Thu 2 Mar 2006
Point Brugge Café
401 Hastings Street
Point Breeze
412-441-3334
T-Sat 11am-10pm; Sun Noon-9pm
(Note: this is Reed’s first-time review of Point Brugge Café. If you want to see Erika’s first-time review, you can check it out here.)
Point Brugge Café is a small, neighborhood restaurant tucked into little-explored Reynolds Street area of Point Breeze. The emphasis is on things Belgian, and Point Brugge does a very good job, particularly when they stay focused: The fare, overall, is quite good. And, the more Belgian a menu item is, the better it tends to be.
The atmosphere inside is quite inviting and fairly open, given the small space they had to work with. A number of very large booths take up a significant amount of the floorspace, but a sort of elevated seating area at the back gives the place a bigger-than-it-looks quality.
The bulk of the Point Brugge menu is divided between primary sections: Small Plates, Dinners, and Sandwiches. They also offer a pair of “platters,” a few salads, and a daily soup selection. The “Small Plates” menu mostly amounts to appetizers, although some modestly-proportioned versions of their dinner fare can be found as well.
With some initial trepidation, we tried the Roasted Tomato and Spinach Dip, a bubbly blend of tangy, melted cheeses and the occasional soft-and-delicious roasted grape tomato. Delicious! The dish is served with crostini and celery.
In general, I’m always fearful of so-called “spinach dips”, for they so frequently turn out to be a sort of bizarre concoction of spinach leaves dissolving in a strange, polymerized albino-nacho-cheese sauce. Not so at Point Brugge! My only complaint: the dish, I’ve learned, is served blisteringly-hot. One would think that my own instincts of self-preservation would prevent repeated mouth-burnings, but the delicious smell invariably coaxes me into burning myself yet again. But I have no regrets. The crostini could probably be a little less crusty and a little more plentiful, but the celery lends itself to some creative cheese-scooping and provides a welcome, cooling sensation for my burns, not unlike aloe.
When it comes to main courses, my experience has been mixed… but all is forgiven.
As Erika mentioned in her review, the Bolognese sauce (created using Chimay Ale, rather than white wine) lacks a certain bite that the wine would lend. I approve of such experimentation in general, but I feel there’s an acid component missing from the sauce that leaves it flat on the palate. Perhaps a blend of wine and ale could be used to highlight the distinctive character of the Chimay, without sacrificing too much. Or, maybe there’s a tangy lambic out there somewhere that could do the job, if added to the sauce late enough. Close, but needs work.
Most items are quite good, though. The Chaud Chevre salad (A roasted-veggie salad, with — you guessed it — warm chevre) is deilicous. The Steak Frites is also quite good; it’s your basic meat-and-potatoes, Belgian style: a well-proportioned strip steak comes coupled with the outstanding Brugge Frites, served piping hot. (Another burned mouth, anyone?)
Frites are Belgian-style french fries, which I believe are fried once, then cooled and dunked in milk before being fried a second time. They deliver a distinctive, very slightly crusty fry that goes perfectly with the unmistakably European herbed mayonnaise. For anyone who likes a European-style fried potato, The Brugge Frites are truly not to be missed.
But the featured item on the menu is clearly the mussels, or Moules. Belgium is famous for its mussels, served in a light cream and wine sauce. And the Brugge version lives up to expectations both in the sauce department, and in the mussel department. (Apparently, mussels can be shipped alive, so they make their way from Prince Edward Island to Point Brugge — by way of Benkovitz in the Strip — in amazingly good condition.)
A heaping pile of mussels at Point Brugge are more than good enough to make up for any amount of mouth-burning, and even for the corruption of the Bolognese. For the non-traditionalist (like me), the mussels in Red Curry sauce are truly an amazing treat. The curry flavor is quite mild, so it still retains the delicate flavor a Belgian mussel sauce ought to have — you won’t mistake yourself for being in a Thai restaurant. I’ve seen patrons order the mussels, eat them all, and proceed to scoop up the sauce, bit by bit, in a mussel shell. (For the record, I’m not sure why they didn’t just ask for a spoon.)
From a culinary prespective, Point Brugge’s closest cousin in Pittsburgh is probably the Sharp Edge Cafe in East Liberty. But, beyond a focus on things Flemmish, the two restaurants have little in common. The Sharp Edge may offer an impressive (bordering on overwhelming) selection of beers, but it falls short of its own aspirations when it comes to cusisine. Poing Brugge, by contrast, takes advantage of its small size, trading off 160-odd beers for a neighborly atmosphere and a distinctive and quite sucsessful menu.
Hats off to the good folks of Point Brugge.