Diaspora Season: Chapter 2 // Big Trouble in Little Kortrijk?
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The Brussels Beer City Podcast: Diaspora Season is about Brussels’ immigrant communities and the places they love to drink. From ice cold Sagres with piglet sandwiches and pintjes in old bruine kroegen, to creamy pints, fried plantains, and more, the podcast will explore the drinking - and eating - cultures of just a small slice of Brussels’ diaspora communities, in the company of people who have come from all over the world to make their home here.
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Simon Steverlinck is already at Café In Den Hemel when I get there, sitting at a wooden table between a squat stove and the café’s big plate glass window. In Den Hemel is in the northwestern Brussels district of Ganshoren, and Steverlinck (originally from Halen in Flanders) has been coming here on and off since he moved in nearby five years ago. First with his newborn daughter in her buggy, and later - after buying a few rounds to ingratiate himself with the regulars - alone.
He’s a regular himself now, joining the café’s Wednesday evening bike rides and watching the occasional Anderlecht league match at the weekend. It’s a small place, In Den Hemel, just the one-room bar and spartan toilet cubicles out the back. There's space for a dozen or so seated drinkers across some worn green leather banquettes and high stools. There’s the aforementioned black gas stove and on the walls are a dartboard, a promotional skateboard for local singer Zwangere Guy, a chalkboard listing beers for sale, and football paraphernalia from Brussels clubs RWDM and Union St Gilloise. Den Hemel (“In Heaven”) is on a residential street, across the road from the rusting green gates of Ganshoren’s decommissioned municipal cemetery. On a dark night and with the curtains closed, without the black-and-white Estaminet beer sign hanging over the entrance you wouldn’t think it was a bar at all.
But it’s this scruffy, modest charm that Steverlinck likes. It reminds him of the “bruine kroegen”, the old brown bars, he grew up in as a teenage musician drinking in provincial Flemish towns. “What I'm looking for - and what you find in these kinds of bars - is a cosiness,” he says, and plenty of chat at the bar too. Chat conducted in Dutch. Not exclusively, but predominantly - both barmen and beer drinkers. And the value of that to Steverlinck is not to be diminished. “I think it's something about Flemish-speaking people, wherever they are, if they're in Diest or Hasselt or in Brussels, they're the same,” he says. “And you [can] really feel a connection immediately.”
In Den Hemel is one of the few places in this corner of Brussels that’s guaranteed to offer that possibility of connection. But when he first moved to the “the big, big city” (his words) in his mid-20s - before marriage, children, and suburbia - like most Dutch-speaking new arrivals, he found it elsewhere. More specifically, in downtown Brussels’ Dansaertwijk neighbourhood that hosts the densest concentration of Flemish bars in the city.
Some, like the Walvis or Bar Beton, are modern. Others, like the Daringman, Le Coq, or the Roskam are more timeworn. De Markten, right at the neighbourhood’s geographical centre on the Oude Graanmarkt square, is a bit of both. But what connects them, apart from their geographical proximity, is the dominant language spoken behind and in front of den toog: Dutch.
For almost 40 years this small corner of central Brussels - comprising the Antoine Dansaertstraat, the Vlaamsesteenweg (the “Flemish Carriageway”) and the perpendicular streets that criss-cross them - with its bars and shops and cultural lodestones, has been a linguistic enclave for the city’s Dutch-speaking “diaspora”. But the forces that made this neighbourhood a creative centre of Flemish life in Brussels look to be waning, and the Dansaertwijk’s grip on Brussels’ Dutch-speaking imagination might be loosening.
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It’s patently ludicrous, you might argue, to treat Brussels’ Flemish and Dutch-speaking residents the same as its Italian, North African, or Turkish communities. Brussels and Flanders are both Belgian, after all, and Brussels is the seat of Flanders’ regional parliament. For centuries Brusselaars spoke a Brabantian dialect of Dutch, and in his 1992 book Arm Brussel Brussels-born author Geert Van Istendael - whose own parents came from Flanders - said that until the French Revolution Brussels was just as Dutch-speaking a city as Amsterdam or Utrecht.
But Belgian independence in 1830 and a century of Francophone elite-driven policies of Frenchification of this new country’s capital meant that, by 1947 three quarters of the city’s population said they mostly or only spoke French. Brussels was now a Dutch-speaking city, van Istendael wrote, with a French crust on top.
Despite efforts to exclude Dutch from daily life, an influx of what you might call proto-gastarbeiter rural Flemish labourers migrating to Brussels meant there were still working-class Dutch-speaking neighbourhoods. They were clustered in Molenbeek, Anderlecht, Schaarbeek, and parts of central Brussels between the canal and the grands boulevards. Post-WWII social mobility and de-industrialisation scattered these communities to Brussels’ more salubrious outer suburbs - to places like Ganshoren, and bars like In Den Hemel.
