The cathedral rises from the warren of gabled houses and cobbled streets like a fantastic medieval rocket poised to explore some unknown realm of faith. As my tram rounds the corner, I lean to one side for a better view of the exquisite trickery in the airy, bone-white belfry; that the spire is actually made of stone would strain anyone’s credulity.
“It’s lovely since they cleaned it,” says the Indian woman sitting next to me in a vermilion sari under a shearling coat. “When I was a girl, the cathedral was black with soot.”
I must have looked puzzled, for she just smiled, as if to remind me that appearances can be deceiving, especially in Antwerp.
Stepping off the tram and windblown under a low, gray sky, I head down Appelmansstraat, a narrow street near the rail station whose random façades of ’50s modern, Deco, Art Nouveau, and other florid 19th-century styles look like so many odd books on a collector’s shelf. Following the aroma of coffee and pastries, I arrive at Del Rey, the most elegant tea salon in this ancient North Sea port. I order a chocolate tart but remain puzzled by the waitress’s disapproving glare until I realize that I’ve tracked flaxseed—bright red and shiny—all across the carpet.
Of course. I’ve just come from the sprawling port, only a few miles away, and remember an enormous ship from Valparaíso unloading flax as I passed its rusty hull. I am vaguely embarrassed until I spot two young women, one with a pierced eyebrow, the other with tattooed hands, taking a seat. Surely their presence in this consummately civilized refuge of European ritual will mitigate my offense. But to my surprise, two grandes dames on their way out make a point of stopping by their table. It seems that one of the younger women is the florist of the moment, very much in favor with the wives of the local diamond merchants who patronize this sublime little salon.
Proudly wearing the mantles of wealth and culture attendant upon European bourgeois society, Belgium’s second city is appropriately epicurean and refined. But Antwerp is also magnificently unsettling, which is why I love it. Tensions and contradictions run just below the surface. Or, sometimes, they are garishly apparent: In the red-light district, one of the largest in Europe, women from Ukraine, Belarus, and Africa strike poses in shop windows that are framed in eerie red neon, before the gaze of swaggering men not used to dry land and so much beer.
The first time I visited, in 1987, the city was just attracting the attention of the fashion world. Outside its glittery center—Antwerp is a very rich city—many of its neighborhoods had the appealing shabbiness of old slippers. There was good, if predictable, classic French food served in formal restaurants whose interiors mimicked the warm scenes of a Flemish painting. But grabbing a plate of mussels and frites on the run proved as much fun as dining out.
More than a decade later, the city has lost none of its homey charm, but now its forlorn 19th-century waterfront has been gentrified, and a lively neighborhood flourishes around the new museums of contemporary art and photography in the Zuid quarter. In the 1960s two dock basins in the Zuid were filled in to become a big square, today surrounded by galleries, shops, restaurants, and cafés. You can stop for a beer or coffee at Cargo, whose cast-concrete décor recalls Santa Monica more than Flanders, or stop by L’Entrepôt du Congo, where the setting is prewar and proletarian, from the antique, cream-colored globe lamps to the shiny chrome spigots running the length of the bar.
As Antwerp booms culturally, signs are everywhere that the city is evolving into the capital of a newly revived and prosperous realm—Flanders—whose rising autonomy jibes with the trend toward decentralization in the ever-unifying Europe. After 170 years, Flemish-speaking Flanders, whose language is similar to Dutch, is finally easing out of its sour, contentious marriage with Wallonia, the historically dissimilar, francophone region of western Belgium. In fact, most of the natives consider themselves Flemish first, then European, and finally Belgian.
The fact that Antwerp is thriving represents a reversal of regional fortunes in Belgium. For a century after the country was founded in 1830, Wallonia was rich, due to its coal and steel industries, and Flanders was poor and agricultural. Now Flanders is home to robust service industries and an emerging high-tech economy.
But the core business of Antwerp, culturally at least, remains confronting the bourgeoisie, which, to its credit, eventually comes around to the newcomers and their new ideas—not for love of change but for a chance to make a profit. This instinct to reach for a calculator rather than a gun is key to the city’s character. “Antwerp is primordially a city of traders,” says Geert Bruloot, a local retail king and PR maestro who was instrumental in orchestrating the rave debut of the city’s first generation of fashion designers at the London Designer Show in 1986. Over lunch at the trendy bistro Hungry Henrietta, he tells me, with a dose of Flemish pride, “I love the mixture of cultures in Antwerp. It’s the reason I couldn’t live anywhere else. Antwerp is to Brussels what Barcelona is to Madrid.”
