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First I'll say that they do very good mussels and pomme frites. The crab cake my husband ordered as an app was also very good and the Belgian chocolate cake we shared for dessert was also good. I liked the mushrooms in my mushroom puff pastry app, they were well cooked and seasoned, but the pastry was flavorless. So, they have a good chef. I would call the service "friendly and clumsy". The host seated us at a strange, tiny triangle table right next to the service station where the staff grabs utensils and plates. My husband is a very tall man and somehow the host thought he was going to compact into the booth. My husband grabbed a chair from another table instead and sat opposite me. We were brought menus and water and then a woman, began circling us, staring and obviously not happy. I watched her looking at us, then leaving to say something to a busboy, then looking at us again. Finally she approached our table and asked us to move to another table. Turned out she was our waitress. She watched as we gathered our coats, packages, menus and water glasses and moved to the table she indicated. She was perfectly friendly throughout our dinner, but I'm a little peeved at her for recommending a certain beer to me husband. There are no prices on the beer menu, so when she leaned over and said, "Um, I like this one." I got the feeling she really didn't know what she was recommending. Turned out to be $11 a bottle and he had a few. My only other complaint would be that they should toss out beer goblets that are broken, as I spent my dinner looking at the very broken pedestal on mine that looked like it could take a chunk of flesh out.

Best french fries in NYC. Right up there for all manners of mussels. Service is attentive and being a born and bred NYCer prolly accounts for why I don't care what lifestyle the waitstaff follows as long as my food is hot, well cooked and the drinks keep coming. Opps. My Halloween is not right if I don't get a window table at this establishment on the 31st.

I was recently on a date here and am not sure what some reviewers were talking about. The service was great (no signs of a grouch) and the food was delicious. We had a variety of muscles and the escargot as an app - all were wonderful. Will be back for sure!

Service was wonderful! I guess they read the previous reviews and finally got it right. Trout was a great disappointment - rubbery and unseasoned: no amount of salt could improve it. Chicken, mussels great. I asked for a bread plate (there were none at our table of 7) and only one was brought out. Waiters seemed not to know better. Desserts were dreamy. Everyone was very attentive to our needs.

My chief complaint with this place is with the service. It was as if the owner/manager went out to meth clinics, bathhouses and highway underpasses to recruit the most diverse group of nonplussed waiters in the US. The majority of the staff runs around the restaurant like drunken lab rats, certain that they have a purpose but too disoriented to properly achieve it. You ask for bread and 15 minutes later they hand you a menu, we had to go through 3 waiters to get a drink order in, getting extra plates takes an act of congress and at one point an old man who failed to identify himself in any way (but who one would suspect was the owner) came over, picked up my friends half empty beer bottle and muttered that “we needed more to drink.” Our primary waiter was apparently attempting service by proxy, he came to our table 9 separate times, but left before we could order, apparently to attend to someone else. For the 8 seconds that he could be bothered to stay at our table, he hastily yelled specials at us before he scurried off. He never checked in to see if we were enjoying the meal or if we needed plates cleared; we wound up putting dishes on the ledge behind us. As for the food, the mushrooms in puff pastry were good and the snails were excellent, but the entrees left a lot to be desired. My friends each got the Waterzooi. Perhaps it’s a regional thing, but is Chicken Waterzooi supposed to taste exactly like a glass of water? To call the dish bland casts a disparity on all things bland. A lecture of offshore tax havens is bland; this dish was flat out null and void, a culinary vacuum where no one can hear you scream, least of all your absentee waiter. We shouldn’t have paid for those dishes, they were pretty inedible, but good luck finding your waiter in this joint in order to lodge the complaint. By the time our waiter came back to bark dessert options to us we just wanted to get the hell out of there, as did most of the other patrons. 9 pm and your restaurant was empty, I wonder why. Honestly, the service was SO BAD that it distracted from the entire meal. The food might have been passable with some salt and pepper, but the wait staff blew it right out of the gate. I would consider traveling to Brussels for a decent meal before I returned to Café de Bruxelles. This is NY, you’ve got to do better than that.

I am a Belgian living in NY and recently visited this place with a group of other NY-based Belgian friends. It turned out to be a major disappointment. Service by our waitress was shockingly rude and arrogant (only after some tough negotiating did we get our Kwak specialty beer served in the appropriate glass). The food itself was mediocre and confusing: our "rabbit with prunes", a classic, was massacred by serving it in a mustard-base sauce (instead of the sour Ale-based sauce as tradition would prescribe). Our "waterzooi", another classic, had no potatoes (a key ingredient). The pommes frites, though prepared correctly, were served in miniscule portions (deemed a serious provocation to most dining Belgians). All in all we found ZERO Belgitude in the place. The purple neon light in the dining room made the whole experience almost depressing.

True, the manager is rude to every patron who doesn't speak fluent French, but Robert, the bartender, and all the waitstaff do their best to make you feel at home. In the 20 years I've been dining here I've always enjoyed the mussels~au roquefort, au casino, au curry, all the duck and soft shell crab specialties, and Sunday dinner specials. Skip the pedestrian brunch~nothing special there.