I could crash the meeting, I thought. There was a chance they’d have snacks and, most likely, beer. Instead, I continued riding, stopping to admire the cemetery around the base of the town’s church. Across the street, in the front yard of a stately two-story home, some chickens were pecking at food. They looked delicious.
Then I saw it: a glow of neon, a beacon that said, Come and eat. It was a fast-food friterie. Inside, I waited as a couple in front of me ordered. After ringing them up, the man behind the counter dunked a metal basket of fries into bubbling oil then pressed some buttons on a microwave, which I realized was how he was cooking their dinner. When it was my turn to order, I felt uninspired.
“What are stoofvlees?” I asked. The man looked slightly panicked and motioned for a woman to come help. She said something to him in Dutch.
“From the cow!” he told me, brightly.
I ordered stoofvlees and frites, with dipping mayo, of course, along with a Rodenbach, a blend of old and new Flanders red ales from the brewery Sarah and I had visited a few days earlier. My meal arrived on a plastic tray: a steaming plastic rectangle of reddish-brown carbonnades (a far cry from the version I’d had at Drie Fonteinen), a pickup-sticks pile of fries, and a chilled bottle of beer served alongside an empty Rodenbach glass. The tray held what I now understood to be typical Belgium fare: meat, frites, and a drink, which was never water.
As I ate, families came and went, saying their hellos to the man behind the counter in friendly, small-town style, before they stepped out into the chilly evening with plastic bags of hot takeout. The woman, who was married to the cashier, was in the back of the restaurant, at a table with their six-year-old son. She told me it was his first year of school.
“He has a hard time reading,” she confided, glancing back at him. With his head bowed over a workbook, he looked studious.
I thought about Tony and Oscar, about what they’d eat for dinner and the books they’d read at bedtime. I thought about how someday, years from now, I’d be helping Oscar learn to read. If I was there. I knew I was being too hard on myself, but I still felt a pang of guilt tinged with sadness, the bittersweet feeling of being somewhere justified by the mind but abandoned by the heart. Right then, I wanted nothing more than to be at home participating in the sweet daily grind, proper glassware and Cicerone study be damned. I finished my beer in a quick slug, taking note that the red ale tasted unspectacular, like a rip off of a red table wine. I pulled on my hat and gloves and rode under the moon toward my bed for the night.
The following evening at dusk, I stood outside the same friterie again with my bicycle. The church was illuminated a ghastly neon green. This time, I had a reservation—not for anything from the microwave—but for a table at ’t Hommelhof, a restaurant known internationally for its focus on beer. Inside, a few early birds sat at tables draped in white. Candles were nestled inside glasses filled with malt, and dried hop bines loaded with an arresting amount of flowers hung above the bar. The chef, Stefaan Couttenye, described the scene in his book, Cooking with Belgian Beers:
Hop vines hanging from the beams, worn out floor boards, antique furniture and vintage ornaments take you back to a bygone era when the living was easy and the word “stress” had not yet been invented. Whether you like it or not, you automatically switch down a gear, which only benefits the enjoyment.
Nothing was lost in translation. After spending much of the day getting lost on poorly marked country roads on my bike, I was ready to unwind, even if it meant also taking notes and photos. I’d first heard about ’t Hommelhof from a brewer who described an indulgent beer-focused meal in the middle of nowhere, then again from my friend Evan who runs bike tours in Belgium.
“Do you think it would be a weird place for me to have dinner by myself?” I asked him over beers at a Belgian beer bar in Portland. It had been many years since I’d eaten a luxurious meal in a restaurant alone, but I remembered enjoying the last one.
“Sitting down for four hours and eating good food and drinking great beer?” he said. “Why not? Just go. You’ll enjoy it.”
I decided a meal at the restaurant would be a way to study food and beer pairings. The Cicerone exam would test my knowledge of generally accepted pairing principles, the kinds of concepts that were quantified by words like “intensity,” “resonance,” and “contrast.” Those concepts translate into tangible things like the way hop bitterness intensifies spicy heat and how tartness contrasts with fat, umami, and salt.
