Antwerp

Antwerp
With edgy new fashions, stylish boutiques, smart restaurants and chic cafes, once stodgy ANTWERP has become a lodestone for the young, the hip and the high of cheekbone. By STEPHEN MCCAULEY

De Drie Fluwelen restaurant is installed in the home of the late designer and costumer Josette Janssen. Photograph by Elizabeth Zeschin for The New York Times.

I'd heard that Antwerp, less than 40 miles north of Brussels and Belgium's second-largest city, was considered one of the hippest spots in Europe. With London prohibitively expensive and Prague passe, it had become, I was told, a favored haunt of the young and beautiful, the fashionable and fabulous, a magnet for aspiring artists and haute couture hopefuls. It was information that gave me -- pulling 40 and unambiguously unhip -- pause. Good food, I thought, but a lot of self-consciously bad haircuts. In anxious preparation for my trip, I bought black pants and cut off my hair.
And so, arriving by train with my friend Sebastian one overcast December morning, I found the city's Centraal Station a welcome surprise. The platform hall is a soaring vault of iron girders and glass panels darkened by age, and the station itself is an immense granite structure with the sooty, decaying atmosphere of an untended cathedral. In the cafe off the waiting room -- tarnished gilt on the walls and sullen waiters in white -- a handful of people sat at small tables smoking unfiltered cigarettes and pondering the dregs in their coffee cups. I'd recently passed through the uninspiring train stations of Brussels and Berlin, both buffed, polished and face-lifted into bland anonymity, and it was a pleasure to see that one city, no matter how "happening," respects the importance of Old World character and, at least for the moment, knows how to preserve it with benign neglect.

From top: In the Zurenborg district, a treasury of Art Nouveau houses. Dinner at the Hippodroom. Photographs by Elizabeth Zeschin for The New York Times.

As it turns out, the train station was a telling introduction to the city. There is, indeed, a great deal of fresh air and new money blowing down the cobblestone streets of Antwerp. Brussels, an easy commute, is the recently minted capital of the European Union, and Antwerp's port, the third largest in the world, is rapidly gaining ground on Rotterdam's. The fashion houses of Paris and Milan might not be losing sleep over Antwerp, but the city has become one of the stopping points for serious shoppers touring Europe for next season's wardrobe.
Yet for all of its forward momentum, what I found most powerfully appealing about Antwerp is the way much of the new -- the stylish shops and restaurants, the swank cafes where the chic linger to display their $1,000 sweaters -- is solidly anchored in the past. Look closely at the edgy silk-screened clothes of Martin Margiela, some with exposed seams, and you'll see the designer's reverence for the classical training he received at the rigorous fashion department of Antwerp's Royal Academy of Fine Arts. Or lunch (if you can afford the two-hour wait for a table) at Horta, one of the city's newest and most shamelessly trendy restaurants, just off the Schuttershofstraat in the middle of what is undoubtedly the smartest shopping district in the Low Countries. The building, a brand-new shimmering glass box, is, in fact, a homage to Victor Horta, Belgium's great Art Nouveau architect, and is constructed around the resurrected ribs of the Maison du Peuple, his 1899 Brussels masterpiece, torn down in one of those "urban renewal" frenzies of the early 1960's.

Stephen McCauley's most recent novel, "True Enough," is forthcoming from Simon & Schuster.

