Where to stay

Auberge du Moulin Hideux
Typical Relais & Chateaux hideaway hotel in lovely surroundings. Great gardens and beautiful-to-look-at French cuisine. From £140. 00 32 6146 7015, moulinhideux.be

Crowne Plaza Liège
Reception on the seventh floor, rooms at lower levels, great views, strange design built into the side of a hill; the only five-star in Liège. From £88. 00 32 4222 9494, crowneplazaliege.be

Logement Les Naux
Danielle Denies runs a simple b&b in the province of Gaume. A good overnighter with no trimmings but generous hospitality. From £52. 00 32 6341 3927

Le Sanglier des Ardennes
A once-celebrated hostelry that is undergoing changes. The renovated, pricier rooms are more attractive. Breakfast is very good and service is too. From £57. 00 32 8621 3262

The Royal Snail
Namur designer hotel that overlooks the Meuse. From £63, plus breakfast. The food at its restaurant, Agathopède, matches the décor. 00 32 8157 0023, theroyalsnail.com

Les Tanneurs
A restored 18th-century brick building with quirky rooms, it’s actually 11 houses divided into 32 rooms and staircases. The two restaurants are popular with the local bourgeoisie. From £72. 00 32 8124 0024, tanneurs.com

Travel Information

The Ardennes is a forested region in the south of Belgium. The currency in Belgium is the euro and the local time is one hour ahead of the UK. Flights from London to Brussels take an hour. The height of the tourist season is July and August, but the region is in season from April to October. Like Britain, there are rarely extremes of temperature –in January temperatures average 6C; in July, 23C.

RESOURCES
Belgiumtheplaceto.be for travel and destination information for visitors to Belgium covering the capital city of Brussels and the Wallonia region. It’s an excellent resource for information on Belgian tourist attractions including beer trails and World War memorials.

GETTING THERE
Eurostar runs ten trains daily to Brussels. eurostar.com
British Airways operates up to six daily flights to Brussels. ba.com

FURTHER READING
Walking in the Ardennes: Belgium, Luxembourg and the Ardennes. This handy guide suggests 32 day walks around the region as well as one longer and more adventurous route.

What’s Cooking in Belgium: Recipes and Stories from a Food-Loving Nation (Luster, £39)
More than a cookbook, this tome details traditional dishes accompanied by anecdotes from chefs, farmers and historians.

CARBON COUNTING
To offset your emissions, visit climatecare.org – return flights from London Heathrow to Brussels produce 0.11 tonnes of CO2 per person. The cost for this trip is 81p and donations go towards supporting environmental projects around the world.

Where to eat

Chimay, Auberge Poteaupré
A short walk from Chimay Abbey, it’s tripper-style food with sandwiches, but you can also order any of the beers either individually or as a flight with some nice Abbey-produced cheeses on hearty bread. 00 32 6021 1433, chimay.com

Au Coeur de la Gaume
Genuine regional cuisine from Claude – the patron – is fattening, but tasty. His fameux pâté gaumais de mon grand- père is the best, and the interior a higgledy-piggledy mishmash of bric- a-brac. Eating ‘the works’ may cost £36, but one dish is filling enough for most appetites; open Thurs-Sun. 00 32 6358 1804, resto.com/aucoeurdelagaume

Le Dernier Ragot
No need to book – simply walk into this bar off the street. Boulets à la liégeois cost £11, including salad and chips. Rue des Clarisses 12, Liège, 00 32 4221 2294.

L’Essentiel
Stylish country restaurant 15 minutes from Namur, with classic Franco-Belgian bourgeois cookery, plus modern touches. From £39 for three courses, excluding wine. 00 32 8156 8616, lessentiel.be

Le Jardin des Bégards
A self-taught chef-patron with Sicilian roots offers artful touches in this Liège showpiece gastronomic restaurant. Wine list is excellent and fairly priced. From £90 for the spring tasting menu; expect to pay more. 00 32 4222 9234, lejardindesbegards.be

Food Glossary

Food and Travel Review

Signposts pay scant respect for borders. Nor do wooded country lanes dappled by sunlight filtering through overhanging boughs. A turning one way heads towards France, another to a Cistercian abbey famed for its Trappist beer. In the Belgian Ardennes, the geography tells only one part of the story.