I’d been e-mailing the restaurant for weeks trying to get a reservation, with no response, so I was starting to panic. One of the reasons I was in Watou was to eat at ’t Hommelhof. That morning, out of desperation, I asked the woman who ran the bed and breakfast where I was staying if she knew the chef. Within seconds, she had him on the phone. I gave him my spiel about being a journalist studying for a beer test. He kindly agreed to chat with me if I came in early, before the kitchen was humming. After all, it was Friday night.
Chef Stefaan Couttenye wore a day or two of gray stubble and the glasses of an architect. He’d opened the restaurant thirty-one years earlier, the year the first American brewpub of the craft beer era opened on the East Coast. While that brewpub stayed open for just two years, Stefaan continues to cook beer-centric food in the same building, a structure from the seventeenth century that once housed a beer tavern and a court of law, at the same time.
After apologizing profusely for the quality of his English, Stefaan told me he was first drawn to cooking with beer, not pairing food with beer. The cooking part, he said, is “not so easy,” thanks to beer’s inherent bitterness. “It takes over the taste in your mouth,” he said, “and you can’t taste anymore what’s on your plate.”
I knew what he meant. One time, setting out to make a beer-braised pork stew, I sautéed some onions, browned some cubes of pork shoulder, then braised them in twelve ounces of a hoppy pale ale. After three hours of simmering, the meat was falling apart but it tasted as bitter as a poisonous plant. That’s because as water in beer cooks off, the flavors in the beer intensify, the classic formula for a good reduction, except for the bitterness piece. Stefaan had two solutions: First, not to cook with really bitter beers, which had been my first mistake. And, if it’s too late and the dish tastes horrible, tone down the bitterness with lots of butter. That was a strategy I could endorse.
’t Hommelhof, which means “the hop garden,” serves the beers of the region—the very immediate region. All the beers at the restaurant come from the two breweries of Watou, a strategy Stefaan said caters to tourists, who crave a connection to all things local. “People from Antwerp don’t come here to drink De Koninck,” he said.
Stefaan pointed out that tourists from abroad seemed to appreciate Belgian beers more than Belgians themselves. After all, 62 percent of Belgian beer is exported. “Belgian people are not, how do you say it in English, chauvinists. We are not proud of our products,” he said. “I always say, if France had been a beer country, we’d all be drinking beer.” On that note, he opened a bottle of Cuvée ’t Hommelhof, a blend of white beer and Kapittel Abt, a strong, fruity Belgian tripel, brewed just for the restaurant, a palate cleanser for the meal that was about to unfold.
Every night ’t Hommelhof offers a het land van amen, or “land of amen” menu. Tonight, all four worshipful courses were devoted t
o hop shoots. During the month of March, hop shoots begin appearing in restaurants all over Belgium. Like fresh bamboo shoots in Japan, the ingredient is a way to celebrate the new growth of the impending spring season, a mark of the return to bounty. In Natural History (book 21, chapter 50), Pliny the Elder, the Roman naturalist and author, wrote that the Romans ate hop shoots like asparagus. (Pliny has become famous for his beer writing, which includes such resonant passages as, “The perverted ingenuity of man has given to water the power of intoxicating where wine is not procured. Western nations intoxicate themselves by moistened grain.”) I had to have the hop shoot meal. After all, I was smack in the middle of a region of Flanders where hops have been farmed for almost eight centuries.
Belgian hops don’t have the same reputation as hops from Germany, which some years grows more hops than any other country in the world, and which boasts the Hallertau region, a center of hop growing and research. Belgian hops don’t have the cache of the storied English hops, such as Golding and Fuggle. But the crop is culturally significant, something I had explored earlier in the day at a hop museum in the town of Poperinge, which was, theoretically, a thirty-minute bike ride from Watou. The four-story museum occupies a former warehouse where hops were once weighed and inspected. Poperinge was once an important cloth-making town but was conquered by the French then the English, events that destabilized its economy. When the locals began farming hops, a new economic boon began, and even though World War II created a setback for hop farmers, the town was behind Allied lines, so it wasn’t destroyed like many of its neighbors. The postwar decades included prosperous hop farming.