Linda Loppa, director of the incipient Flanders Fashion Institute, echoes his praise: “People feel free to try something new here. Antwerp has a sense of fantasy you don’t find in the Netherlands or Germany.” Loppa shows me around a huge, derelict electrical-goods factory in the heart of the city that is being converted into a costume museum to open in 2001—a fascinating measure of Antwerp’s future ambitions. The space is rather magical—the perfect spot to stage Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast—and revolves around a soaring central staircase linking four sprawling floors, each with very high ceilings, framing a central atrium. “We want to create a new pole of attraction for visitors to Antwerp,” she says. “I started working on this project in 1996; the breakthrough came when the provincial government of Flanders realized that the institute could be an important addition to the local cultural landscape.”
Ann Demeulemeester, who is perhaps the most original of the talented fashion designers who work in Antwerp, recently opened her first freestanding boutique, a space that’s as provocative and unexpected as the clothing on display. Mannequins in plate-glass windows dangle from the ceiling on steel cables, wooden floors remain roughed up, and almost the entire space is white. Demeulemeester was one of the Antwerp Six, the original band of local designers to make it big, which also includes Walter Van Beirendonck and Dries Van Noten, the Ralph Lauren of Belgium.
“Making clothing is not just fashion, it’s a form of communication,” says Demeulemeester, explaining her summer 2000 collection with an engaging passion that was easy to understand once I saw the clothing: Fragments of phrases from rocker Patti Smith’s book of poetry, Woolgathering, are hand-embroidered on transparent white or black silk blouses to be worn over tunics; photographs by Jim Dine, taken specifically for the collection, have been screened onto dresses.
Walter, created from a former parking garage, is another of the hip boutiques in Antwerp, here just off up-and-coming Nationalestraat, which links the Zuid with the city’s historic center. In the back of the store, a huge polyurethane bear comfortably reclines. Owner Walter Van Beirendonck says that all kinds of people come to shop, “from mink-coat ladies to techno-kids. The old bourgeois culture is giving way. Antwerp has a great pop-kitsch sensibility that comes from old films, television, and modern visual culture—and everyone’s in on it.”
Perhaps, but one of the keys to the rise of fashion in Antwerp is the stodgy, if ever-reliable, diamond industry, which employs 30,000 people and has a turnover of $15 billion a year. And, beyond the hip and chic of the Zuid, a preoccupation with 16th-century opulence and comfort is still very much a part of the historic heart of Antwerp, where the prevailing atmosphere remains profoundly and quite authentically that of the northern Renaissance.
If any great metropolis liberates with an abundance of choice and an option for anonymity, it is rare that such freedoms abound in a city as snug and intimate as Antwerp, with only 500,000 people, its suburbs included. Antwerp is a Catholic city, with an almost Mediterranean joie de vivre, unusual for a town some 50 miles up a muddy river from the North Sea. Historically liberal and with a proud tradition of humanist thought, Antwerp has always been a great European center of culture. In the 16th century, the Portuguese established a distribution point in Antwerp for spices and precious commodities from the lucrative East Indies trade, and in 1531 a stock exchange was founded in the city, later to serve as a model for those established in London and Amsterdam. Banking innovations, such as the first letters of credit and bills of exchange, accelerated the explosive growth of the city. Just a few decades later, Antwerp attracted more than 1,000 foreign trading offices and was the second-largest city in Europe after Paris. Around that time, the Portuguese began trading Indian diamonds here, which drew Jewish gem dealers fleeing persecution in Portugal and Spain.You get a good look at Renaissance Antwerp inside the Museum Mayer Van den Bergh, where Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s masterpiece Mad Meg not only depicts an apocalyptic vision of war but also provides caustic commentary on gluttony, lust, greed, and amoral ambition. And if many of the region’s 16th-century artists represented in the museum were keen to show off their technical mastery by portraying the sheen on a newly opened oyster or the transparency of glass, they also revealed the gourmand tendencies of the city’s rich burghers by painting exotic and expensive Spanish citrus fruits, bottles of French wine, and plates of lobsters.
