Café spotlight: Nosh

Cafés are truly magic. You go there in the evening, enjoy the company of your friends, the music, the atmosphere and, crucially, the beverages. An excess of the latter will, more often than not, make you feel terrible the following day, and this is where the magic happens.

For cafés also exist in the shape of eetcafés: places where, on the dreaded “morning after the night before”, you can indulge in feel-good food and enjoy the peace and quiet, while you swear blind that you will never, ever touch another drop of alcohol so long as you shall live.

M’lady and I had some business to attend to in Leuven but were paying the price for the liquid fun from the previous night. And lo, bang in the centre of town, we stumbled across Nosh, the kind of place that serves exactly what the doctor ordered. On top of “traditional” breakfast stuff like croissants, Nosh specialises in two types of yummy treats: wentelteefjes and bagels.

The former are also known as French toast or eggy bread – the ultimate grandma-style comfort food, available here with six different toppings. But we plumped for the latter instead, and here it wasn’t just the fillings we had to select, but also the type of bagel we wanted: plain, poppyseed, multigrain, onion...

Enough to give you a headache, which is the last thing you need after a heavy night out. M’lady had the New Yorker (cream cheese, smoked salmon and capers on poppyseed), while I opted for a smoked onion bagel stuffed with a cheese omelette. We washed them down with a strong coffee and freshly squeezed orange juice and slowly started feeling reinvigorated.

Our breakfast cost €11 each, very reasonable I thought, and there is an even heartier menu for €15: hot drink, orange juice, one bagel, two pastries and... a glass of cava! Well, there’s always a next time, isn’t there?

➟➟ www.nosh.be