Yellow****, excellent food but expensive

There’s a lot of talk about Yellow, the bistro of Gert De Mangeleer and Joachim Boudens. For three months they opened this restaurant on the corner of the Braambergstreet and the Jozef Suveestreet. Seven days a week and four services a day will cost a lot of effort from the chef and his staff. We went there for lunch and were really impressed with the food. We had made reservation for the 12h shift and had to wait outside until the doors opened. Once inside, there are several spaces with table (too) close to each other. The walls are blank, here and there you have notes and lipstick drawings. The acoustic is surprisingly ok.

The bread on the table is delicious, served with butter, olive oil and a few olives as appetizer. The placemat on the table is also the menucard and on a separate piece of paper are the drinks. Out of the 10 different kinds of starters and mains courses, the choice is hard to make. We ordered a sherry and a gin tonic as aperitif. Meanwhile the restaurant filled up with guests.

Annemieke chose the vitello tomato ‘new style’ and a brandade of north sea fish. I took the cockles with coriander and kafir lime. As main course the Waygu beef, Marrakech style.

The starters were served really quickly, i hadn’t even finished my gin tonic. The vitello tomato was prepared with tongue of veal and really melted in your mouth. Delicious. Even more impressive was the smell and the taste of the cockles, served in a cast iron casserole. The asian flavors combined with cockles were amazing. Already then we thought we would have to come back to taste some of the other starters.

The brandade was served in a similar casserole as the cockles and had a really rich taste, a bit too rich. It also didn’t contain a lot of fish. The waygu beef was perfectly done, tasted divine and was served with a taboulé of quinoa, carrot, chick peas an pomegranate. Very original and very tasty.

We had a glass of white wine and a Vedett beer to drink.

We closed with a plate of old Comté cheese, plate to share. You can choose between 3 different kinds of cheese, served with a lovely herb salad and toast of raisin bread. Unfortunately, you have to have only one big piece of cheese, and you cannot combine a little piece of the 3 cheeses. Which makes it a bit boring.

The coffee was served in the bar/tent. There is a tent set up on the back of the building, heated up by a heating element. It can get really hot if you sit a bit too close to it. The bar is entirely decorated in orange, with Veuve Clicquot things. You can find it everywhere in the restaurant as well. 

The check of this lunch was €201, very expensive. The waygu beef alone was already €45. The food was excellent, the portions very much ok. What makes it so expensive? The drinks: €10 for a sherry, €14 for a gin tonic, €6,5 for a coffee… When you pay this price, you expect to get some bites with your aperitif or  home made sweets with the coffee. Even the tea was out of a cardboard box. And that’s not right.

So for the food, we might come back. And we will make sure to get our aperitif and our coffee somewhere else before and after.