BELGIUM BASH II: food and activities thread.

[Mr. Johnson]

First of all: This is not the thread for ordering food, that's a bit too early. What this thread is for is our day out on Saturday the 4th of May, where we will be visiting Ghent which is my new hometown. If there are serious objections against this or if you would rather do something else please shout out here in this thread so I can find us something else to do. I'm still looking in to things so I'll update this thread when more info is available.


TRANSPORT

If we want to explore the city we'll have to get there first, and after reviewing our options it seems like the best option for us is renting a van with a driver. I am currently looking into this so I'll update with prices and such when I have them.

CITYTRIP TO GHENT

As I outlined in our main thread, I wanted to go out on Saturday to my new hometown, Ghent.

Ghent is a reasonably quiet city that is a little off the radar as it is wedged between touristic juggernauts such as Bruges and Antwerp, but despite not offering the scope and grandeur of the previously mentioned cities, it's a very pleasant place that may not offer the touristic sights other cities have to offer, but in my opinion it makes up for that in quaintness and culture.

My plan that I had for our day out goes as follows; we leave sometime around 10 am, have a little something to eat, explore the city at our leisure (with frequent stops to drink), and round off the day with a nice restaurant meal or an evening formula, then head back to HQ.
An evening formula? What's that you say? Well I'll tell you.

EVENING FORMULA

It was a bit tricky finding something for us to do, as most everything here is centred around culture and nothing like that sort of thing seemed like something 5punkers would enjoy. But then I found something that seemed right up our alley (fnar).
I found this thing called a 'walking dinner', where you visit four separate restaurants in four hours, each restaurant offering a different part of the course. (aperitif, starter, main course and dessert) and inbetween the restaurants there's a guide telling you things I don't know despite living here.
This sounded pretty great until I looked at the price: €60-€80 (£50-£70 est.) per person is a bit steep, and since the menu is a surprise you might end up with something you really don't like.
However, there is a slightly cheaper formula available, which focuses on something more 5punky than food; beer and food.
It's more or less the same thing as the walking dinner, but instead of a 3 course meal you get a main course and three beers at three different locations. These are about €45-€60 (£40-£70 est.) per person.
More information about the walking dinner is here.
The beer walk info is here.
General information about Ghent is here.
Feel free to check out the sites since they have many other things you can do listed.

Please answer in the poll what you would like to do on Saturday, you can give several answers if you're indecisive.

Again, everything is debatable so say whatever's on your mind.

[HereComesPete]

Both walks sound good but I have to say both the length and the cost put me off (twss).

I reckon we could do a good job of walking (or taking a river boat) round looking at stuff between beer and food. Being geeks we could google the fuck out of stuff that looked nice and learn instead of following a guide. I fucking love me some architecture (you may remember me blathering on about the houses last time) and Ghent has some sexy ass buildings like cathedrals, town halls, the canal stuff etc. For those who don't like walking round looking at old buildings parking at a pub is probably the best option.

Browsing the restaurants the prices seem very reasonable even for the fine dining.

If I could do only only one thing in Ghent it would be to drink some gruut at the brewery.

Editz - I voted citytrip without fancy extras as that seemed the closest to my opinion, however I would like a fancy dinner.

[tandino]

Architecture, culture and beer all grape my squildo. I think Pete's idea of discovering Ghent for ourselves whilst stopping for beers and food when hungry is a good (and relatively cheap) way of doing things. Financially I'm not too concerned as I'll have just been paid. The brewery sounds like a fucking great idea. It's usually a mission of mine to find and drink in a local brewery everywhere I go.

[mrbobbins]

You must go to the shoe bar!!, the place where you have to handover a shoe as deposit to get a big glass of beer

[Dr. kitteny berk]

What Pete said.

[HereComesPete]

The brewery sounds like a fucking great idea.

I'm liking the fact that it's unhopped so it's ale that's spiced, I'm intrigued as to how it tastes.

[Shada]

Don't like beer but do like food, so I picked that one. But to be perfectly honest we really don't need a guide to sniff out food, so we could probably just AMUSE GUEULE ourselves for cheaper.

[TheJockGit]

I have been to Ghent, and I have to say that it does offer a number of cool bars and restaurants, but unfortunatelly I went on a Thursday and the place was dead.

If it had been a weekend however I would imagine it would have been a completely different story.

So anyone not sure, I would say go for a trip round the town, its not so large (like Brum) but it does have a lot of variety for a small town.

[Mr. Johnson]

Brewery visit sounds good to me gents, if we were to visit the gruut brewery, it'd be €9 pp (£7) for a normal visit which buys you an explanation about brewing and three tasters (which I'm guessing is sharing a goblet of beer or something), €11 (£9) for an explanation, 3 tasters and some cheese and salami with mustard, which is very commonly given with beer. The last two formulas they offer is one where they give the customary explanation, the three tasters and some special bites, or the same but with a selection of cheeses instead of the special bites. both of these are €14 (£12)

There's more info here: http://www.gruut.be/eng-visitbrewery.html, including an explanation of what the special bites are.

Personally I think these prices are pretty reasonable, and if you like the tasters enough you can simply drink the beer in the attached café should you want to. For the rest of the day we can simply walk around and slowly destroy our livers, as was suggested.

[tandino]

Brewery visit sounds good to me gents, if we were to visit the gruut brewery, it'd be €9 pp (£7) for a normal visit which buys you an explanation about brewing and three tasters (which I'm guessing is sharing a goblet of beer or something), €11 (£9) for an explanation, 3 tasters and some cheese and salami with mustard, which is very commonly given with beer. The last two formulas they offer is one where they give the customary explanation, the three tasters and some special bites, or the same but with a selection of cheeses instead of the special bites. both of these are €14 (£12)

There's more info here: http://www.gruut.be/eng-visitbrewery.html, including an explanation of what the special bites are.