Outside the museum, there was an abstract sculpture of a woman shaped like a ball, weighted by a belly of soil and with a wire extending from her oversized hands. A hop bine would climb the wire come spring. Inside, one room buzzed with the sound of wasps and flies, the predator insects that eat one of the hop plant’s worst enemies—aphids, bladluizen. In one exhibit, I had learned that a member of the Order of Saint Benedict, a woman named Hildegard von Bingen, aka Saint Hildegard, had written extensively during the twelfth century about the evils of the hop plant. “Makes men melancholy and depressed,” she wrote. “Bad for the testicles.”
Hops were also considered aphrodisiacs, antiseptics, and soporifics. In 1409 the Duke of Burgundy, known as John the Fearless—and possibly the inspiration for Gambrinus, a mythical figure in Medieval poems and songs who made a deal with the devil to become the King of Beer—created the Order of the Hops. The group honored brewers who made hopped beer, and had a Flemish motto, Ich zuighe, which means, “I savor.” In one room, I had stood face-to-face with a mustached straw man, a replica of what hop workers once burned as part of their end-of-harvest celebrations (and what I guessed was the possible inspiration for the Burning Man gathering). In another area, shelves were packed with products made with hops that had nothing to do with beer, from breast enhancements to sleep aids.
Until I sat down for dinner, I hadn’t tasted hops since I popped a hop caramel into my mouth at the museum, an unsatisfying mixture of sweetness and bitterness. Even though I was ready to taste hops, I knew the hop shoot dishes wouldn’t satisfy that craving. Earlier in the week, at Jan’s house, I’d eaten hop shoots in preface to the spectacular cheese board dinner. One of his friends, Eric, had bought the hop shoots from a local farmer. “They’re the first of the season,” he said. He opened the top of a small, brown paper bag, and when I peeked inside I didn’t see a tangle of green asparagus-like sprigs, the kind of early hop plant growth that pops up during spring in my yard, but something that looked more like two-inch-long bean sprouts, blushing pink. At Jan’s we sat down to eat at a dining table designed to host large dinner parties, with Sarah and me, the honored guests, sitting at each end. When the plates were served, atop the nest of blanched hop shoots spiked in a cayenne broth, I saw a single, stark-white poached egg; we were told this was a traditional Flemish way to serve hop shoots. I caught Sarah’s eye across the long, blond table before she quickly looked away.
I was tempted to say something that would excuse her from having to eat the egg, but the only thing I could think to say was that she was allergic to them, and while I would have fully gone along with her lie, I didn’t feel comfortable creating that one on her behalf. With the slow deliberateness of someone dissecting a rare animal, Sarah proceeded to eat her entire portion of poached egg and hop shoots. Later that night, when we drove back to Brussels, I said I was proud of her.
“I was proud of myself,” she said.
I had liked the dish. As though I had been searching for the saffron in paella, the hop shoots were so delicate, I had to focus to find their flavor. The crunchy, earthy sweetness of the shoots contrasted nicely with the creamy, orange egg yolk.
At ’t Hommelhof, Stefaan explained that the hop shoots were pale because they hadn’t been exposed to sunlight, and therefore haven’t been triggered to produce chlorophyll, the same deviation that creates white asparagus. To harvest the shoots, farmers kneel near the base of the hop plant and dig up its rootball before cutting the new, white shoots from the woody part of the rhizome. Stefaan told me if the shoots are pink or purple, they’ve “gone too far.” He preferred pure white shoots. Some farmers near Watou grow hop plants in greenhouses just so they can harvest and sell the shoots as early as December. But greenhouse hop shoots are expensive, Stefaan explained, something he’d serve only for Valentine’s Day. That made me think Belgian hop shoots could be the country’s truffles, if they actually did have aphrodisiac qualities.
