Bart de Poorter

My restaurant wish list is getting longer every day, so this time I decided to have a lunch at one of the restaurants on my list. ( hopefully this way I finish my list quicker) This time it brought me to the Mercedes House in Brussels, to restaurant WY by Bart De Poorter. For my readers who don’t know Bart De Poorter, he is the chef and owner of the 2 Michelin star awarded restaurant “De Pastorale”. So the fact that this restaurant was from Bart De Poorter was the first reason to try it, the second reason was that the executive chef of this restaurant is nobody less than Wouter Van der Vieren who is a Michelin star awarded chef who used to have his own restaurant. It just had to be good, although I must admit that after my last famous chef side project experience I had my doubts… But I can confirm that this was a well thought through and coordinated project with a very professional staff that can work fine even with Wouter Van der Vieren’s absence.

The restaurants itself has of course a Mercedes Benz touch to it (as it is the Mercedes House), but it is not too much… it has modern interior with only 3 (very nice looking) cars on the restaurant floor. I like the very open kitchen, because there are big screens that you can follow exactly what the chefs are doing in the kitchen. I wouldn’t call it the coziest restaurant I have ever been to, but it surely didn’t disturb me. The acoustics on the other hand are very good, so you can come here with a group and understand each other.

This time my partners in crime weren’t just any friends, but foodie friends :-). Foodie friends know as Thomas (Chef and owner of 12 Place du marché and former classmate from me) and Gianluca (Sommelier and son from Spiga d’oro owner)

Food glorious food, this was after spending time with friends the reason for this lunch 🙂 Choosing what we wanted to eat wasn’t easy as the 3 course and 5 course menu had different dishes that I all wanted to try, but to make it even more difficult the ‘à la carte’ menu was also different from the tasting menus with again so many things I wanted to try (A true luxury problem)… but at the end we decided to go for the five course menu, which was (when looking back) a great choice. Not only did all of the dishes taste well, they also looked like little paintings…

The only dishes that didn’t really blow us off our feed was the first dish from the menu: Mackerel with beetroot (prepared in different ways) and oyster snow, it just missed a bit of assiduity. Don’t get me wrong, the dish was good, but I (we) think that with a touch of assiduity it would even be better. Besides that all great combinations, with a bullet for dessert 🙂 this were actually filled white chocolate balls (for some reason when writing this I think of Jerome “Chef” McElroy from south park). I also enjoyed the bouillabaisse sauce with the seabream (the smell from this sauce was soooooo good as well)

I wouldn’t be able to say which was my favorite dish. We first also wanted to try the Wouter van der Vieren signature dish, but as I didn’t see him in the kitchen… it wouldn’t be the same trying it without him being there. We did get to see him as he arrived a bit later, but I think the fact Jeroen Meus was eating at the table next to us had something to do with it 🙂 But nevertheless Wouter did a good job training his team, he can be proud of them!

I was lucky enough to have a sommelier at my table to pick the wines and he really did a good job. Gianluca picked a white Italian wine a Gaja Rossj-Bass Langhe. The red wine however was a wine suggested by the sommelier from WY, he picked a 2007 red Italian Barbaresco by Serafino which was also a very nice choice.(with 2 Italians at the table you can’t go wrong with Italian wine 🙂 ) So if you add all these comments up I can only say that this was a nice restaurant with you get true value for your money and brought to you by very professional people and I was lucky enough to also have great company at my table 🙂 and on top of that I got to see Wouter van der Vieren AND Jeroen Meus… wow what a lunch 😉

FYI: for the car lovers, you’ll find lots of great cars when you go downstairs 🙂