"I think oysters are more beautiful than any religion," he resumed presently. "They not only forgive our unkindness to them; they justify it, they incite us to go on being perfectly horrid to them. Once they arrive at the supper-table they seem to enter thoroughly into the spirit of the thing. There's nothing in Christianity or Buddhism that quite matches the sympathetic unselfishness of an oyster. Do you like my new waistcoat? I'm wearing it for the first time tonight."

  from 'The Chronicles of Clovis' by Saki

But as has been stated, mussels don't need any fancy broths, even when they are a perfect compliment, and while you have several choices at BXL Zoute - thai, dijonnaise, creamy, provencal etc - the straight Marienières is what we went with - the simplest and often the best serving style. The mussels were delicious, the dish was straightforward, and the fries were flawless. How do Belgians make those perfect fries? No fancy Heston Blumenthalesque techniques I'm sure. 

Belgium is one of those western-European countries that is held together by a weird Victorian compact. Like Great Britain, France and Spain, Belgium isn't defined by any single ethnographic group. The country is divided almost in half into Flanders and Wallonia and occasionally there are proposals for the country to be split, or for some sort of dissolution of the country into France and the Netherlands. 

The beauty of Moules Frites is that it perfectly combines mussels, which are especially popular in the Flemish part of Belgium, and fried potatoes which are something of an art of agriculture and cuisine throughout northern France/southern Belgium. So the dish becomes an expression of the marriage between these cultures. The endless debate around whether nation states should represent a kind of ethnicity, or be a melting pot of ethnicities, could be easily answered by looking at foods. The best foods, everywhere in the world, are produced when cultures allow mingling and mixing of races, ethnicities and types of people.