Inflight Magazine of Brussels Airlines

Food & drink

Jenny McNeely finds the best places in Europe to take brunch, puts art cafés in the picture and looks forward to a mouth-watering cooking festival

IMAGE GRAND HOTEL, ANDREA SARTI/CAST1466, RICHARD BRYANT

Brasserie Desbrosses

BERLIN

CHAMPAGNE BRUNCH

3 Potsdamer Platz, tel. , www.desbrosses.de

The Financial Times recently commented that the hugely popular Sunday brunch at Brasserie Desbrosses had “done for brunch what Bugatti did for cars”. This may have a lot to do with the never-ending flow of bubbly on offer. The food, meanwhile, encapsulates everything that’s great about brunch, in that you can have whatever you fancy. Platters of seafood, fresh lobster, shrimp and oysters can be sampled along with beef and freshly baked patisserie. This ties in with the French theme – the brasserie dates from 1875, when it was built not in Berlin but in the French city of Macôn, before being transported brick by brick to Germany. Every art deco lamp and painted tile has come from the original building, and don’t be surprised to find yourself serenaded by an accordionist to cement the oh-la-la ambience.

The brunch costs €78 (you can get a Dom Perignon upgrade for €199) but you won’t have to, or be able to, eat anything else after this afternoon of indulgence. It’s immensely popular and reservations are essential – think weeks ahead rather than days.

Grand Hotel

OSLO

GRAND CAFÉ JAZZ BRUNCH

31 Karl Johans Gate, tel. , www.grand.no

Brunch is well-established in Norway, where it usually serves as an antidote to the previous night’s excesses. And there’s no better place for a traditional hangover cure than this most traditional of establishments.

The Grand Café is on the ground floor of Oslo’s Grand Hotel, and is one of the city’s most splendid meeting places. Since the hotel was opened in 1874 (by pastry chef Julius Fritzner, so there’s no excuse for poor patisserie), the café has been frequented by politicians, journalists, actors and students – it was a place of stories, rumour and the odd scandal, so journalists would pen their columns in the café so as not to miss a thing. The famous dramatist Henrik Ibsen walked to the café every day for nine years from his home on Arbiens Street to enjoy an open sandwich, a beer and a schnapps. In fact, the playwright became such a regular fixture that he had an armchair reserved for him.

Don’t eat a morsel in the morning, as the groaning smorgasbord at the Grand Café demands a keen appetite – you can round off your afternoon of grazing with a slice of Napoleon cake and a strong black coffee. The Sunday Jazz Brunch is open from 1pm-5pm and costs €41/NOK 325 per person; booking is recommended.

Captain cooks

Join Hugh and other top chefs at Bristol’s Love Cooking Festival

Want to improve your culinary skills? Then get yourself along to Britain’s first festival of cooking, where the country’s best-loved chefs will be taking to the stage to demonstrate their skills to an eager audience of enthusiasts.

Each Love Cooking show is a one-day event featuring a series of one-hour, theatre-style cookery presentations from chefs such as James Martin, Gary Rhodes, Rachel Allen, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Rick Stein and Valentine Warner.

The festival kicks off on 5 October in Bristol with useful sessions such as ‘cooking for friends’, before travelling to London in November, where Rick Stein will be demystifying the cooking of fish in his live session. www.lovecookingfestival.com

The Peggy Guggenheim Collection

VENICE

704 Dorsoduro, , www.guggenheim-venice.it

The Peggy Guggenheim Collection is housed in the collector’s former home on the Grand Canal. One of the world’s best small museums, its café is the perfect spot to mull over an art collection that features Picasso, Kandinsky and Pollock. It also overlooks the Nasher Sculpture Garden, which contains work by Henry Moore and Anish Kapoor, and is the final resting place of Guggenheim and her beloved dogs.

Chiswick House Café

LONDON

Burlington Lane, tel. , www.chiswickhousecafe.com

A domed party pavilion created in the 18th century by Lord Burlington and his protégé William Kent, Chiswick House is an imitation of Palladio’s Villa Rotunda in Vincenza. In the gardens, architect firm Caruso St John has created a smart new café, which serves modern British cooking and captures the spirit of the original villa – a place where sophisticated townies and rock’n’roll aristocrats got up to all sorts of mischief.

NEED TO KNOW

Brunch is the tastiest of portmanteaus. The meal can include almost anything, from eggs benedict to champagne cocktails, but there have to be some rules and purists believe a meal cannot be designated as brunch until after 10am. The culinary philosophy of ‘whatever you want’ originates from the land of the free, of course – the United States – but has now been eagerly embraced by the rest of the world

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