Antwerp is also a latter-day city of guilt, having served as the launching pad and countinghouse during the savage exploitation of the Belgian Congo by King Leopold II in the 19th century. During the Nazi occupation, the city behaved with an ambivalent passivity, although there were notable exceptions. Most recently, Antwerp has given birth to the Vlaams Bloek—White Block—a far-right party that is ominously well represented on the city council. Within the city limits, though, you’ll find two mosques, five synagogues, one of the highest percentages of foreign-born citizens for a European city its size, and an almost nonexistent crime rate. Freud would have loved Antwerp.A walk down Nationalestraat tells Antwerp’s diverse story. Here is a Cypriot grocery next to a slick take-out sushi place, itself flanking a shop that sells spectacularly odd and tacky ceramic figurines—not just ballerinas and Harlequins but generic American Indians, plus Fred and Wilma Flintstone. Next to it is a chocolatier sporting campy portraits of Prince Philippe of Belgium and Mathilde d’Udekem d’Acoz, his new bride. And everywhere are the old-fashioned greengrocers, each displaying bunches of freshly pulled radishes that are as comely as any bouquet of roses. There are bakeries selling French bread as well as sturdy, dark Germanic loaves armored with seeds; butcher shops with hares and pheasants neatly arranged in their original finery; and cheese vendors selling French, Dutch, Italian, and English varieties as well as bright-yellow butter to be cut from a massive mound into manageable slices. The whole street is a delicious comment on the importance Antwerp attaches to eating well.
This may explain why Garnich Didier, considered the best chef in the city, operates with the intensity of a surgeon. A few minutes after ordering at De Matelote, his snug yellow dining room in a narrow 16th-century house, you encounter his precision and obsession through stunning hors d’oeuvres—stuffed mushrooms, cheese straws, marinated fresh anchovy canapés, and salmon tartare. Didier’s talent is nowhere more obvious, though, than in his fish dishes, such superbly conceived creations as house-smoked wild Scottish salmon steak with asparagus and Zeeland oysters, and sea bass with a bread-crumb and herb crust on a bed of confit tomatoes and lemon.
“My fish comes to me within hours of being line caught in the North Sea,” Didier tells me, adding that Asian and Italian cuisines influence him more than classic French does. “My fish is already dead,” he says slyly, “so I don’t want to kill it a second time by smothering it with foie gras.”
The night I dine at ’t Fornuis, a pampering two-star in an old gabled house off the Groenplaats, I think of the Renaissance bons vivants from the Mayer Van den Bergh museum. They might have recognized many of their favorite victuals among chef Johan Segers’s battery of classic bourgeois French dishes, which he gives an occasional personal spin. The only really Flemish part of my meal is a tiny hors d’oeuvre of green pea soup with chunks of sausage. Segers himself, a tall, bespectacled man with a blond ponytail, comes to the table in immaculate chef’s whites to recite his daily bill of fare—there’s no printed menu—and to help you design your meal.
Since I appear curious about the preponderance of Bordeaux on the wine list, the young sommelier explains that Antwerp has been trading with the French wine port since the Middle Ages. Belgium, he points out, produces no wine, so its selections are often more cosmopolitan than those in neighboring France, usually with bottles from Spain, Italy, California, Australia, and New Zealand.
If ’t Fornuis is pleasant, albeit very expensive, at Hippodroom, in the Zuid, I find cooking that corresponds to the current fin-de-siècle ambiance of a city in full cultural evolution. Here, in the high-ceilinged dining room, are gorgeous 19th-century moldings, parquet floors, huge black-and-white photos screened on the walls, and chandeliers of randomly suspended halogen striplights. I lunch on a luscious and hard-to-find local classic: breaded croquettes filled with béchamel sauce and tiny gray shrimp from the North Sea, garnished with lemon wedges and deep-fried parsley. I follow that with grilled tuna steak served on a bed of rock salt with a beautifully made, curry-flavored mousseline sauce and a sauté of red and yellow peppers, leeks, broccoli, cauliflower, and bean sprouts. I end the meal with pain perdu, literally “lost bread”—thick slices of brioche dipped in egg batter, grilled, and caramelized—that is served with spice-cake ice cream.