The Ardennes defines itself by a huge forest covering half the region. It grows up to the fringes of medieval towns tucked in valleys such as La Roche or Durbuy. It invades the massive walls of Namur’s citadel fortress. It creeps up to the riverbanks of the Meuse, the Ourthe and the Samois. It disguises rocky schist crags and waves of rolling hills. History has painted it as a battleground. Caesar fought the Gauls here. Protestants faced off against Catholics. It saw the first major engagement of the First World War. The Battle of the Bulge, at the end of 1944, marked the last German offensive of the Second. Cemeteries, memorials and museums ensure nobody forgets. These days, the closest thing to conflict is a Red Bull vs Mercedes duel around the legendary Spa- Francorchamps racetrack during the Belgian Grand Prix.

That doesn’t preclude minor tiffs of the culinary kind. Belgian Ardennes ham is often smoked but the French one isn’t. Artisan charcuteries of Wallonia (French-speaking Belgium) have tried in vain to stop Flemish manufacturers from making their beef-and-pork saucisson d’Ardenne. In Liège, they debate the respective merits of the hot and the cold waffle. Bière d’abbaye that has little to do with religion enrages beer nerds. Bakers Angela and Dominique Le Grand, based in the city of Namur, condemn the loss of age-old baking skills. ‘Artisans like us are disappearing,’ says Angela, ‘because nobody encourages them. We make most of our bread with biodynamic spelt grown for us by peasant farmers. They send it to a miller in Ferrières who grinds it with a millstone that’s at least 300 years old and my husband applies his skill to turn it into loaves.’

He uses a 43-year-old sourdough starter he inherited from his father. ‘It changes every day. You have to use a blend of instinct and experience to make it right. We adapt to the flour. It doesn’t matter that the loaves don’t always rise the same way. That’s the problem; they teach kids that there’s a precise recipe but the flour is dead.’

Eating his brioche – 24-hour dough, farmhouse butter and eggs – is a journey back in time. Craquelin (sugar bread) and cramique (fruit bread) belong in the repertoire of historic Wallon baking.

Every 15 August, the city of Liège closes its annual festival with a burlesque funeral. The burial of Matî l’Ohê (‘Matthew the hambone’) brings an end to the street parties. There may be some deep- rooted symbolism involved but it isn’t an ancient rite. It does, though, resonate with butchers.

Charcutier Philippe Bouillon cures hams in the cellar of his shop, Maison Bouillon, in La Roche-en-Ardenne’s Place du Marché. He dry-salts them, brines them with bay leaf and juniper berries, hangs and smokes them with a mixture of oak and beech chippings. Matured for nine months, the rind is dark mahogany. Sliced, the meat is the colour of raw tuna. One more thing: it has been boned. The loss of a femur, according to Bouillon, doesn’t mar the taste. It breaks the farmhouse custom of killing a pig in December, then hanging the meat in chimneys to preserve it.

‘We’ve always had to smoke – the sausages and collars as well as larger cuts,’ he says, ‘because the climate of the Ardennes is too humid for air-drying.’

His family originated in Gaume, a tiny county stitched on to the southern rim of the region. Claude Peignois’ café-restaurant in the rambling village of Ethe has three specialities: pâté gaumais (a flat pork pie), cabu roussi (white cabbage braised with caramelised onions) and roustiquette. This is the killer: small waxy potatoes baked in a cast-iron pot with boiling lard and pork scratchings poured over them. It takes a trencherman to survive all three courses. Claude announces that he doesn’t do desserts. Instead he serves glasses of mirabelle plums flamed with alcohol.

Boulets à la liégeoise, as served at Le Dernier Ragot, run it close for calories. The size of small cannonballs, these rissoles – two per portion – deep-fried in beef dripping, served with chips, in a pot of gravy, have as many recipes as there are cooks. They also have a secret ingredient in the sauce. Sirop de Liège looks like a molasses- Marmite hybrid. It’s a delicious sticky spread made by evaporating apple and pear juices. It’s also the natural partner for Herve. This is a washed rind cheese that takes its name from the plain that lies between the city and the Dutch border.

According to the Fromagerie du Vieux Moulin’s Philippe Polinard, it is something of an endangered species: ‘In the Fifties there were about 500 farms making blocks of what was known as “white cheese”. They sold these to the specialist cheesemongers, who ripened them. Today there are only three craft cheese makers left and one industrial manufacturer that has 98 per cent of the market.’

Selecting the cube-shaped bricks is a matter of personal choice: ‘Some people enjoy them at three days old when they are chalky. Others prefer them when the rind has started to colour but the core is still firm. After that it depends on taste, two weeks or more than two months old.’ It exists in two versions: one that is milder and a second that is washed twice to give extra punch when fully ripe.