But young people keep coming from Flanders to the big city, and to its insalubrious centre. And at the end of the 1970s and early 1980s it wasn’t factory workers or small tradesmen, but writers, musicians, and artists who found their way to partly-abandoned downtown Brussels, attracted by the cheap rent, lively cafés and a rough-edged reputation of the Dansaertwijk.
At that time, local officials had recommended tourists avoid this corner of the Brussels vijfhoek, which was only a five minute walk from the Grand Place. In an article for Brussels’ Dutch-language newspaper, the owner of the Dansaertstraat’s L’Archiduc jazz bar recalled it as a place where there was “a murder a day.”
The nearby Sint-Goriksplein, where I met Hans Vandecandelaere at the Roi Des Belges café, had a similar reputation. But though it is scarcely 100 metres from L’Archiduc, and experienced its own wave of gentrification, Sint-Goriks fell outside the borders of this emerging Dutch-speaking enclave. “There is an essential difference between Sint-Goriks and the nearby Oude Graanmarkt,” says Vandecandelaere, a historian and writer focused on “hyperdiverse Brussels”. “Sint-Goriks is more Francophone, more international…while the [bars] around the Oude Graanmarkt do indeed have a greater concentration of Dutch-speaking Brussels residents.”
Why? Three reasons: culture, couture, and cafés.
The cafés were there first. Rowdy establishments with dodgy reputations that rubbed shoulders with pay-by-the-hour hotels next door. Places like ‘t Kapiteintje, Le Paon Royal, L’Archiduc, and In Den Congo. Journalist, film director, and long-term Dansaertwijk resident Marc Didden - born in Limburg - writes wistfully in his book Over Brussel about witnessing in the Congo three regulars attack a man dressed as Santa Claus for not buying his round.
Didden and his Flemish contemporaries - playwright Josse de Pauw, singers Arno Hintjens and Johan Verminnen, dancer Ana Teresa De Keersmaeker, and others - were often in or near the neighbourhood for work. By the early 1980s the Beursschouwburg, a former dancehall next door to Café Le Coq on Rue Orts, had emerged as a multidisciplinary arts centre. The KVS - the Royal Flemish Theatre - was a short walk away. On the Oude Graanmarkt a former glassware showroom - gutted by multiple fires and with bats roosted in the rafters - was bought by the government and converted into what became the Markten, with a café on the ground floor and performance spaces above. It was here, for example, where De Keersmaeker made her debut, and where across the square at Le Paon Royal many of these figures would drink after hours.
De Pauw captured the slightly manic atmosphere of the scene’s early years in his essay “Ode aan een stamcafé” about Café Le Coq. He writes of its stinking toilets and lingering aroma of bleach, Bruna the Belgo-Italian landlady, the bodybuilders huffing away in the room above the bar, landlord Jean-Pierre’s chanson records, the vagrants and widows and punks and painters and schoolgirls and mercenaries and gigolos who comprised the Coq’s clientele, the clean ashtrays and the well-poured pintjes.
In the wake of these artists came the fashionistas. Sonja Noel, an early supporter of the Antwerp Six fashion designers, opened her boutique Stijl near L’Archiduc in 1984. By the early 1990s others had followed and the sneering term “Dansaertvlaming” had come to denote a particular type of bourgeois Flemish person who came in their expensive cars to spend money in these boutiques. People were beginning to move into the area as well, taking up residence in cheap former industrial buildings.
One of them was Eva Wilsens, and though it was clear a Flemish scene was emerging, and even as some of the bawdier cafés frequented by Didden and co were closing, the Dansaertwijk was still a rough part of town. “There were a few bars, a few night shops, but a lot of empty buildings,” she says. “Dark streets and dark nights.”
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Eva Wilsens is now back in the Dansaertwijk as the director of De Markten, which she says has evolved to become “the village square of Brussels.” The cultural centre and café, now with an extended terrace out front, has remained a central meeting point for Flemish people living inside and outside Brussels. For some of the latter, Wilsens says, it’s one of the few places they know in the city. As if proving her point, the current café operator Joris Lens says that as a 17 year-old coming on very occasional jaunts to Brussels from faraway Hasselt, De Markten featured prominently on his itinerary: “It was really almost my first connection to Brussels.”
Lens discovered the rest of Brussels when he opened the AUB-SVP restaurant in 2013. That restaurant outgrew its location on the Schildknapstraat, and when the lease for the Markten’s café came up he leveraged goodwill nurtured during catering jobs for Brussels’ Flemish cultural institutions to win the bidding process. The Markten didn’t just offer the chance to operate out of a larger space in a beautiful building - the café is big and bright, and shiny, and bats hanging from the ceiling are a distant memory. It also put the ideas he’d developed in AUB-SVP - sustainability, social engagement - at the epicentre of a Dutch-speaking ecosystem. “It's great that it's a bit Dutch-minded, not that it's essential…because my French is horrible,” Lens says.
