Bacino Restaurant, Antwerp

...beasts.

Bacino is located on the corner of a side street very close to Antwerp's beautiful cathedral and it's a rather traditional looking bar/restaurant in typical Belgian style. After checking that they definitely had mussels, we were taken to a table in the conservatory-style terrace area where several other tables were already taken. Our table was right next to a fearsome radiator that made it so physically uncomfortable that ...
...scrubbing shells.

Bacino specialises in mussels; there are two whole pages of mussel options in their menu. Taking the route of least resistance Katya and I went for the simplest option of ordering their offer of mussels in five different sauces with fries to accompany. Alex chose a steak with mushroom sauce. For drinks I ordered a Framboise (the local raspberry flavoured beer - sharper and juicier than the better known Kriek which ... more

I have an on-going debate with my Belgian colleague Joep about who and what Belgium is famous for. We've done the 'Name 10 'famous' Belgians' challenge a dozen times and even tracked down the 'www.famousbelgians.net website to substantiate some of the names were weren't too sure about. But one thing we both agree on is that it's easier to think of famous foodstuffs for which Belgian is renowned. There's the chocolate, the zillions of different beers, the outstanding national skills with chips and my favourite - mussels. Everyone has probably heard of Jean-Claude van Damme - the man nicknamed the muscles from Brussels. This review is an account of my hunt for the mussels of Antwerp.

I go to the lovely old city of Antwerp every couple of months and I usually call my friends Alex and Katya to arrange to see them and to go out for dinner. On my last visit they told me they will soon be moving back to the UK so I'll be able to see them more often but it means my future visits to Antwerp for work will see me sitting sad and lonely in my hotel room. Since this was our last opportunity to fulfil our search for that very Belgian classic dish, mussels and fries, we headed into the city to look for dinner.

Our previous mussel hunt in December had been unsuccessful. Lured into a restaurant by the promise of shellfish we were disappointed to find a mussel-free zone. So this time we took no chances and chose Bacino, a restaurant where Katya had eaten mussels several times before and where they specialise in these little critters. I'm not frightened of seafood but I do think that mussels are best eaten in restaurants that turn over a lot of them and are used to dealing with these sometimes tricky beasts.

Bacino is located on the corner of a side street very close to Antwerp's beautiful cathedral and it's a rather traditional looking bar/restaurant in typical Belgian style. After checking that they definitely had mussels, we were taken to a table in the conservatory-style terrace area where several other tables were already taken. Our table was right next to a fearsome radiator that made it so physically uncomfortable that I had to change seats just to get away from the heat. On the window ledge beside us were all manner of bizarre nick-knacks including a wooden model boat, three of Snow White's seven dwarfs posing as garden gnomes and two mismatched table lamps. The next window ledge along had another three dwarfs and a couple more lamps. Perhaps I should have asked what happened to the seventh dwarf but by then my mind was on more important things - mussels!

It has been suggested that the seventh dwarf was either in the toilet being sick (that suggestion from people for whom even the thought of mussels makes them queasy) or was in the kitchen scrubbing shells.

Bacino specialises in mussels; there are two whole pages of mussel options in their menu. Taking the route of least resistance Katya and I went for the simplest option of ordering their offer of mussels in five different sauces with fries to accompany. Alex chose a steak with mushroom sauce. For drinks I ordered a Framboise (the local raspberry flavoured beer - sharper and juicier than the better known Kriek which is cherry flavoured), Katya took a Duvel (my favourite of the Trappist beers) and Alex ordered water.

The five mussel dish is also available as a special deal where you can have a soup starter, a dessert and a drink for just a few Euros more than the mussels alone. The deal would have been great value but I knew that I wasn't hungry enough to do it justice so we kept things simple.

When the food arrived Alex's steak was nicely presented with lots of sauce. Our mussels came in a metal contraption that looked like something from an industrial caterer. It reminded me of the sort of device from which the school dinner ladies would ladle out soup, custard, gravy and so on (not necessarily in the right order). This big metal beast stood about nine inches high on quite long legs and it was a real intrusion on the table. The waiter placed it on the table between Katya and me with each of the five compartments containing mussels with a different sauce. We each received a bowl of big fat fries (forget the idea of French Fries - the Belgians do them better than any other country on earth) and a small dish of 'fry-sauce'.

Taking care to rip open the corner of my hand wipe sachet before I started to eat - always a useful tip because once your fingers are greasy or covered in juice it's more difficult - I took my first shell and guzzled down the first mussel, keeping the shell to use as an extraction device for the mussels to follow. You then pick up each mussel and use the shell of the first as pincers to pull out the ones that follow.

I can't swear that I worked out what all the sauces were. At one end was a white wine sauce which just tasted vinegary and unpleasant. Next to this was a rather bland meuniere sauce but the mussels were covered in a mass of minced garlic. I like garlic but not in that sort of quantity. I'm not at all sure what the one in the middle was but it came with a couple of large prawns bunged in with the mussels. Pot number four was 'Provencale' (I remembered that one from the menu) so it was with lots of tomatoes, herbs and another dose of garlic and the final section was curry. Yes, you heard me correctly, mussels with curry sauce.

I always like the idea of a 'sampler' dish like this but the reality is that sometimes it's just not that great. In this case, the various flavours really didn't work well together and some of the sauces were just plain nasty. The other problem with the way that the dish was served, was that most of the sauce was at the bottom of each compartment so the mussels themselves were not as infused as they should have been. One of the best things when eating mussels is getting to scoop up all the sauce with a spoon or soak it up with bread but the layout of the serving dish just didn't facilitate that at all. There wasn't space to push the mussels to one side and the dish was too high to get a spoon in and out comfortably.

I guess we ate about half the mussels between us. My pile of shells was certainly bigger than Katya's but more modest than I would have expected given the frenzied state of anticipation I'd been in at the thought of a good mussel fest. The chips - needless to say - all got guzzled up but our performance on the mussels was a bit pitiful. And they aren't exactly the kind of thing you can take home in a doggy bag.

We passed on desserts and coffees because we were a bit ashamed of not having got further through the mussel mound. The bill for the three of us was a shade under Euro75 which was not expensive for a night out in Antwerp but considering that mussels are ridiculously inexpensive as raw materials, I thought it was a bit on the high side for what we'd actually had. Mussels settling nicely in my tummy (despite the 5 sauces fighting for attention) we paid up and headed out into the night knowing that we might not be back for a long time but at least we'd achieved our mussel-quest.

 

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