The noren curtain that marks Nonbe Daigaku's entrance on Avenue Adolphe Buyl is the most reliable indicator of what the restaurant is and what it refuses to be. Noren divide spaces in Japan. Inside from outside, guest from kitchen, the known from the about to be discovered. At Nonbe Daigaku, the division is between the Brussels street outside and a room of perhaps fifteen seats that functions, in the precise Japanese sense, as an izakaya: a place to drink well alongside food of serious quality, without the ceremony of a restaurant that has decided it needs to be taken seriously by people who weren't looking for it.
The Michelin Guide has taken note, which has introduced the restaurant to a wider audience without materially changing it. The menu rotates with the seasons and the market. Yakitori of genuine character, dashimaki tamago with the correct yielding texture, small preparations of fish and vegetable that reward the attention paid to them. The sake list is the most considered in Brussels: a selection assembled by people who understand what they are matching and who are willing to explain why a junmai ginjo from a particular Hyogo prefecture brewery changes the relationship between the drink and the dish preceding it.
The name translates approximately as the University of Drinkers. An izakaya name that captures the spirit of the place with precision. This is not a restaurant where the drinking is incidental to the eating. The two activities inform each other over the course of an evening, with the floor team guiding the relationship between sake, shochu, and beer and the food as it arrives. For Brussels, where the Japanese dining landscape is broader than most European cities outside London and Paris, Nonbe Daigaku occupies an entirely specific position: the smallest, most intimate, most focused of the city's serious Japanese addresses.
Book early. The handful of seats means that the restaurant fills with regulars on any given evening, and the closure on Sundays and Mondays limits the available windows. A meal here takes as long as it takes. An hour and a half if you are in a hurry, three hours if you are not. The latter is the correct approach.