entirely safe and fun

On a recent trip to New York City, which required me to stay in the Times Square area, I had the good fortune to walk past the BXL Café (125 West 43rd Street, New York) as I found my way from my hotel to our clients’ office. “Good fortune” because I could have sensibly walked across town on any of seven streets (48^th - 42^nd), and I just happened to select 43^rd. That worked out pretty well!

For me to find beers I’ve never had before takes some work, given that I’ve had around 800 different commercial beers by now, and BXL shows some of that hard work, and done well. Fifteen taps yielded two new beers, Dentergems Wit and the German offering Gaffel Kölsch, along with hard-to-find favorite Rodenbach Red. The bartender was also pouring a good selection of the Belgian-style beers brewed at Cooperstown’s superb Brewery Ommegang — the BXL house beer was brewed by Ommegang as well — along with a very pleasant lineup of Belgian standbys like Chimay Triple (”White”). I’d estimate that there were around thirty or forty bottles, as well, many of them new to me. As a capper, I believe that brewery glassware was available for everything on tap, per the Belgian tradition. All in all, BXL is one of the most impressive Belgian beer bars I’ve found, with fine ambiance, knowledgeable staff, and a well-chosen and resonably wide selection.

Almost unbelievably, BXL doesn’t have a web site that can be found with Google. (If anyone affiliated with BXL reads this — setting up a nice web site is easy and fun, and you really ought to do it!) I did find a picture at Blakespot, some barebones entries at Ratebeer and Pubcrawler, which indicate that the food is good, a fact I had no opportunity to confirm on my purely liquid visit. I found one blog entry at a New York restaurant blog which gushed about the food as well, and this from an author who doesn’t even appear to be interested in exotic beer, so I’ll take his/her opinion as more diagnostic than that of the aficionados at the beer sites.