As regular readers will know, I have an entire recommendations section for people wanting to know the best restaurants (IMHO) in a particular neighbourhood, or for a specific type of cuisine, or according to price. But of course I get lots of other requests that I’d call “situational”: My nieces and nephews are in town – where can I go with kids? I’m coming over for New Year – where does a good party? My parents are visiting – where’s someplace a bit posh that I can get them to pay for?
A while ago I wrote about Restaurant Anna, and a while before that I wrote about Vis aan de Schelde – both restaurants I’ve visited with my parents when they’ve been to stay, and which felt like the right combination of grown-up and slightly on the side of someone-else-is-paying-awesomeness! But the other week I discovered exactly where I’ll be taking my parents next time: Beulings.
Beulings has a kind of calm dignity which frankly isn’t befitting of four rowdy girls on a Friday night. But hey-ho. It also does amuses bouches – like, lots of them, which I find pretty cool when you’ve got a bit of cash to splash and it’s a special occasion. Beulings served us (in no particular order) olives, deer sausage, curried gold-leaf-encrusted macadamia nuts (fab!), a glass of sauerkraut soup (much nicer than it sounds) with rye bread, little cones of some fishy tartare, and at least four different varieties of bread with olive oil and caramelised butter. If we’d eaten everything, we probably could have stopped dinner right there.
But (all in the name of research, of course), we crashed on with our starters: mine was a combination of duck liver and eel, which had been compressed into a sort of terrine and then bruléed on the top. It sounds odd but it was curiously delightful.
For main, I continued in the fishy theme with scallops, a fleshy white fish that I forgot to note down, kale and notes of truffle. Accomplished and elegant.
I skipped the chocolate dessert in favour of the cheese plate (you know me by now), which came with a decent selection of cheeses in different styles, and a weirdly under-cooked apple chutney.
Dinner, for three courses plus wine, came to around €65 each, although it could easily have mounted up higher had we opted for more courses (we could have had anywhere up to seven). Which, while perfectly fair, is the point at which you wish your mum and dad were paying. Next time, eh?