It’s not just restaurants that are doing well in Antwerp. Café life here, more so than in most French cities, is alive and well. There are hundreds of little places all over town where people duck in for a coffee, invariably served with a piece of chocolate or a cellophane-wrapped burned-sugar biscuit, a De Koninck—the local ale—or one of the hundreds of delectable abbey brews that Belgium produces. Locals sit and read the papers, play chess or pool, chat, daydream, even dance. In their cafés, the Antwerpers find a culture of casual, unhurried leisure that’s unique to northern Europe, with the possible exception of Irish—but not English—pubs. Just don’t expect Gallic elegance or posing; the Flemish prefer cozy, hole-in-the-wall cafés with communal tables that facilitate conversation.
Sitting in one of these cafés on my last night in Antwerp, I savor the crowd passing through the beautifully illuminated Grote Markt square—Panamanian sailors joking in Spanish with Peruvian sweater vendors; an elderly man with a gold monocle accompanying his wife, who wears a fox stole; a band of singing German teenagers; and a flock of natty Flemish couples out for a night on the town. I begin to wonder if Europe might finally be free of the mistakes of its past, ready to lead the way to even greater prosperity and well-being for the rest of the world. If so, this city will surely be one of its guiding lights.
Details
To telephone Antwerp from the United States, dial 011 32 3 followed by the numbers given below. Antwerp has its own airport, but from the United States it is easier to fly to Brussels and continue on by train, a ride of only 40 minutes.
Where to Stay
The best hotel in town, De Witte Lelie, Keizerstraat 16–18, tel. 226 19 66, fax 234 00 19, e-mail: hotel@dewittelelie.be, is an intimate, Flemish-style charmer with only ten rooms in two gabled 16th-century houses. Doubles $200. Hotel Firean, Karel Oomsstraat 6, tel. 237 02 60, fax 238 11 68, e-mail: hotel.firean@skynet.be, is a bit off the beaten track in a quiet residential neighborhood, but this homey Art Deco townhouse hotel is friendly, very comfortable, and right on the tram line leading to the center. Doubles from $135. Alfa Theater, Arenbergstraat 30; tel. 203 54 10, fax. 233 88 58, may be uninspiringly modern, but it has a great location and comfortable rooms with reasonable rates. Doubles from $90.
Where to Eat
‘t Fornuis, Reyndersstraat 24, tel. 233 62 70, may not deserve two Michelin stars, but this charming restaurant serves very good classical French food, such as truffled sweetbreads in truffle sauce and turbot in white-bean sauce. Excellent but pricey wine list. At De Matelote, Haarstraat 9, tel. 231 32 07, fax 231 08 13, chef Garnich Didier’s stylish dining room, in the middle of town, rates a Michelin star and raves from the local beau monde. Book well in advance. Dock’s Cafe, Jordaenskaai 7, tel. 226 63 60, a very popular seafood brasserie on the waterfront, has a raw bar that serves oysters and langoustines with freshly made mayonnaise; two of the better main courses are sole meunière, which comes with sautéed endive and parsleyed potatoes, and sea bass on a bed of Provençal vegetables. On the ground floor of a stunning Art Nouveau mansion in the Cogels-Osylei neighborhood (a 15-minute taxi ride from the center), Euterpia, Generaal Capiaumontstraat 2, tel. 235 02 02, is a favorite of the well-heeled locals, including those working in the diamond industry. The pasta with wild mushrooms and panfried goose liver in orange sauce are good starters; then order lobster waterzooi, a light version of this traditional Belgian dish in which lobster—or game, in season—replaces chicken in a bowl of bouillon with green beans and potatoes. Hippodroom, Leopold de Waelplaats 10, tel. 248 52 52, is perfect for lunch after a visit to the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, across the street. Go light on the chicken yakitori salad or sushi, or sample the shrimp croquettes, a local classic, and tuna steak or filet mignon with homemade frites. L’Entrepôt du Congo, Vlaamse Kaai 42, tel. 238 93 32, is another good spot after visiting the Royal Museum. A storefront bistro with cement floors and halogen lights dangling from the ceiling, Hungry Henrietta, Lombardenvest 19, tel. 232 29 28, appeals to the fashion crowd by serving contemporary dishes like tuna carpaccio with fresh cilantro and lemon, langoustines on a bed of tagliatelle, and grilled cod steak. Zuiderterras, Ernest Van Dijckkai 37, tel. 234 12 75, has become a chic symbol of how Antwerp has reclaimed its waterfront; it’s a good place to enjoy river views over a beer and salad. Maritime, Suikerai 4, tel. 233 07 58, just off the Grote Markt, serves traditional Flemish-style seafood and attracts a cross-section of Antwerpers, who come to feast on big pots of mussels steamed in white wine, chopped shallots, and parsley, accompanied by a platter of freshly made fries. Hoffy’s, Lange Kievitstraat 52, tel. 234 35 35, a popular kosher restaurant, fits the bill for lunch after a stroll around the diamond district. Try the sweet carp, stuffed eggplant, potato pancakes, or assorted platter. At Cargo, Leopold de Waelplaats 24b, tel. 260 60 10, young and hip rules. Two of the best stands for Belgian french fries are Frituurs, Teodor van Rijswijck Plaats, and Erik, Waalse Kaai 35, both near the photography museum in the Zuid district.
