It was time to leave town; Bonnie had her usual coffee
and croissant (having learned to go down the street for
these), and for breakfast I opened up some of those Dumon
soft centers before heading through town and southward in
search of lunch and the train station.

The Flemish Pot had smelled interesting the other day, but I
checked surreptitiously to find that the prix fixe lunch was E44,
a bit much, with a la carte things to scale, so we decided to
wander through the Saturday market, where there were quite a
few good smells but nothing to eat there, all to take home.
There was a place selling locally made croquettes, but they
were raw, so we gave up and walked toward the station,
munching on a few more of those chocolates on the way, but
then, hark, what were those fragrances coming from the east?

And thus we found Bagientje, which is a mere 100 meters from
the station and turned out to be many times better than it had
to be. The girl behind the desk asked quite severely if we had a
reservation, and I looked quizzically at her; it turned out that
she was allocating rooms at the hotel upstairs and had been of
the impression that we needed a room. Once that misconception
was fixed, we were seated right away at a decent table fairly
near but not too near the door. The service was leisurely; this
was mitigated by a complimentary appetizer of bread, butter,
couscous, and lard. All of which were good, the butter being
the least good, as it was just beginning to turn. Some of the
best bread I've had, and the very best couscous, which had been
cooked in a saffroned chicken stock, mixed with the tiniest dice
of red and green peppers imaginable (and also fixed up with MSG),
and where have you ever been served delicious pure white lard as
an appetizer? It was mixed with sea salt, ground pepper, and
cracklings and was truly wonderful. Bonnie found it disgusting,
so I had the whole 2 oz tublet of it to myself.

She got the Saturday special: beef croquette and a steak frites,
E16. The croquette was leftover boiled beef pulled and mixed
with the usual thick white sauce, rolled in crumbs, and perfectly
fried. Plain but excellent. The steak was tasty, medium-rare as
ordered, in a mushroom cream sauce, a massive bucket of friets on
the side. The steak was good. The potatoes, hung by a contraption
from the edge of the table, were exceedingly potatoey, and she
liked them; they were however not very crispy, so I didn't.

I got tongue in madeira from the dinner menu, It was superb, about
12 oz of interestingly trimmed meat in a demiglace fortified with
wine and very strange normal mushrooms, aged so the caps were
shriveled and the taste intensified. The tongue had been peeled
and the vessels and detritus trimmed off but the fat left on.
Wonderful. Some of the peelings were left in the bottom of the
casserole to intensify the flavors, kind of neat. This came
with the same industrial but delicious croquettes that I'd been
introduced to at Bistro Schilder the other day, only these were
more perfectly fried and in lard.

We got a carafe of red, which was about the best carafe Bordeaux
I've encountered in my life. It was, however, billed at E16.50 the
half liter, a massive amount for house wine. We forgave them.

The only disappointment was my cold chocolate dessert, which at
the Chocolate Jungle had been fresh shaved 80% dark heated with
light cream; here it was syrup and milk, sort of like a Nesquik.

The walk to the station was in perfect cool sunlight, and
despite our best efforts we didn't get run over by traffic. We
did miss our train by about 10 seconds, because Bonnie in the
lead didn't know how to open the train door. Oh, well, the next
one was in 10 minutes.

A short forgettable train ride got us to Sint-Pieter station,
now essentially a huge construction site that offered signs to
the tram that led us to the exact opposite corner of the
station from where the tram actually was. Luckily, some
passersby took pity on us and led us to the right place,
which is where I'd expected it to be to begin with. The
tram let us off at St. Bavo's Cathedral, and it was an
easy third of a mile to the Ghent Marriott on the Korenlei,
where behind a traditional front on an anciently important
quay is a snazzy modern hotel in a style familiar to those
who have stayed in Hiltons, Marriotts, or Hyatts anywhere.
Really peculiar, not, strangely, unattractive, and it didn't
grossly offend my sense of historic preservation. They
upgraded us to a perfectly ordinary room on the executive
floor, which was fine but meaningless, as there no longer
is an executive lounge. Persons of higher status than mine
get drink coupons; I get just the room.

After stowing our traps, we looked for snackies but didn't
find anything that struck our fancy, so we parked at the
hotel bar Poppi, where the bartenders were friendly but
unfamiliar with the merchandise, as the menu and the
inventory were apparently completely different owing to
management changes.

As it was still rather warm, I ordered a Leffe blonde,
which though Belgian as anything (clove, citrus, a little
too sweet) quenched okay, followed by a Coquerel Calvados,
actually quite good. Bonnie had two Grey Gooses and tonic
with lime. The bar snack was a puffed herb cracker coated
with some MSG-laden substance. It was quite moreish. The
cost was similar to what a modest dinner might be.

Wandering around the northern regions we found the Groot
Vleeshuis (big meat house), which interested me, but it
turns out no longer to be a meat market but a sort of
incipient Quincy Market sort of thing, kind of boring.
But we did find out more or less where we were going to
have lunch next day.
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