Meet KLINE, The Brutalist Kitchen With a Brutal Price

[Restaurant review]

Meet KLINE, The Brutalist Kitchen With a Brutal Price

Here I am, one evening, looking for a nice restaurant in Brussels to enjoy good food with great folks.

Lately, I’ve been using Guide Michelin to gather some ideas and options before looking deeper.

Let me stop here to correct a popular belief. Michelin’s guide doesn’t contain only pricey restaurants or starred ones, which may cost just as much. Depending on the location, they tend to have good if not excellent restaurants for a fair price. Now back to my story.

This is how I came across KLINE, a restaurant that you can easily reach walking from Brussels’ Place Sainte-Catherine.

Reading their website, their ‘punchline’: KLINE, The Brutalist Kitchen, intrigued me. As a big fan of the brutalist movement, I could but be attracted.

The brutalist movement fascinates me on many levels, even before cold-blooded capitalists smelled money in minimalism and captured and repurposed it. See Les Étoiles d’Ivry in the outskirts of Paris for an example of brutalist architecture.

Nowadays, you can find hints (if not more) of brutalism in many places where the ‘Patagucci’ bobo clan congregates. This group craves detox juices that cost an arm and a leg, kale (or whatever the fad of the day consists of) and oat milk drinks. Full disclosure: In many ways, probably more than I want to admit, I belong to that clan.

I am veering off. Back to KLINE. I decided to give it a try. And here we go.

My initial impressions proved favourable. Nice, young people from the ‘Patagucci’ clan, highly likely Flemish given their French accent, minded the kitchen and served the customers. Brutalist influenced interiors and decoration. Delicate lighting, …

A waitress took us to our table, gave us the menus and explained the concept of the restaurant. They purportedly use mostly local and exclusively seasonal ingredients. The plates are for sharing. Each guest should take three plates (without counting dessert), to fill a reasonably empty stomach. The restaurant does not serve bread for free, so one must order it. Note this. I’ll come back to it later.

We were enjoying ourselves and engaged in interesting discussions. We trusted our hosts and ordered three plates each, bread and there we went. We didn’t look at the prices of the food we were ordering. But when the smiling waitress asked us about drinks, our eyes met the price list. Ten euros for a mocktail. 24 for a bottle of 75cl of kombucha (winking at the bohemian brotherhood and sisterhood out there). And let us not speak about alcohol. Homemade ice tea, please. Yes, for everyone. Thank you.

The food tasted good. The ingredients felt fresh and very tasty. The recipes would have been delicious had they not put so much sauce on almost every plate. And remember that bread is not offered. One has to order it. Which we did. And it was delicious bread, but one would need to order three or four servings to enjoy all the sauce. And good luck with that!

Time for tasting dessert. As a long-time foodie, I came to recognise great restaurants by how mind-blowing their desserts were. Regardless of how subpar some plates were.

Here, KLINE lost quite some points. Their desserts tasted fine, but some at CERT-EU, who kindly shared their homemade desserts with us, can make at least as good desserts as KLINE.

Then, the bill came. We ended up coughing up almost 90€ per person, with one soft drink and no alcohol. That’s the price range of many 1-star Michelin restaurants.

So brutal that I wouldn’t go to the brutalist kitchen any time soon. It’s just a rip-off in broad daylight, even for a “pataguccian” such as yours truly.

– KLINE, The Brutalist Kitchen. Vlaamseseteenweg 162, 1000 Bruxelles. Belgium.