By the time Sebastian and I had finished soaking up the atmosphere at the Centraal Station, a wet, heavy snow was falling. We would be in Antwerp for five days, and impressions of the city would be dominated by the weather, some of the most changeable I, an inveterate New Englander, have ever experienced. Prevailing winds from the west funnel down the Scheldt River from the North Sea, bringing low gray clouds one minute, blue skies the next, and then, without warning, drenching rain and a brief period of sleet. Snow, we were told, is a rarity; but rarity or not, it made more than one appearance.
Because A.T.M.'s are hard to find in Antwerp and because we had arrived without Belgian francs, we decided to walk through the snow to our hotel. Fortunately, distances are deceptive in Antwerp. What appears on a map to be a long cab ride frequently turns out to be a brisk 20-minute stroll, providing you don't get caught in the tangle of crooked streets, many of which change names suddenly, as if on a whim. I gradually came to enjoy this aspect of the city; I have only a vague sense of direction and was constantly tripping over museums and shops I'd assumed to be miles away.
We made our way down the Meir, the wide pedestrian boulevard that's home to department stores, fast-food outlets and multinational chains. ("What is it," my friend asked, "about the sight of Foot Locker in a foreign land that makes the heart sink?") In short order, we found ourselves standing in the Grote Markt, the center of old Antwerp and a prime point of reference.
Along one side are the imposing 16th- and 17th-century guildhalls, step-gabled, gold-ornamented and, in their tall splendor, evidence of the historic wealth and power of trade guilds in Belgium. At this time of year, the Markt was ringed with stands selling beer, roasted nuts and Belgian frites, those wonderful miniature fat-delivery systems, twice deep-fried, heavily salted and served in paper cones with great dollops of thick mayonnaise.

The Flanders Fashion Institute, which will open in the fall. Photograph by Elizabeth Zeschin for The New York Times.

Looming over all is the 400-foot tower of Antwerp's cathedral, Onze Lieve Vrouwekathedraal. This Gothic masterpiece was built over the course of almost two centuries -- it was finished in 1521 -and has survived fires, ideological assaults and revolutionary outrages. Despite an ongoing renovation, the dark interior still bears the scars of history in many of its side chapels and pitted, peeling naves. Among other works, Our Lady contains two remarkable paintings by Rubens: "The Raising of the Cross" and the passionate "Descent from the Cross."
Rubens, it should be noted, moved to Antwerp in 1608 and is still very much a resident of the city. Whether you get in line with busloads of tourists to visit his house in the center of town or spend a morning at the Plantin-Moretus House, an improbably fascinating and beautiful museum dedicated to the history of printing, or drop into any number of churches and museums, you can't escape Rubens. He turned out canvases with the help of a sizable staff of painters (someone to do the apples, someone to do the birds), and thus produced more than 2,500 pictures in his lifetime, an awful lot of which seem to have remained in Antwerp. After a few days, I grew tired of all the luminous flesh and abundant food that he specialized in and cleared my palate at MUKHA, the city's modern art museum. There, an arresting and irreverent show by Wim Delvoye focused on the digestive process and its products.
Our hotel was a block from the river, undoubtedly a selling point at any other time of the year. Housed in a neo-Rococo building that was once a soap factory, 't Sandt is one of a number of small designer hotels in Antwerp that cater to style-conscious travelers with individually decorated rooms and attentive but informal service. Another, De Witte Lelie, is a favored spot for celebrities and fashion photographers. All the rooms at 't Sandt are optimistically labeled suites; ours turned out to be a small single room stuffed with a mixture of impressive antiques (a polished walnut armoire) and undistinguished new furniture (a wicker desk crowded into a corner). Since the hotel was completely booked, Sebastian, who suffers from claustrophobia, rearranged the furniture, piling chairs and a vast ottoman in the hallway outside our door. The freshly denuded corner room was suddenly spacious and, with its four tall windows, bright and cheerful. In fact, the entire hotel was airy and, even in winter, infused with light. The youthful staff, like almost everyone in stores and restaurants throughout the city, was friendly and garrulous in many languages.

The cathedral tower rises above the Grote Markt. Photograph by Elizabeth Zeschin for The New York Times.