Personally I think these prices are pretty reasonable, and if you like the tasters enough you can simply drink the beer in the attached café should you want to. For the rest of the day we can simply walk around and slowly destroy our livers, as was suggested.

I'm all for this. In past visits to breweries, the tasters have involved a half or full pint of whatever types of ale they brew. Either is good!

[Mr. Johnson]

Seeing as there seem to be no objections against a brewery visit, I'll be booking it for us asap. I'll also be looking out for a restaurant. Any preferences for type of food?

[Grimmie]

I'm not really a beer person, but you knew that. I'll still go though.

[Mr. Johnson]

Well, I can't please everyone. The beers they make there are brewed sans hops and with a "medieval spice mixture", so they should taste a bit different from your standard beer. Broaden your horizon Grimmie! Also, it's just one part of the day so there'll be enough to drink and do that you like!

Hmmm... I should probably go taste some of those beers.

[HereComesPete]

The non-beer types can sit in a bar and order babycham or whatever.

[FatherJack]

I'm not really a beer person, but you knew that. I'll still go though.

There are a lot of beers and you cannot discount them as a whole until you have at least tried them all.

[Grimmie]

Oh, I'll try them. Don't worry about that. Booze is booze.

[Mr. Johnson]

I booked our brewery visit for 3 PM, so we can have a nice lunch at around 12 and see some things before we go there. I took the standard option with the three tasters, which is €9 (£7) per person. The payment is done on the actual visit so just have some cash on you when we get there.
Meanwhile I can't seem to get a hold of a taxi service, neither by email or by phone which is plain weird but I'm on it.

Also, I'm looking into restaurants right now and I was thinking of a classic french food type restaurant (don't think anything too posh) where they offer a variety of meats, fish and the somewhat more expensive specials. How much would want to spend max?
Have a look around here: http://www.visitgent.be/en/restaurants for a selection of restaurants where they use "types of people" as a means of classification. It's kinda odd but it works. I'd recommend some myself but I really don't know that many restaurants due to being poor.

[Mr. Johnson]

Okay, I'm going to start another poll to choose our restaurant which is a bit tricky because there are only a few that I know and I can't afford to visit them all so I'll have to trust the reviews. I really have to make my choice soon or there might be no available seating. You can make as many choices as you like as I might need a backup restaurant if there are no seats available, and you can vote till the end of next week.

Here are the ones I do know:

-Il Cortile (no website)
A small Sicilian restaurant that doesn't offer a huge variety of food, but they do two person pizzas (also regular pizzas) and have home made pasta. I only tried the pizza and it was delicious. They sadly don't offer much in terms of drinks and dessert, they only have ice cake for some reason and no cannolis which was a huge let down for me as I love Goddamn cannolis. The price here is pretty reasonable, roughly about €15 for a basic pizza.

-Eat Love (http://www.eatlove.be/)
A hidden in plain sight Italian restaurant that serves pizzas just a little bit different than the usual restaurants. The pizzas they serve here have slightly different ingredients and are made in the Napoli tradition: very thin. They're really quite good but personally I think it might be too pricey for us, and if you're really hungry you might not be satisfied with the thin pizzas. Also, the decor is a massive eyesore as it's all black and MDF boards for some reason. Prices are on the menu that you can download from the site.

-Amadeus (http://www.amadeusspareribrestaurant.be ... /info.html)
A restaurant that specializes in all you can eat spare ribs. If you don't like spare ribs you might not want to pick this option as the other stuff they serve is probably not very good. I consider it pretty cheap as €16 for all you can eat ribs is a pretty good deal. You also get some lettuce and a jacket potato if I remember correctly.
Supposedly there's another, better restaurant that also serves all you can eat ribs but I'll have to check if it's better.

-De wereld van Shan (no website)
Another small restaurant, but a Chinese one this time. I've only been here once but it was pretty good. It's still not quite authentic Chinese food but it had a nice atmosphere and the food was a cut above the usual MSG stuff (it probably still had MSG in it). They also had an interesting formula where you sat around a circular table and eh... there was an entire table of food involved and it looked really good but I forgot the prices and such. Sorry. I'm gonna look into this and tell you more tomorrow (if I remember)
EDIT: So the thing I saw some people do when I was there was a Chinese fondue, where they give you a pretty expansive selection of meat and fish you can cook up yourself. For 8 of us it would come down to about €19 PP, which is very reasonable considering the variety of stuff you get.

Aaand some of the places I don't know.

-Thai food
I love Thai food, but for some reason I never actually had any here so I can't give any recommendations. But if you'd like Thai food just pick it as an option and I'll find the best one available for us.
a.k.a. I'm too lazy to sum them all up.

-Keizershof (http://www.keizershof.net not in English, sorry)
To offer an alternative to all the foreign food options here's a Belgian restaurant. They serve a number of classic Belgian dishes such as Vol-au-vent (a type of chicken stew with a puff pastry), Waterzooi (I have never had this myself because it looks kind of bland, but they serve it everywhere here so it can't be that bad I guess) and steak frites.

-Pakhuis (http://www.pakhuis.be/en/atmosphere/home)
This last one I'm going to put on here just for the sake of it, because it's probably beyond the price range of most 5punkers but the food is bloody amazing and it's lovely in there with a decent bar. It's pretty much the only fancy restaurant I know, but not suit and tie fancy. Just putting it out there.

So that's a quick selection of the many restaurants this town has to offer, I'm struggling a bit to come up with stuff so as usual if nothing takes your fancy (or your wallet) speak up!

[Grimmie]

Yes. I have done a vote. Hooray, food.

[ProfHawking]

I know i'm not coming and havent voted but all you can eat spare ribs!! HELLS YEARGH!
This thread makes me hungry