What to See
The exceptional little Museum Mayer Van den Bergh, Lange Gasthuisstraat 19, tel. 232 42 37, displays the magnificent art collection of Fritz Mayer Van den Bergh, a wealthy 19th-century aesthete and collector, and includes superb Flemish still lifes and two wonderful Bruegels. The most important tribute to 16th-century printing is at the Museum Plantin-Moretus, Vrijdagmarkt 22, tel. 221 14 50, which occupies the stunning brick mansion just off the Groenplaats, where Christophe Plantin, one of Europe’s most important early printers, lived and worked. In addition to the actual printing works, which are fascinating, there’s an impressive collection of rare books, including one of the 13 surviving copies of the Gutenberg Bible. The Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, muhka, Leuvenstraat, tel. 238 59 60, was built from Art Deco grain silos and is a spectacular all-white space with soaring volumes and has regularly changing exhibitions. The photography museum, Provinciaal Museum voor Photographie, Waalse Kaai 47, tel. 242 93 00, has one of the most extensive permanent collections in the world, including works by Brassaï, Doisneau, Atget, Man Ray, Cartier-Bresson, and Capa. What would Antwerp be without the Provinciaal Diamantmuseum, Lange Herentalsestraat 31–33, tel. 202 48 90, where the entire story of diamonds—from their mining through cutting and grading and on to trading—is presented. The Flandria port tour, Steenplein, tel. 231 31 00, gives fans of industrial architecture a fascinating glimpse, on a 90-minute cruise, of the working port.
Where to Buy
For designer gear: Ann Demeulemeester, Leopold de Waelplaats/Verlatstraat, tel. 216 01 33, carries minimalist men’s and women’s wear; Walter, St. Antoniusstraat 12, tel. 213 26 44, is where to find hip, young sportswear; Het Modepaleis, Nationalestraat 16, tel. 233 94 37, is the flagship boutique of Dries Van Noten; Louis, Lombaardenstraat 4, tel. 232 87 22, carries the signature collection of Martin Margiella, now head designer for Hermès, and new talent like Veronique Branquinho, Jurgi Persoons, and Raf Simons.
For art, antiques, and chocolate: Gallery Ronny Van de Velde, Ijzerenpoortkaai 3, tel. 216 30 47, has a soaring three-story space in the Zuid, as well as the most interesting shows of painting and photography. Axel Vervoordt, Kasteel van’s Gravenwezel, St. Jobsteenweg, S’ Gravenwezel, tel. 658 14 70, is the most famous antiques dealer in town (by appointment only). Bill Blass and Ralph Lauren are among the clients who visit his spectacular 13th-century castle, just outside of town, which is filled with English and Belgian antiques, most of which are for sale. He has just opened another spectacular gallery space in an old distillery near the castle. Del Rey, Appelmansstraat 5–9, tel. 233 29 37, Antwerp’s best chocolatier, produces more than 80 different types of filled-chocolate pralines, and the tearoom is a fine spot to sample these remarkable pastries.