About 9,000km from Sapporo, to Belgium.
A Dog of Flanders TEXT/YUSUKE TOKOSHIMA, PHOTO/NAOKO TAKAHASHIBelgium, a European country overflowing with charm — great food, nature, old castles — has its capital, Brussels, serving as an international city and home to the EU headquarters. A restaurant and bar where you can enjoy Belgian food and culture sits along the streetcar route on Minami 1-jo. The shop’s name comes from a beloved literary classic set in Antwerp, Belgium, the hometown of co-owners Yves Pexsters and Walter De Coninck. The two fell in love with Sapporo’s scenery and climate while traveling in Hokkaido, and opened a restaurant where they could share the home-style dishes of their native Belgium.
Step inside, and rows of wooden tables and chairs, aged to a warm amber, line the room. The heavy, storybook-like interior features antique furniture more than 200 years old, once used by Belgian nobility, shipped over from Belgium by sea. Even the plates the food is served on are Belgian antiques. It feels like being invited into a Belgian home for dinner. The popular menu item is chicory gratin at 900 yen — one of Belgium's classic home-style dishes, combining chicory's distinctive bitterness with a mellow white sauce and cheese in an addictive way. The Belgian stew, braised in brown beer and served with chicory stoemp (mashed potato), is 1,000 yen, eaten together with the accompanying mash. The waffles, baked in a Belgian oven, are lightly sweet with a subtle hint of vanilla — 650 yen, topped with apples steeped in red wine, which pair beautifully with fresh cream.
Belgian beer, hard to find elsewhere in Sapporo, is stocked here in over 30 varieties, both draft and bottled. Fruity flavors are a hallmark of Belgian beer, and with less of beer's characteristic bitterness, it has plenty of fans among women too. The alcohol content tends to run higher than Japanese beer, so it's best enjoyed slowly, more so than usual. Why not take the streetcar to Belgium on your next day off?
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