belgian beer cafe bluestone - 557 st kilda rd melbourne 3004 03 9529 2899

and i thought australia was the only place that claimed beer and chips as a national dish. probably a couple of hundred years before some foreign monk made a wrong turn at new guinea and found himself in sydney. the belgians were getting on the piss complimented by that other great food group, deep fried chipped potatoes.

they do drink their beer in slightly poofy glasses and are very anal with the whole beer-must-match-the-coaster thing. example? you order your beer from a menu, not by looking along the bar to see what's on tap and each beer has its specially shaped glass and a coaster to match. you'd actually get a pint of guinness faster that a belgian beer but we're not here for speed. sing it with me '7%, 9%, 11%, floor...'

besides chips, they do mussels. big troughs of the things drowned in a number of different sauces, most of which have some form of alcoholic content. bless those bloody pisshead belgians, eh? each of these dishes comes with another pile of chips. they call them frites, but they're maccas chips, no doubt about it. they send some poor bloke down there on his bike to the nearest drive-through every ten minutes.

ahh, stoemp. can't forget the stoemp, fabulous stuff, stoemp. it's mashed potato and pumpkin and sometimes some other vegies with bacon. now it sounds pretty ordinary but nothing could be further from the truth when you need those carbs. i can't believe drunken uni students haven't stumbled across this idea yet.

if you are allergic to seafood and potatoes, you're going to go hungry here. but as long as you're not allergic to wheat you will wonder how you lived so long without belgian beers - with a couple of the 9% alcohol beers, who needs food? great race, the belgians.