Brussels (AFP)

Potatoes and smoked eel, white asparagus and licorice or Thai red curry: twice a week, Michelin-starred chef Isabelle Arpin comes back behind the stove to delight the carers of a Brussels hospital.

"Good vitamin food, it plays on morale and health", underlines this Frenchwoman, plunging a "bazooka", a huge food processor, in a Dutch oven to prepare a creamy watercress.

Ten 12-liter gray bins, lined with bags that can withstand a temperature of 80 degrees, await the flavored soups.

They will be delivered free of charge by Sodexo in an insulated truck to the Erasme University Hospital, in the Brussels municipality of Anderlecht. And served immediately to some 350 caregivers.

For this dynamic fifties cook, accustomed to preparing refined and colorful dishes in the open kitchen of her restaurant on the famous Avenue Louise, the change is radical.

The day after the last service on March 13, once the restaurant was closed due to confinement, Isabelle Arpin and her partner, Dominika, thought of starting out as a caterer.

But a gourmet restaurant that serves an average of thirty covers at a price of around 80 euros in the evening is not really equipped for that.

"We weren't going to take masks from the caregivers to fly in the wind!" Exclaims Dominika, the manager who started preparing soups when she never came back to the kitchen before the pandemic .

Everything was quickly organized for the two women, already engaged in helping the hospital with medical research for personal reasons.

After a few days of finalizing their project, they are relaunching their suppliers, in particular several farms, including one close to Brussels airport which employs the disabled.

Between the donations of their customers, the solidarity fridges that collect food surpluses, Carrefour and Metro that give them unsold products, they make their first soup on March 21.

Why this choice ? "Soups are nutritious. It's almost a meal. It's easy to eat quickly," says Dominika, 40.

She cites the example of watercress, "rich in trace elements, a vitamin bomb".

- "Happiness" -

Equipped with a black mask with white polka dots, the chef Isabelle Arpin, a graduate of the hotel school in Dunkirk (northern France), is quite a character.

A photo of her in yoga posture on a county millstone welcomes customers to the restaurant that bears her name.

This Tuesday, his Thai red curry consists of peppers, mushrooms, zucchini, onions, poultry, lemongrass and coconut milk. And it is largely self-sufficient, no need for a second dish.

"It is absolutely not in my habits to cook for so many people. On the other hand, I have the impression of finding the primary goal of what is our job, to feed people", confides the chef, one of whom previous establishment, Restaurant Alexandre, had won a Michelin star.

"I have lived in Belgium for over 20 years. In a situation like this, without knowing what is going to happen, we have to help the society in which we live. It is a citizen action and it is now", says this sportswoman, who practices boxing for her hobbies.

Its round of soups, Tuesdays and Thursdays, alleviates in any case the heavy days of the caregivers of Erasmus.

"What a joy to be able to blow my breath for a few minutes, travel to Thailand or discover the taste of anise in the course of a few watercress leaves (...) in a daily life that has become so brutal and exhausting", testifies the head of the service pathological anatomy of the hospital, Isabelle Salmon.

© 2020 AFP