Recommended Eats: HUIS Belgian Bar & Kitchen - A Southsea mainstay that has gone from strength to strength - video Dailymotion

The News, Portsmouth

Watch Recommended Eats: HUIS Belgian Bar & Kitchen - A Southsea mainstay that has gone from strength to strength - The News, Portsmouth on Dailymotion

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00:00I'm Simon Docker, I'm the owner of House Belgian Bar and Kitchen in Alben Grove in South Sea.

00:06Perfect, and how long have you been open here?

00:08We opened in April 2015.

00:11So it's been quite a long time then.

00:13Yeah, yeah, nearly coming up to 10 years now.

00:16Amazing. And obviously it's going pretty well.

00:19Yeah, it's going alright. We've changed a lot since we launched.

00:22We were sort of 50 bar, 50 food.

00:26Now it's more like 80 food, 20 bar.

00:29COVID changed a lot of things.

00:31The eat out to help out scheme brought us a lot of new customers from beyond South Sea

00:38and really shut us up on TripAdvisor as well.

00:41So we've seen obviously COVID was a terrible time for everyone.

00:44But the sort of bounce back of reopening really supported our food element of the business.

00:53Great. Obviously it's quite unique as well. There's not too many Belgian restaurants around.

00:57What made you want to decide to open a Belgian one?

00:59I started House really for a love of Belgian beer.

01:02When I was a kid, my dad was doing some work in Corso on the Belgian coast.

01:08And when he came back, he would bring back lots of interesting bottles.

01:13At first it was just the interesting kind of artwork and the design.

01:17Then I was allowed to have one or two a week.

01:21When I turned 18, I started going out.

01:24Beer was awful.

01:25I ended up drinking at home a lot.

01:27It just became a bit of a hobby collecting beers from Belgium and around Europe.

01:33Also around the 90s, I was working a lot in Germany.

01:36So I wasn't too far away from Belgium.

01:39It just became a hobby.

01:41I ran a satellite TV company for around 25 years before that.

01:47That took a dip with the internet and IPTV.

01:51So I had a break.

01:52I thought, what am I going to do?

01:54I'd never worked for anyone before.

01:55So I thought, I'd better continue working for myself.

01:58Fair enough. So you didn't have any hospitality experience prior to...

02:02No hospitality experience before.

02:06You've just got to be nice to people.

02:08You've got to be passionate about what you do.

02:10You can't really go wrong.

02:12Obviously Belgium is well known for its beer.

02:15You've got quite a lot lined up behind you.

02:17How many beers have you got on offer here?

02:19We have around 100 beers from Belgium.

02:21We have around 90 in the main menu.

02:24And then we have a rotating specials list that changes throughout the week.

02:28We sort of scour the breweries in Belgium and see what's new, what's interesting.

02:33What you probably can't get elsewhere.

02:35And then we sort of import from Belgium regularly.

02:38We have a guy in a van that goes over and collects rare kegs and bottles.

02:42Nice.

02:44And in terms of the food side as well, obviously,

02:46when you think of Belgium, I guess you think of Belgian waffles.

02:48You've got maybe chips.

02:50What are the distincts in Belgian cuisine?

02:54So Belgium is a really small country.

02:56It's kind of the equivalent of a few counties in the UK.

02:59So the food is really centred around waffles, beef carbonara, mussels.

03:07So what we try to do is we've had to have like this kind of edge to us.

03:12So we sent out chefs for some training in Belgium where there was a TV chef called Alan Fayat.

03:19He's written a few books as well.

03:21He recently passed away.

03:22But we sent out chefs to work there where the chef was known for cooking with beer.

03:26And that became our edge, cooking meats in beer, cooking mussels in beer.

03:31We're doing things that also border Belgium.

03:35We have a lot of influence from Germany, from the Netherlands, from France.

03:39My wife's from Romania.

03:42So we have some influence from the Mediterranean areas, the Balkans.

03:49We just try and do Belgium but sort of diversify and get creative with some of the traditional ideas

03:55that could be made a bit more interesting.

03:58What are some of your more popular dishes?

04:00Our most popular is our pork belly.

04:03It's also roasted in our apple beer and served with a cider and mustard reduction.

04:10We get a lot of regulars for that, especially like Father's Day coming up.

04:17We're pretty sure that we're going to serve 90% pork belly.

04:22Our meatballs are really popular.

04:24We do them in all different sauces, including, as I say, cooked with beer.

04:30We also have croquettes that we make on site out of carbonade.

04:36Basically everything we do is made on site, apart from the ice cream.

04:40You mentioned carbonade a couple of times. What's that?

04:43Carbonade is like an equivalent of a Belgian-Irish stew.

04:48So what we do is we take beef, we slow cook it with vegetables and three different beers.

04:54We use a wheat beer, a cherry beer and a dark beer to get all the different elements of sweetness, sourness and sort of maltiness

05:01that you would perhaps get with an Irish stew.

05:04How often do you change your menu?

05:07Our menu normally lasts for six months, our main menu, before we start taking off less popular dishes

05:14or making dishes that we think could be more interesting.

05:18Our specials normally change every three to five weeks.

05:22But there's a lot of items that we'd be too scared to take off.

05:26Items like our pork bellies and our crocs are sort of the staple diet of our diners.

05:32Do you have any kind of events planned for the year or anything like that?

05:35Later in the year we're going to start doing outdoor events,

05:39selling our waffles and slightly twisting our menu to where we are.

05:44That should be taking part in our Portabox, which we've been renovating.

05:50That should be later this year.

05:52In terms of outdoor events, festivals and things like that?

05:55Yeah, that kind of thing.

Recommended Eats: HUIS Belgian Bar & Kitchen - A Southsea mainstay that has gone from strength to strength

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