What’s the buzz? There hasn’t been a hotel opening on this scale in Brussels in more than a century. Built at the behest of the then king to attract and accommodate visitors to the Brussels International Exposition of 1910, the former Grand Hotel Astoria reopened just before Christmas after a 17-year closure, resuming its position as the grandest hotel in Belgium.
It was acquired in 2016 by the Malta-headquartered Corinthia Group, which lavished €150mn on the building’s restoration and renamed it Corinthia Brussels.
Location, location, location The hotel sits close to the Place du Congrès on the rue Royale, which is less distinguished than it sounds but very central. The Grand-Place, the city’s great gothic and baroque main square, is 15 minutes’ walk away, as is the Palais Royal and Parc de Bruxelles. The European Commission’s Berlaymont HQ is about 25 minutes’ walk, or a couple of stops by metro. It’s also very convenient for the Royal Museums of Fine Arts (worth the price of admission for Jacque-Louis David’s extraordinary 1793 painting “The Death of Marat”) and the Magritte Museum.
Checking in The elegant reception area leads directly to the Palm Court, a splendid pilastered, palm-filled salon with an 11-metre high stained-glass roof. The original glazing was destroyed in the 1940s, but it’s been reconstructed according to black-and-white photographs, using a palette based on the colours of the stained glass of the loggia at the top of the imposing stone staircase at one end.
Now a café and bar, it was humming even on the early January Tuesday when I visited. Passing through en route to breakfast, which is served in another distinguished salon, a number of business meetings were ongoing but from lunchtime till late into the evening, the vibe is more relaxed, the chatter louder and the demographic diverse.
What about the bedrooms? In contrast with the majesty of the Beaux Arts-style public rooms, where every ornamented door handle and hinge has been preserved in accordance with the building’s protected status, the 126 bedrooms and suites are pleasantly restrained. It’s all very comfortable and contemporary — muted colours, pale marble, brass detailing — if unlikely to inspire a rethink of what you have at home.
The lights, though, are exasperating, operated by keypads labelled in a small lowercase font you need the torch on your phone to read. The downlighters set into the lofty ceiling above the bed are far too high to illuminate a book.
The top floor is still a building site, but four penthouses are due to open in March, one named Brontë in honour of the British novelists Charlotte and Emily, who taught at a school close to the hotel on the site of what is now the Bozar, or Centre for Fine Arts.
And the food? There are two restaurants. One is a reasonably priced brasserie, Le Petit bon bon (main courses from €26), overseen by Christophe Hardiquest, something of a celebrity in Belgium, whose now-closed restaurant Bon Bon had two Michelin stars. Here he’s keeping things simple with an alluring menu of Belgian classics: shrimp croquettes, eels in a green sauce, cod à l’Ostendaise (a sauce of mussels and shrimps), meatballs à la Liégeoise (a fruity sauce made with brown Bertinchamps beer) and retro dishes like duck à l’orange and vol-au-vents.
The other, Palais Royal, is the creation of David Martin, whose essentially Franco-Belgian cooking has been influenced by the time he’s spent in Japan, and whose restaurant La Paix, in Anderlecht, has two Michelin stars.
There is a short, very expensive carte, but you’re firmly steered towards the tasting menus: €135 for 10 courses, €175 for 12 (and additional truffle and lobster). Like the Palm Court, it was full.
He assumes the clientele like oysters: raw under a sabayon of meat juices in one course, poached in another. And smoked eel made two appearances, first in a croquette, then six courses later, emulsified into a sauce served with veal, umeboshi mushroom dusted with fermented plum powder and a purée of crapaudine beetroot. It tasted sublime, and the painterly way it was plated delighted me too. Indeed, bar the weirdly wet merguez accompaniment to a filet of red mullet, I loved it all. That said, four desserts felt like three too many, though I’ll remember with pleasure the deliciously bracing, bitter lemon gel that cut through the lemon ice cream and its sweet soufflé crown.
Other guests? For the moment, even the overnight guests are mostly Belgian. But Filip Boyen, the hospitality-industry veteran brought in as interim managing director to open the property, hopes the hotel will be sufficient to persuade Americans visiting Amsterdam and Paris to add Brussels to their itineraries.
What to do? There’s a subterranean Sisley spa, nine-metre pool and gym. Sessions can be booked with the in-house personal trainer, Paul Tucker, formerly an instructor with the UK’s Royal Army Physical Training Corps.
Beyond the hotel, take a tram (one change) to the Wiels Foundation in Forest, a part of town about 4km southwest of the centre. It’s a huge exhibition space in what was the Wielemans-Ceuppens Brewery, once the largest in Europe, and an industrial Modernist masterpiece with terrific views. The next exhibition (from February 1) is a survey of the Dutch artist Willem Oorebeek.
On a smaller scale, the Boghossian Foundation’s Villa Empain holds exhibitions intended to promote “dialogue between eastern and western cultures”, currently the Belgian artist Pierre Alechinsky, whose work has long been informed by his fascination with Asian calligraphy. Like Wiels, the building, this time the immaculately restored Art Deco former home of Baron Louis Empain, whose father built the Paris metro, is as much a draw as its contents.
Towards the end of the year, Paris’s Pompidou Centre will open a satellite, Kanal-Centre Pompidou, in a former Citroen garage built in 1934. In terms of space, it will be Brussels’ largest cultural institution and the first new one since 2015, when what is now Design Museum Brussels opened close to the Atomium, the 102-metre molecular landmark built for the 1958 World’s Fair.
The damage From €500, room only. Breakfast adds a punchy €60 per person — better to head out to one of the city’s many tempting coffee shops.
Elevator pitch A grande dame returned to splendour — and a good base for a classic European city break.
Claire Wrathall was a guest of Corinthia Hotels (corinthia.com) and Eurostar (eurostar.com)
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