We had as a guide to the city Katrina, an old friend of Sebastian's. A striking, soft-spoken Frenchwoman with purple hair and an encyclopedic knowledge of things Antwerpian, she'd moved to the city 10 years earlier and, like many people we'd meet, had fallen in love with the place for reasons she couldn't quite articulate. There is just something about the city -- its manageable size (population roughly half a million), the beauty of its buildings, the safety of its streets and, perhaps most important, its air of quiet tolerance that welcomes a sizable community of fashion students, filmmakers, gay men and women -- that seems to nurture artistic sensibilities.
She explained all of this over dinner at La Rade, a bastion of Belgian cuisine: complex sauces complementing heavy game and just-caught fish. Housed in a 19th-century mansion near the river, the family-owned restaurant manages to be gaudy and elegant at the same time, with marble fireplaces, golden mosaic ceilings and blood-red wallpaper. The formal, nearly ossified, service left me fearing I was going to have my fingers rapped for eating my sturgeon with the wrong fork.
(The perfect after-dinner antidote is a stroll through the city's red-light district, a few blocks north. Antwerp's prostitution and pornography quarter might not be as expansive as Amsterdam's, but it was bustling on the night I visited. Inside the tiny, large-windowed storefronts, women of all ages, races and shapes chatted on cell phones, read magazines or posed suggestively. Many were strikingly beautiful and most, apparently health conscious, had large bottles of spring water beside their stools.)
Katrina told us that truly to understand the city, you have to visit the diamond district, and dutifully, I went. Diamond cutting came to Antwerp in the 15th century and has been a major part of the city's economic life since. By some estimates, as much as 83 percent of the world's diamonds are traded through Antwerp. But for me, it was wasted energy. I have no appreciation for precious gems, and the rows of narrow storefronts west of the Centraal Station, with their glittering wares and morose merchants, left me cold. The diamond trade is a closed world within the closed world of the Orthodox Jewish community. I meandered around the storefronts, but it wasn't until I walked into Del Rey, a chocolate shop on the outskirts of the diamond district, that I felt as if I'd discovered something rare and valuable: thin medallions of dark chocolate with fresh cream centers flavored with Cognac, champagne, walnuts, cinnamon and tea, artfully decorated with edible gold leaf. These were the best I sampled in Antwerp, and I left with several boxes, which I'd asked to have wrapped, as if I were planning to give them as gifts.

From top: De Foyer, a brasserie in the Bourla Theater. The lobby of De Witte Lelie, a stylish small hotel. Jo Peeters, the architect of Hangar 41, at the bar. Photograph by Elizabeth Zeschin for The New York Times.

The best method for furtively eating chocolates is to plead a sudden urge for solitude and go for a long, sugar-fueled walk. In this way, I happened upon one of the great treasures of Antwerp, the Zurenborg district, a small neighborhood of Art Nouveau town houses a few blocks from the Berchem train station. Brussels's influence as a capital of the Art Nouveau movement spread throughout Belgium. In this neighborhood, you'll find houses in varying stages of renovation, all rounded windows and wrought-iron balconies, cobalt blue window casings and decorative mosaic panels. The sinuous lines of the houses seem to give the facades motion, as if you're looking at a reflection on the surface of a pond. (This hallucinogenic effect is especially powerful if you've just consumed a half-pound of Grand Marnier truffles.) The ornamentation on many of the houses is organized around a single image -- swans, sunflowers, irises, dawn -- and some houses relate to each other thematically. At one intersection, each of the four corner houses is named after a different season, with colors and embellishments that mirror seasonal moods.
Perhaps it says something about the ubiquitous and somehow unintimidating presence of haute couture in Antwerp that after three days in the city, Sebastian, who buys most of his clothes at yard sales, was convinced that the majority of his problems could be solved by purchasing a simple, sleek Dries van Noten suit.
Van Noten is one of six designers who put Antwerp on the fashion map in the 1980's, a group that became known internationally as the Antwerp Six, whose successors include such designers as Nicole Cadine, known for her exotic, many-layered creations. Since then, fashion has become so important to the economic life of Antwerp, and such a boost to tourism, that the city purchased an expansive 19th-century building off the Nationale-straat for the Flanders Fashion Institute. Set to open in September of 2001, the institute will house the fashion department of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, several stories of archives, a fashion museum, a restaurant and a bookstore. Celebrations will start in May with an exhibit called "Mutilate?" (a historical perspective on body modification) at MUKHA and run throughout the summer at venues around the city.
Sebastian discovered that a fashionable wardrobe, like an appreciation for diamonds, isn't something you can acquire overnight, even in Antwerp. And Dries van Noten, like the rest of the Antwerp Six and the dozens of new academy graduates who've followed in their wake, is a designer you have to work your way up to, sock by sock. A perceptive clerk in a shop suggested he try Francis: International Art Development, a store that features vintage 50's and 60's modern furniture and previously worn designer duds at remarkably reasonable prices. In the end, he discovered a thrift shop run by Oxfam and purchased a clunky winter coat of no particular pedigree to replace the one he'd foolishly decided to leave at home. But somehow, in Antwerp, it looked more stylish, and that night in a cafe where we sat tasting Belgian beer, a woman in many layers of soft dark clothes tapped him on the shoulder and asked where he'd bought it.

