French Cuisine

You can get a classic moules-frites dinner with mussels, fries and a beer for about €13 in Brussels; Grand Place/Grote Markt is the central square of Brussels and recognized by UNESCO

Several weeks ago, Professor Peter Scholliers of Vrije Universiteit in Brussels stopped by to give our class some lectures on Belgian and European food history of the 19th and 20th centuries. Soon afterwards, one of my roommates noticed that Ryanair flights from Torino to Brussels were quite inexpensive, and there was a four-day weekend coming up, so we made a spontaneous decision to treat ourselves to a weekend in Belgium. After all, isn’t the point of living in Europe that you can fly off at a moment’s notice to another country? I’d like to think we were inspired by class, so this was really a didactic experience anyway.

The other day, my aunt asked me, “So you keep raving about how delicious everything is, but are there any bad meals?” Yes, of course there are. Though I generally travel with boatloads of research and a good sense of intuition, I do get stuck with bland, uninspired meals like everyone else. While in France, the quality of the food was (unsurprisingly) very good, but no country is fail-proof. Here is a glimpse into how our class of well-traveled and knowledgeable students critiques meals: