Married With Restaurant
How did this happen?
Between 2007 and 2011, while I was a foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal in Brussels, my then-wife and I owned an Italian restaurant. The marriage lasted five years. We had no children. Our shared arena was Con Gusto, a cozy canteen with 46 chairs, where journalists, lobbyists, civil servants, bankers, and shopkeepers gathered for dishes like penne all’arrabiata, or farfalle scampi-broccoli.
Caroline managed and cooked. I invested cash, put in hours here and there, drove the delivery truck, and, on probably a thousand occasions, ate, drank coffee, or hung out.
Con Gusto is located on the ground floor of a four-story row house on the Rue de Linthout, on the same street as the hospital where I was born to a young American musician couple who’d fled the boredom of the D.C. suburbs in 1976 to rail-pass their way through Europe. My dad got a job at the Brussels opera house. They never left.
My parents settled in northeast Brussels, on a middle-class block built in the late 19th century as the country boomed on the back of the industrial revolution and the colonization of the Congo. By the 1980s, the European Union was expanding in that neighborhood. They knocked down the block where my best friend Sarah lived to put up the building where they now hold summits.