CHOICE AND CHIC
HOTEL 'T SANDT , 17-19 Zand (telephone: 232-93-90; fax: 232-56-13), has double rooms, including breakfast, beginning at $150; the rates for larger suites begin at $190.
HOTEL DE WITTE LELIE , 16-18 Keizerstraat (226-19-66; fax: 234-00-19), has double rooms, including breakfast, beginning at $215 and suites beginning at $290.
HORTA, 2 Hopland (232-28-15; fax: 232-93-54), lists appetizers for $7 to $22 and main courses beginning at $15.
DE FOYER, 18 Komedieplaats (233-55-17; fax: 226-65-66), serves such snacks as pate on toast ($9) and smoked salmon ($14).
LA RADE, 8 Ernest Van Dijckkaai (233-37-37; fax: 233-49-63), offers several prix fixe menus, beginning with a three-course dinner including aperitif, wine and coffee; $60 a person. Closed Saturday lunch and Sunday.
DE DRIE FLUWELEN, 24 Hofstraat (234-05-27; fax: 234-97-76), proposes prix fixe menus ranging from $50 to $70 a person, the latter for five courses and appropriate wines. Closed Saturday lunch, Sunday and Monday.
ZUIDERTERRAS, 37 Ernest Van Dijckkaai (234-12-75; fax: 234-02-54), specializes in salads ($8 to $17).
HANGAR 41, 41 St. Michielskaai (257-09-18), serves such classic Belgian bistro fare as steak tartare with frites ($12.50).

SUSTENANCE WITH STYLE
Antwerp has some of the most beautiful restaurants in Europe. Just down the street from La Rade is the Zuiderterras. Designed by the architect Bob Van Reeth, it features polished zinc floors, heated glass walls and stark black-and-white tiled bathrooms with immense porthole windows. It's perched over the banks of the Scheldt, near a pedestrian tunnel under the river, and looks, from a distance, like a spaceship hovering over the water. I was there at twilight, and for one moment, the sky and the river turned the same shade of murky olive and the patrons looked up from their coffee and salads in hushed appreciation. De Drie Fluwelen is located off the Grote Markt in the house of the late Josette Janssen, a fashion designer and costumer for the opera. The interior has been left largely as it was when she lived in the house, the walls of the Second Empire drawing room still the same calming shade of gray-blue and hung with the designer's crisp paintings and portraits.
Lunching at De Foyer, on the second floor of the Bourla Theater, is like dining in a rose-colored dome. And for more cool, stark beauty, there are scores of new restaurants and cafes like Hippodroom, Hangar 41 and Cargo, where minimalist decor (polished wood, buttery leather and acres of glass) is complemented by the jutting cheekbones, hand-rolled cigarettes and artfully deconstructed clothes of the pretty patrons.

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March 04, 2001

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