Detox Day. Pineapple for breakfast, afternoon tea.

A slice of profane life: yesterday I discovered an excellent restaurant downtown. Viva Bomma had two outstanding scores on a Belgian restoguide website and I thought I'd give it a go. Since my company owns a restaurant themselves, I was a bit nervous because of the risk I'd taken to invite them to a place I hadn't checked out before.
We soon learnt I could have done so, when the chef told us his place opened a year ago. He had turned his deli into a restaurant for his son, but some three months later the same son confessed to being more into forklift driving and left. So this guy and his wife decided to manage the place by themselves. No staff, no fuss neither, 18 sets of cutlery. As soon as we got to our table I felt we were in for a perfect evening.

The menu at Viva Bomma is brief, with a choice of 6 starters and 6 main dishes, which vary from season to season. The desserts vary on a weekly basis. There is a short selection of wine, which is all sold at the same price. We opted for the menu with accompanying wines, and the apéritif on the house. A chardonnay brut, picon or freshly squeezed orange juice. I had a flashback to the night before of about 5 seconds, but then decided I'd go for the chardonnay anyway. Good choice (bad girl). As an appetizer we got serano ham, olives, feta and some salty cookies. Nothing fancy, but again on the house, honest and it made us feel perfectly at home.

I had been thinking of bouillabaise all day - my favourite meal after my stomach's been washed away by wine - so I was definitely going for the Ostend fish soup. It was not a proper bouillabaise, but close enough. My brother-in-law took another seaside classic, fish cake on local lettuce with fried parsley. My sister the carnivore had carpaccio with baked foi gras and grated granny apple. It's a dish she would order all the time and she couldn't stop saying how well this foi gras was fried, and how all ingredients were cleverly combined. I took her word for it, since I don't eat foi gras myself. And the wine? I forgot to look at the bottle. That's how confident I was. Well, that and the fact that I never remember any wine names while eating out, will account for the lack of information on this particular subject.

Out of general sympathy with kitchen staff (one middle-aged, intellectual looking blonde woman as it turned out), we all took the same main dish: a trio of baked fish. The lucky bastards of the day were cod, sea perch and sole. We had them with mashed potatoes, fresh julienne vegetables and herb relish.

Just as we finished our plate, Betty arrived. She's my friend from Brussels, who drove down to Ostend at the risk of being caught in traffic jams and other horroresque situations. Nothing of that, she had made her way to the seaside easily, at 90km an hour - and was in an ideal state for joining us: hungry.

(I am getting a bit tired of descibing food and drinks - I'll skip the part of the beef and baked late spring potatoes, the desserts I didn't have because I had actually already eaten something at home before we set out - never take the risk of not getting any food while going out - and will conclude: it was a dazzling evening, like the one before that and the one before).

...

In my living room, I have a fuchia and pink flower bouquet to stare at.
Outside there's the sea and the setting sun. I'm out of here!