In Brussels, meals don't follow the French service but the workday: black coffee and a morning tartine, a hearty one-pot stew at noon (carbonnade, stoemp), a visit to the friterie after the workshop, and a dark beer with something sweet to end the evening. It's a cuisine of patience and comfort, built around long hours bent over the drawing board.

In Belgium, beer is not just a drink: it's a sauce base. Flemish carbonnade gets all its depth from an amber brown beer that caramelizes and tenderizes the meat. It's the garum of Flanders, the umami of the Low Countries.