Both Lens in the café and Wilsens upstairs emphasise that while the majority of their customers are Dutch-speaking, they are open to everyone - in particular the low-income communities bordering the Dansaertwijk. “The focus here is Dutch, but we help everyone in the language they want to be [helped],” he says. And yet, Lens can’t quite get away from the neighbourhood’s reputation, because, well, “it exists,” he says. “Especially here in De Markten, where you often see famous [Flemish] actors.”
Café de Roskam, just around the corner on the Vlaamsesteenweg, is more associated with musicians, thanks in part for its reputation for live jazz. Singer Arno Hintjens lived nearby and was a regular until his death in April 2022. He would, the Roskam’s owner Ruud Van Bochove told local media, drop in several times a week for a quiet hello and a drink.
The Roskam itself is recognisable by the blue tiles, neon wordmark and black-and-white horse logo on its facade. Inside, it looks not unlike Den Hemel in Ganshoren - with red instead of green banquettes, and a similar spartan decoration - though it’s much larger and has a small stage in the back for gigs. It’s busier too, at least on the day I arrive in to interview one of its regulars, Bazaar Trottoir tour guide Valérie de Ketelaere.
De Ketelaere has been coming to the Roskam almost since she arrived in Brussels twenty years ago, after running away from Kortijk in West Flanders. “I [had] wanted to live in a bigger city…somewhere much more multicultural, where it's more city-like,” she says. De Ketelaere didn’t quite outrun her Flemish background, landing after a few years in what she calls Brussels’ “ghetto of Flemish people”. “You had only a few bars [here] where they spoke Dutch, and it was not as lively as it is now, but it was cheaper to live here,” de Ketelaere says.
Originally a regular at the nearby Monk on Rue St Catherine, it was the Roskam that became her Brussels stamcafé. “The stamcafé [is] where you can go…and always see somebody that you know…Often it's the person behind the bar, but not always,” she explains, though explanation is unnecessary. Of the 10 minutes it takes her to order a round of beers, eight are spent catching up with fellow stamgasten at the bar.
De Ketelaere doesn’t live in the neighbourhood anymore, having moved just across the canal. But she’s still close enough to enjoy the neighbourhood’s attractions, linguistic and otherwise. “The language is one thing, but also [it’s] the atmosphere. I love the bars, the restaurants, the shops, the people in the shops, the people walking on the street…I can be myself,” she says. “It’s my little Kortrijk.”
This inner-city village atmosphere evoked by De Ketelaere is what seduced Simon Steverlinck too, or at least a younger version of himself, the one that revelled in its café-centred chaos when he arrived in Brussels for the first time. He too was a Roskam regular, before moving on to the nearby Café Merlo where he’s been drinking on and off for the past 14 years. “When you're a [young] Flemish guy in Brussels, and you go to all the bars in the Vlaamsesteenweg…it's like a small village,” he says. “I always liked it, how cosy it was. You know everybody.” Wednesdays were big nights at the Merlo. That was when the players of the café’s pub league football team - for whom Steverlinck was an integral member - would spend the night at the bar celebrating or commiserating into the small hours.
“Those days are long gone now,” he says ruefully, replaced for the most part by more cautious weekday evenings at In Den Hemel. There is still the occasional cutting loose down on the Vlaamsesteenweg, but every time Steverlinck goes back now he finds Café Merlo a little different than when he left it. The crowd is younger, the barmen too. And the connection just a little more tenuous than it was.
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De Ketelaere too has noticed a sea-change in the Dansaertwijk, as some businesses turn their attention to the tourists who have, despite the previous warnings from the tourism office, found their way there. “I don't go to the Monk a lot anymore because for me it became a bit more touristy,” she says, though it remains popular with her visiting Flemish friends. “I [prefer] to go to the Roskam, the Merlo, [even] Au Laboureur. That's a bit more French, [as in] the people behind the bar are only French-speaking, but it has a nice anarchistic vibe.”
And she and Steverlinck are onto something. There is a generational shift is underway, which is normal; people get older and younger drinkers will always step in to replace them. As De Ketelaere says, tourism-focused hospitality is encroaching too, the result being more chains and fewer independent venues. But there’s something else happening too, a ‘vibe shift’ suggesting the Dansaertwijk’s time as the centre of Brussels’ pocket Dutch-speaking universe might be ending. Not gentrification, exactly, but blandification.
Maybe this blandification is just the end stage of the dynamic initiated by those adventurous Flemish artists in the 1980s. Marc Didden in Over Brussel captures his generation’s anxiety about what’s happening to the neighbourhood they had a hand in creating. Didden bemoans the arrival of copywriters and IT-specialists and loft-living nouveau riche. The area has, Didden says, become pretentious, petty bourgeois, and boring. The Dansaertvlaming epithet is defanged, good now only as fuel for a satirical social media account and spin-off TV series. Part of this is being driven by rising rent and property prices. “I paid €500 for an apartment with two rooms,” Eva Wilsens says, when she moved here in the 1990s. “Now I can't afford to live here anymore.”
