My name is Eoghan Walsh, and this is the Brussels Beer City Podcast.

Each week, a fascinating Brussels resident invites me, your host, to their favourite Brussels bar. Where, over a drink or two, we talk about the importance of the bar to them, and their relationship to Brussels - what they love, what they hate, and why they couldn’t live anywhere else.

My guest on today’s episode is Michiel Van Meervenne, a journalist and entrepreneur, and co-founder of the Brussels food company Kriket, making confectionary using protein sourced from crickets grown locally in Brussels, 

At a central Brussels haunt from his old school days, over a Taras Boulba from local brewery Brasserie de la Senne, Michiel talks about how it took him some time to really feel like a Brussels local, why eating crickets is absurd, surreal, and very much in keeping with Brussels’ self-perception, and how suffering through the greyness of Brussels is making him feel like an old man.

Quick note for context, this episode was recorded before the Covid-19 lockdown in Brussels and the global anti-racist movement that has emerged in the wake of the murder of George Floyd.