My Belgian waffle

Waffle singular. You read that right.

Since the news is so dire today, perhaps you might enjoy reading about how I managed to spend a week in Brussels—the undisputed waffle capital of the universe—without eating more than one waffle.

My first morning in the city began innocently enough. I walked a block or tw0 from my hotel on the gloomily named Place des Martyrs to reach a broad commercial street closed off to cars, the Rue Neuve. There tourists and Bruxellois thronged along blocks of fast-fashion emporia and assorted shops in a wildly diverse parade that reminded me a little of Houston.

Almost immediately, I came to a famous walk-up waffle shop, Galet, where attendants were busy singe-ing and garnishing waffles, their irons in full view of the street. It was the first of many hundreds of such shops I would encounter in my relentless strolls around the city, everything from 19th-century sit-down palaces to blatant tourist traps to teeny-tiny kiosk windows.

There was no seating. I paid up front, picking my combination of toppings or add-ins, much as you would do in a modern ice-cream shop. I went for the baseline: vanilla waffle with chocolate syrup, eschewing stuff like whipped cream and strawberries as too hard to walk around with. I marveled as the cashier's Belgian change machine swallowed my 50 Euro note and spit out the change right into my hand. Wow, I thought. These things are great.

Then my waffle, an irregular oblong hot from the iron, was handed over to me cradled in a cardboard nest. The chocolate syrup squiggled every which way. I looked around for a place to eat it. I ended up leaning against a tall trash receptacle near the entrance to a huge Zara store.

The sun shone hot. The crowd of shoppers surged around me. I took my first bite, and found it...not easy to wrangle with a flimsy balsa-wood fork. Galet's are Liège-style waffles, crisped up with sugar on their surfaces, and mine was stretchy and elastic inside. Um, really kinda tough.

The runny chocolate syrup did not improve the experience, being devoid of the dark chocolatey depth I seek. (I had a distinguished chocolate syrup later in the week, on a Dame Blanche sundae at the old-school bistro Au Vieux Martin, and it inhabited a different universe.)

Still, I was starving, and I wrestled the poor thing into submission with my little wooden fork, fretting over the waffle's overweening sweetness and sugar grit. Then I pitched the container into the trash receptacle where I had made my temporary home.

"One down," I thought to myself. As I walked along the street, headed deeper into the old city center, I passed more and more and more waffle windows, pausing to peer at the many, many permutations they had on display.

Some were quite alarming, involving sliced bananas and garish syrups and furbelows of all kinds, such that the waffle itself practically disappeared underneath. "Are those real?" I wondered.

It was a high summer day. All that piped-on whipped cream was holding its shape. The fresh fruits gleamed as if they had just been picked. The syrup squiggles held their form, rather than collecting in dismal pools. Perfectly round scoops of ice cream rode high.

Perhaps...could it be?... I was looking at the kind of fake food displays that mesmerized me along Tokyo's famous plastic-food street, Kappabashi. I have long had a perverse fascination with such artificial food items, and as the day wore on, and I made my way deeper into the central city, I found myself hovering over slightly terrifying displays of overdecorated waffles.

It was lots of fun, but it did not make me crave another one.

I gawked at a stand that billed itself as "Los Churros and Waffle"—well, como no?— where, flouting the name, the poor churros inhabited a far back corner of the lavish waffle lineup. I chortled over the come-on of "Australian Ice Cream and Waffles." I eyeballed shops that I suspected would be better than Galet: the businesslike Le Roi de la Gaufre ("Waffle King") deep in the twisty, cobbled tourist maze; the baroque bandbox of Maison Dandoy, occupying pride of place at the center of Les Galeries Royal Saint-Hubert, the magnificent covered shopping arcade, now in its third century, that was the first of its kind in Europe.

Maybe I'll come back here, I thought to myself, lifting my eyes from the ranks of outside tables filled with waffle-eating tourists, up past statuary busts in high arches to the glazed glass dome far above.

But I didn't. Friends I met up with in the city did, singing the praises of Dandoy's Brussels-style waffle (no sugar glazing, lighter consistency) with caramel syrup and caramel ice cream. But by day's end, I had seen too much. I was too weirded out by the riotous waffle displays that had begun to strike me as creepy.

Perhaps the nadir, my turning point, was when I inspected the windows of a super-fancy, super-touristy waffle emporium on a famous plaza. Souvenir boxes of waffles built for endurance revealed elaborate shapes completely paved with crushed pistachios, or grated coconut, and whatnot. I stared for long minutes at a fake waffle adorned with fake slices of chicken, fake slices of avocado, a fake parsley sprig, snippets of fake undercooked bacon, and some kind of pale fake sauce on the side.

At that point my brain must have short-circuited. The waffles of Brussels had become for me a pleasurably morbid preoccupation rather than a dining goal. I was done.

For this trip, anyway.