On a recent sunny afternoon, I met up with a friend at a cafe that has long been popular with young, Dutch-speaking people in Brussels. Looking for my friend, I scanned the terrace. It was crowded with twentysomethings who seemed to have ordered the same drink, spent an identical amount of time in the sun, gone to the same hairdresser and shopped for their minimalist, expensive-looking clothes at the same store. I spotted my friend, sitting in the middle of the terrace, and manoeuvred towards her. She looked out of place and uncomfortable, and after a minute at best, we decided that we should find another cafe to pass our Tuesday afternoon, one that would not make us feel as if we hadn’t received the dress code for an impromptu social mixer.
On our way to the cafe we eventually settled on, we walked past a so-called bruine kroeg, or neighbourhood bar. A long-time staple of the capital’s Dutch-language community, it was the kind of place where you could always find a happy drunk, no matter the time of day; with inexpensive prices that belied its central location in the city; and a homely, unpretentious vibe.
I would usually spot at least one half-familiar face at this cafe – my high-school maths teacher, say, or a friend’s brother – but not this time. It was the same, eerily homogeneous crowd as at the other bar. Who are all these people, I whispered to my friend? Were they Antwerp transplants who had decided to patronise this one spot and attempt to make it cool by their sheer presence?
We continued on. When we arrived at the cafe of our choosing, it wasn’t crowded like the other two bars had been. No familiar faces here, either, but the ones I saw mirrored the city’s population – different ages, races and amounts of disposable income. I overheard conversations in French, English and Dutch. I saw frumpily clothed people.
After a few minutes, a man clearly looking for his next pickpocketing victim started hovering around our table, and my friend and I agreed she should move her bag from the ground to her lap.
After we got our drinks, my friend got into a short but tense exchange with a drunk who had heavily bumped into her as he stumbled past our table. With not an oatmilk person in sight, it was a good time.
A few days later, I read an interview with the Dutch author Jonas Kooyman in the local city paper about the arrival of the so-called oatmilk elite in Brussels. The oatmilk elite are an urban, young-ish crowd, I learned, who drink speciality coffee with oatmilk, buy sourdough bread, live in ever-so-slightly gritty but gentrifying neighbourhoods, and zip around the city of their choice on e-bikes that somehow remind of iPhones.
Although he coined the term to describe something he was seeing in Dutch cities, Kooyman had also observed an oatmilk elite in Belgium’s capital, he told the interviewer. The only difference with the Netherlands, he mused, was that in Brussels the oatmilk elite’s favoured hotspots – natural wine bars, small plate restaurants, overpriced organic shops – would be merrily sandwiched between a kebab place and a travel agency.
That sounds about right, I thought. A monoculture like the oatmilk elite will never be able to significantly transform the outlook of the city, as it has in places like Rotterdam and Amsterdam. There’s not enough of any one group – be it Walloons, the Flemish, locals, or expats. The happy coexistence of the kebab place, travel agency and small-plate restaurant and, more broadly, the crowd each place attracts are what so many non-Belgians appreciate about this city. Without a dominant culture, everyone can fit in in Brussels. Everyone can pick a little corner of the city and make it their own. Even the oatmilk elite.
Linda Thompson is a Belgian journalist and editor living in Brussels
