When cold one seeks out warm comforting food, and for me that means hot soup. And the most comfortably filling soup for me is the seafood chowder at the Belgian cafe. The Occidental on Vulcan Lane in Auckland CBD is one of my favourite places to come back to again and again. It usually gets very crowded during peak mealtimes, but tonight we didn't care. We got our table at the farthest corner so we could still reasonably shout at each other and be able to hear and be heard.
M's tea, my Belle-Vue-Kreuk! I adore this cherry flavoured beer. It's not too strong, either, below 5%. Actually I would love to go through each and all of their wide selection of Belgian beers and get each one stamped into their 'Beer Passport', but unfortunately that would take me a very long time to get it filled. So I had to do with an old favourite tonight. All good :)
So this is the famous seafood chowder I recommend to everyone. Filled with baby mussels, shrimps, calamari, carrots, celery, and anchovy shavings. We also got a pot of mussels and couldn't finish them all. So so full!