European power games moulded the rural landscape. Herve owed its past fame to Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor. He banned cereal exports from the Low Countries, which forced farmers to convert arable fields to pasture. A century later, Louis XIV stopped the Ardennais growing vines. By the early 20th century there were hundreds of vineyards again. Most were flattened in the fighting of the First World War. Viticulture is still in its phoenix infancy. There’s a tired joke of French origin: ‘Name three famous Belgians.’ Most connoisseurs would find it hard to come up with one wine. Even Moulin Hideux, a country house hotel near Bouillon, doesn’t stock it. L’Essentiel, outside Temploux, does, and the pinot gris from Chateau Bon Baron, a vineyard between Namur and Dinant, has class. Also worth a punt are Ry d’Argent wines made in Bovesse from grapes adapted to the local microclimate. Jean-François Baele turned milk into wine by converting his dairy farm to a vineyard. It could have been a religious joke, a coincidence or divine intervention. The Bible in the chapel of Notre Dame de Scourmont Abbey, Chimay was open at Isaiah Chapter 28, verse seven: ‘Priests and prophets stagger from beer and are befuddled with wine; they reel from beer, they stagger when seeing visions, they stumble when rendering decisions.’

Trappist beer may be the flagship of Belgian brewing, yet it has little to do with cassocks or chastity. The locations, however, are serene and dramatic. Orval especially, rebuilt in 1931 on the site of a ruined monastery, is on a grand scale. The brewing is state of the art. What counts are the fruity flavours: Chimay, a smidgin sweeter, and Orval bitter. Disciples of the late beer critic Michael Jackson admire its ‘light firm body and fresh acidity of the finish’.

Bière d’abbaye is different, neither better nor worse. It must have a link to an abbey, however tenuous, but monks don’t brew it, nor is it necessarily brewed close to a religious house. There are micro and midi-breweries too. Léopold7, a bio beer, is brewed beside the Chateau de Marsinne. Brasserie de Bastogne uses wild yeasts supplied ‘by our sainted mother Orval’ for its La Trouffette range.

BeerLovers’ shop in Liège is a hop mecca. Temperature to serve, ageing, alcohol content, secondary fermentation, types of malt, which hops, even gluten free: the shop has the answers. How do you tell whether yeast in a bottle is healthy? Turn it upside down and if it’s clear, no problem. If it looks gritty there is. Why do some bottles have rubber necked stoppers? On more alcoholic brews that only have a metal top, the glass bottom risks sheering off.

If you prefer something stronger, peket in patois is a juniper berry – ‘the pepper of the poor’. It’s also the Ardennais word for a distillate, genever, that is more lethal than the strongest ale. In the city’s Place du Marché, La Maison du Peket is, in short, a gin joint, but not any gin joint, with 200 peket variations. Order a peket violette flambée and the barmaid blasts a blowtorch at the alcohol to ignite it. Sambuca has nothing on the explosion of the blue flame.

After a couple or four and a visit to Le Carré, a noughts-and- crosses board of cobbled streets packed with nightspots, local youth are oiled for Belgian hazing. As part of their baptême (baptism), they goose-hop the Montagne de Bueren’s 374 steps.

Older citizens content themselves with a café liégeois, which has its origins in the First World War. The French had avoided reference to anything Germanic. Instead of ordering a café viennois when they wanted coffee topped with whipped cream they opted for a liégeois. The name stuck, but the drink evolved into a semi-dessert, like melted coffee ice cream topped with Chantilly.

To paint the Ardennes as a haven for self-indulgent bon viveurs is only a facet of the story. Dine at Le Jardin des Bégards and the chef manicures his cuisine as only someone with Italian roots could manage. The chef-patron of the Auberge du Moulin Hideux has a herb garden worthy of his Michelin star. At Agathopède in Namur, named after a secret society of 19th-century gastronomes, Carl Gillain fills an amuse-bouche eggshell with wild mushroom and egg yolk topped with a herb cream that is as delicious as it is time consuming to make. If there’s one unmissable memory to take away, it’s the André ham sandwich. Only one person can go in and order at a time. This explains the queue. You order with or without butter, mustard or cornichons. The server carves thick slices of York ham off the bone, on to the baguette. It goes in a paper bag. The customer hands over £1.30. That’s it. You can order a double-size portion. Many do. This is Belgium, after all.