De Brasserie Douche Zac

That's Dutch for The Douche Bag Brasserie. This place opened up down the street recently, so last night Martin, Yana, and I paid it a visit. As we walked out later that night my first words were, "that was the highest concentration of pretension I've been around in a long time." Which is surprisingly ironic because today as I began to write this blog I looked up Brasserie V online, only to see that featured prominently at the top of their site is this definition:

bras-se-rie (brās ′ Ə -ře′) an unpretentious restaurant, tavern, or the like, that serves drinks, esp. beer, and simple or hearty food.

The problems started for me when the bar tender, or perhaps he would prefer bierista, asked as we walked in the door if we were going to be having beer or wine. In general, at places that are supposed to have large selections of both, I like to see what my options are. Apparently we should have been thinking about this on the way over though so we could answer promptly as we entered. So, after bringing both a beer and wine list bierista offers to let us sample any of the beers before we choose, but only if we can pronounce them correctly. This is the first point of the night in which I thought: douche bag. It was by no means the last. Specifically we were told how he "just can't stand it when people pronounce Hoegaarden wrong. I upped my judgement from douche bag to Skoczen's favorite douche box. The über-academic graduate student from the German department sitting nearby at the bar quickly joined in, eagerly stating his disgust with poorly pronounced Dutch beer names too. He is precisely the reason why people don't like graduate students. Now, Hoegaarden is actually originally from Flanders which is part of Belgium, but where they speak Flemish, which is part of de Dutch. And that brings up a good point. Not only do neither of these pretentious lecturers on Germanic pronunciation not speak Dutch (or Flemish), but they also had no idea who they were talking to, namely a girl who's lived her whole life in Germany, a guy who was born there and is still fluent, and a linguist who knows his phonetics and phonology.

Once the German connection is made of course the tediously predictable Twenty-Something self-embiggenment begins with the places they've been, the people they've seen, the odysseys they've been on, the foreign lands they've fallen in love with. Demonstrating the advanced nature of grad student's douchery, this is all conducted in German. I take the opportunity to order a Corsendonk, which not only did I like the taste of but I really enjoyed saying too.

Later, as the airs of faux-worldliness began to die down, the barkeep attempted to find a beer Yana would like. She asked for something dark. He came back with 3 amber colored beers, all pronounced as too sweet. This, as with the rest of her judgments, I found to be a reasonable criticism. He poured 3 more, slightly darker this time. Also too sweet. "Wait", he says, "I know just what you want." A legitimately dark beer arrives, and is rejected promptly as too watery. Mr. Belgian Beer is clearly distraught by his underperforming Belgian beers. I enjoy this moment. Finally he opens a bottle of something that is deemed acceptable, although overly liquoricey, and he moves his attention to other customers.

We enjoy our beers, we order a cheese plate. The cheese is good (and includes a new variety to me, idiazábel) but isn't amazing. The nuts that come with the cheese are tasty though. We ask about them, and the description begins as such: "Well they're almonds, obviously; and they're toasted, obviously;
and then we throw in a little butter, that's clarified butter, but just a bit, I mean literally just a few drops... " He goes on, and the pretension goes on with him.

To top off the evening, before leaving we hear a guy sitting behind us make the claim that humans will soon be loosing their finger nails. This, as he explains to the rest of his hip-ish table, is surely to happen soon because nails no longer serve a purpose (obviously) and we will thus promptly be evolving to a nail-less state. Right, because there's absolutely nothing wrong with that statement. Douche Bag.