The Great American Saloon Series/Rick's Café Américain
McGurn, William
"The Great American Saloon Series/Rick's Café Américain" Brussels In a continent where a fine Pouilly Fume might grace even a newspaperman's dinner table, complaints about deprivations here are not likely to fall on sympathetic ears at home. Yet...
...Yet even the good life has its limits...
...It is a place where men and women born on the plains of Iowa and reared on simple, God-fearing fare may demand a hamburger and be presented with a reasonable facsimile...
...the other, closer to the kitchen and for the less important guests, is laid out a I'Europien, that is, with equal disregard for privacy and comfort...
...High on this list, of course, is the clientele...
...has now become as much a part of the tourist experience as a gondola ride or a trip to the top of the Eiffel Tower...
...Which is precisely what makes it so comforting...
...It is a place where a Brooklyn accountant may order in his mother tongue without embarrassment...
...Rick's is an expatriate bar by choice...
...Yet the only one to have risen above the blue-jeansandsweatshirt crowd is Rick's Cafe Americain, named for the famous watering hole in the film Casablanca...
...Then, too, one hears grumblings about the way corners have been cut on the Sunday brunch: smaller pancakes, no cornbread, and coffee that goes for $1.35 a cup—without refills...
...Another complaint, raised in Yankee circles, revolves around the unseemly number of Brits who favor Rick's over their own expatriate establishments, which are located nearer the EC...
...It is no different with Rick's...
...Bogart with Peter Lorre...
...At Rick's these conversations express varying degrees of astonishment at how slow/incompetent/thick the Belgians are...
...Everybody comes to Rick's," says Claude Raines near the beginning of Casablanca...
...Of course Rick's is not without its down side...
...Students, newspapermen, minor diplomats, assorted businessmen, and the odd down-and-out poet lend it a slightly exotic air...
...the account was based on a year's intimacy gained during the correspondent's first sojourn abroad.' Brady's was a local tavern whose roof generously sheltered a group of homesick American students during the length of their program...
...In this the capital of the European Community there exist a number of saloons ministering to just this market, among them Montana Mike's, the Rainbow, and the nowdefunct Cadillac...
...The arbitrariness of it all is what is most appealing...
...As for the crowd that frequents Rick's, again it is somewhat removed from the denizens of Humphrey Bogart's gin joint...
...Its shortcomings are responsible for whatever small measure of charm it may hold...
...A visit to such bars '"Brady's of Maynooth," TAS, August 1985...
...The till is a gold-encrusted job from the National Cash Register Co., which instead of the furtive swooshes of the modern electronic models gives off a robust clang each time a sale is rung up...
...M ore than a year ago this correspondent took to these columns to describe a public house, Brady's, in the nation most renowned for such institutions...
...It is flanked by two dining sections...
...Brussels I n a continent where a fine Pouilly Fume might grace even a newspaperman's dinner table, complaints about deprivations here are not likely to fall on sympathetic ears at home...
...That closest to Avenue Louise is the finer of the two, complete with a splendid old fireplace...
...After picking through endless selections of foie gras, moules vin blanc, and escargots a la bourguignonne, the Yankee palate begins to crave an honest bowl of chili...
...Today shoals of tourists cross the Atlantic to search places like Harry's New York in Venice, Cafe Aux Deux Magots in Paris, or any of the myriad other watering holes where Ernest Hemingway ever took a drink...
...that honor is given to only a few cafes, and a good rule of thumb is that these are not places where the American Express card is accepted and one can order a Long Island Iced Tea...
...In the end, though...
...As distinguished from a saloon patronized by foreigners (e.g., Brady's), the expatriate bar has some definite characteristics of its own...
...Mostly, however...
...At the very least, it provides expatriates with a sanctuary where they may regale one another with jokes at the expense of the natives, in the manner of a British colonial governor entertaining a group of his fellow countrymen...
...Partly it is because Yankee expats are nearly the only ones in this welfare continent whose after-tax incomes allow enough for one of Rick's eight-dollar cheeseburgers or six-dollar shots of Jack Daniel's...
...For the benefit of those patrons for whom the Casablanca metaphor is not immediately obvious, the proprietor has covered the walls with innumerable black-and-white stills from the 1942 film: Bogart outside Rick's...
...Unlike Humphrey Bogart's legendary establishment, however, this Rick's is neither named for Rick (the owner is Jack) nor a haven for those dispossessed and disenfranchised by the political tides of our unpleasant William McGurn is deputy managing editor of the Brussels-based Wall Street Journal/Europe century...
...Quite the contrary, in fact...
...In time, as our powers of memory are overwhelmed by sentiment, these very faults tend to acquire the most nostalgic hues...
...This is not to qualify Rick's as an intellectual bar...
...But Rick's proximity to EC headquarters guarantees a generous quota of Vichyites...
...There are, alas, no Claude Raineses...
...For one thing the basement is a Friday/Saturday-night disco, a flagrant pick-up joint where lecherous old execs compete with lithe young students for the few available women ("the only thing older than the meat are the women," says one expatriate publisher...
...Rick's attracts the expatriate because that is who it is intended to attract...
...Even our own homes have their faults, however—the squeaky faucet in the bathroom, that hideous wallpaper in the hallway—which we overlook simply because it is home...
...It is not so much a part of the local landscape as an escape from it...
...The layout roughly resembles a rectangle divided into three parts, with the bar awkwardly placed smack in the middle, its location dictated by a large mirror and plaster frieze on the wall behind it...
...Rick's, by contrast, is an expatriate bar...
...An expatriate bar is different...
...All in all, not unlike discussing the new neighbors in the privacy of the family drawing room...
...About half-way down the fashionable tree-lined Avenue Louise, Rick's was evidently once home to a Belgian man of some means...
...In short, it is a place where the locals are foreign and the foreigners are at home...
...Meaning, not everybody does...
...In a world increasingly given over to extending privileges solely by merit or financial condition, the satisfaction of being welcome merely because of an accident of birth is hard to come by...
...For this same reason the expatriate saloon—despite management's tireless campaign to present itself to the host country as a faithful, law-abiding establishment—inevitably has the whiff of the subversive about it...
...At the extreme, it may serve men and women actively plotting against the local government...
...ITT's nearby European headquarters ensures a healthy contingent of button-down types, especially during Happy Hour...
...Bogart with Bergman . . . you get the picture...
...No, what Rick's offers is not intellectual stimulation but a manufactured sleaze that strikes just the right expatriate pitch of "roughing it," Uke the thin crust on the neck of a ketchup bottle—homelike but not really unhealthy...
Vol. 19 • December 1986 • No. 12