Rising retail rents are also pushing out the independent boutiques that earned the area its fashionable reputation. The contested opening of a branch of COS on the Dansaertstraat in 2018 presaged the arrival of a rash of international brands, including American Vintage, Ace & Tate, and Scotch & Soda. The cultural centres appear relatively unscathed, but the pandemic, the energy crisis, and the ambitions of private equity-juiced Belgian hospitality chains have put the Dansaertwijk’s cafés under pressure.
In 2014 the bruine kroeg ‘t Kapiteintje on Rue St Catherine was converted into a branch of the Bar des Amis pub chain. Opposite the Markten, Le Paon Royal is now a branch of the Belgian pizza chain Otomat. On the adjacent St. Catherine square, family-owned fish restaurants have made way for single-dish fast casual places specialising in spaghetti bolognaise, burgers, and ramen.
The biggest upheaval came in the last week of April 2023, when Filip Jans sent an email out with the subject line: “Café Monk is being kicked out”. Jans was Monk’s long-term leaseholder and in the email announced the bar would see out its 10th birthday with a party on May 13, then close permanently. Jans’ message prompted expressions of outrage and disbelief from local politicians that another neighbourhood favourite was disappearing. An online petition against the closure secured over 4,000 supporters, and journalists were dispatched to interview customers enjoying their final plate of the Monk’s signature spaghetti bolognaise.
“We did our very best to…be a place where every Brusselaar could feel at home,” Jans says, talking by phone shortly after his announcement. “Maybe because more and more places are disappearing… the neighbourhood saw us as a big loss.” The proximate reason for Monk’s closure was that the building’s owner - the drinks distributor HLS - wanted to renovate. But Jans saw it as just another example of short-term, profit-focused thinking by the breweries and large drinks businesses which own most of Belgium’s cafés. “Costs are rising, and the margins the breweries give us [are] far too small to survive,'' he says. These pressures, combined with the infiltration of chain outlets, has Jans convinced more bars in the Dansaertwijk are likely to follow the Monk into oblivion. “It’s a trend that’s been going on for years,” he says.
Maybe this is just gentrification devouring its children. Maybe the propulsive force of creative capital that drove the emergence of a Flemish Dansaertwijk has simply exhausted itself. Maybe it’s just the same story that, Hans Vandecandelaere explains back at the Roi des Belges, has repeated itself throughout Brussels’ history: neighbourhoods change. “That's the essence to understanding many Brussels neighbourhoods,” he says. “Who remembers that Kuregem in Anderlecht was 30 or 40 years ago mainly Flemish, Sicilian and Spanish?” Change can happen quickly, Vandecandelaere says. Brussels experiences significant population churn, and will continue to do so as new Flemish Brusselaars arrive and older ones drift to the city’s edges and back across the border into Flanders.
Maybe there’s less need too, these days, for a distinct Flemish quarter at all. There are, Geert Van Istendael wrote in a later edition of Arm Brussels, new cracks in Brussels’ old Francophone crust as the city’s disparate language communities work to reconcile their differences. Maybe, like the Spanish, Italian, and older Flemish communities mentioned by Vandecandelaere, the Dansaertvalmingen will disperse into Brussels’ outer boroughs in search of affordable real estate. Maybe, like Simon Steverlinck did, they’ll find out there some leftover of the Dutch-language communities that made the same migration a half-century before.
***
As someone who’d consider themselves an adoptive Dutch-speaking Brusselaar, I’m not so sure.
I’m sitting in my favourite spot in Café Le Coq - the window nook next to the entrance - on a warm early afternoon in July. It’s the same place I was sitting when, after Le Coq reopened following a Covid-19 lockdown, I saw Marc Didden emerge from the toilets like a bear from hibernation. I remember him lumbering through the café, saluting the bar staff and exchanging goodbyes with some younger drinkers before heading out the door, walking stick gripped tightly in his left hand.
Today, there’s two large groups of Dutch-speaking drinkers, who clearly share some mutual connection, animating the terrace outside. The bartender knows them too, peeling herself away from one group to come inside and serve me a pintje at the bar. The bar resonates with lively, discordant and throaty Dutch conversation.
Generations change, but it looks at least on this day as if Brussels’ Dutch speakers will continue to gravitate towards their Flemish village, their Klein Kortrijk. Sitting there, I’m reminded of something Joris Lens said a few days previous at the Markten: “It’s nice there’s a place in Brussels where you can just speak Dutch when you want to. It's nice that you still have this community feeling.”
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