My meal started in traditional Belgian form, with the server pouring a beer into a goblet then carefully placing the bottle on the table so the label faced me. The beer was a Framboise Boon, a lambic from 2013 that had been fermented with whole raspberries. Light shone through the brilliant pink beer, which was blanketed with two inches of frothy pink head. Then the food arrived: slices of beef that had been marinated in the Framboise Boon then grilled. The beef was drizzled with hop shoots cream, raw hop shoots, and salty chunks of what the menu described as “mature cheese.” The fruity beer united the rich smokiness of the beef with the aged cheese and sweet hop shoots.
For me, a good pairing simultaneously elevates the beer and the food, a simple idea that’s surprisingly difficult to execute. Most chefs create pairings based on their inherent knowledge of flavors and textures. They don’t actually cook a dish then try it with multiple beers, but let their imaginations predict the outcome. I discovered one exception: at Luksus, a small prix-fixe restaurant in Brooklyn that serves just one alcoholic beverage—beer—Chef Daniel Burns prepares modernist dishes designed to pair with specific beers. To nail the parings, he holds regular tastings with the restaurant’s staff.
Stefaan said, when he thinks about pairings, he abandons a sense of rules. “In the beginning, it was always fish with white beer, meat with a stronger beer, and game with a very strong beer,” he said. For years, I’d heard the same thing about wine. Pinot noir can go with halibut, and a Riesling can pair well with a steak. While I liked the idea of total freedom when creating good parings, I knew better. There are some rules. Just ask the Cicerone test makers.
When it comes to food pairings, comparisons to wine are inevitable. During a trip to New York City the previous summer, I stopped by Brooklyn Brewery to see Garrett Oliver, brewmaster and author of The Brewmaster’s Table. Even though the book is more than a decade old, it’s still considered the preeminent tome on beer and food. Garrett told me, when he cooks multicourse meals for friends at home, he doesn’t create a competition between beer and wine. He serves both beverages throughout the meal, depending on which pairing is best. But he seemed to be rooting for the beer: “Beer can bring fruit, acidity, plus caramelized and roasty flavors wine doesn’t have,” he explained. And since beer usually has less residual sugars than wine, it shines alongside foods like asparagus and artichokes, which can make wine taste metallic. With those foods, beer with a light, crackery malt an
d a burst of citrus can open new dimensions. Wine can come off as extra acidic next to acidic foods, including vinegar, citrus, and tomatoes, but a beer with high levels of acidity, such as a Berliner weisse or oud bruin, a cousin of the Flanders red, can diminish the perception of overall acidity in food.
Garrett told me the term “wino” originated from a time when wine was looked down upon as the cheap drink of immigrants. “In Rome, you go into a trattoria and you ask for ‘red’ or ‘white,’” he said. “It’s not fussy. British have plonk, a cheap wine. In France, they fill their containers from a spigot in the village. We’re the ones who are fussy.” We have to demystify wine and demystify beer, he continued. “There are some drinks for everyday and some for having a special experience,” he said. “The restaurant is a place to put those things together, a place to have a good time.”
But how often did most people think of a restaurant as a place to enjoy a fine beer with food? Even though ’t Hommelhof has been known as a beer restaurant for decades, Stefaan said he still feels like he’s bucking tradition. “People are not used to it, so it stays difficult. Look,” he said under his breath as he glanced at a nearby table. “They’re drinking wine.” We sat quietly and watched how, at another table of two, the man ordered a beer but his female dining companion ordered iced tea. At yet another table, a few women had glasses of sparkling wine, while the men had beers adorned with orange slices. Nearly an hour into my time at ’t Hommelhof, I had yet to see another woman drinking beer.
A new friend arrived at my table: a tangerine-hued beer with a white head that reminded me of a pencil-thin mustache. The server announced the beer as though he were a herald announcing a guest to meet the queen. “Watou’s Wit, from Brouwerij Van Eecke,” the same brewery as the first beer Stefaan and I had shared. In keeping with the traditional witbier ingredients, the beer was brewed with wheat, Curaçao orange peel, and lemon peel, which created an earthy, yeasty, and lemony effect. A delicate white fish called plaice was served with butter turnips, burnt leek, a hop-shoot-infused cream, and tiny North Sea shrimp. Every ingredient was bathed in a buttery, frothy yellow sauce made with Watou’s Wit.
My Beer Year Page 19