Brasserie de la Gare

The pasta is good and it will be better if the shrimp is more fresher. Love the beer!!!! The service is great! The environment is very comfortable with popular music. Very relax before hopping into a long trip bus.

Love this place! My husband and I had to wait for the train to Paris for 5 hours. We spent 3 hours in this place. We had a lot of beers. They got awesome choices. The server was super nice and didn't complain that we were just sitting there. He recommended very good Belgium beers to us. Food was great here. The price of food and drinks was very reasonable.

Eating near train stations in Belgium is normally bad news ...

but this place is far less bad than the alternatives.

It is run by a middle eastern family that is trying really really hard to make a go of the brasserie and do a good job -

and their efforts paid off.

They stock really good beers notably by bottle.

The steak frite is not the usual piece of shoe leather served in cheap french cafes.

(it is not a 80 euro piece of kobe beef either - but it is a solid B+ for an econo-steak.)

my wife who is fussy about her fries ADORED her fries.

They seemed to be "provided by a frozen commercial provider" to me - but they were still pretty decent and I chowed down happily.

The salads had canned olives (a horrible sin in my book) but TONS of capers, a lot of anchovies, tons of pickled olives, a good dressing ...

so they were actually generous with the expensive ingredients ...

plus the greens and veggies were fresh and tasty

(which is not always the case in cheap utility places)

i borrowed her anchovies for my steak - and with a good beer and good side dishes on my plate, i was a very happy guy.

so we did much better than one expect for station-side eating.

We chilled out at this place for over 3 hours during our 5+ layover in Brussels, before catching the train to Paris. We didn't want to go too far from the train station because we had all our luggage with us. And this place proved to be perfect for our purposes, especially since they had free WiFi.

The staff was super friendly. They not only tolerated us sitting around there for hours, but they actually encouraged us to do so. I guess the fact that we kept buying beers helped :)

Food was very decent, but just average. Otherwise I'd give them a full 5 stars. I had a Croque Madame and my wife had something else (I forget). Certainly nothing wrong with the food, but I've had better.