In Memoriam // The Old Hack
50%. That’s the number of hospitality businesses Moeder Lambic co-owner Jean Hummler thought would close from the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. Hummler made his prediction in the Spring of 2021, speaking to me in his living in the middle of another national lockdown. A little over two years later and Hummler’s apocalyptic prognosis has not quite come to pass. Though the number of new openings has slowed, as of the end of 2023, only one brewery has closed and the wholesale collapse of the industry has yet to materialise.
But that isn’t much cause for optimism; in a widely-shared article earlier in the year, Le Fooding Magazine editor Elisabeth Debourse drew attention to the overlapping challenges bar and restaurant owners have struggled to overcome this year in the wake of the pandemic and the impact of the war in Ukraine. The acute impact of inflation. Rising energy prices and raw material costs. Debt. Increased fiscal oversight. A burnt-out workforce. Declining customer numbers.
A crunch looks to be coming, and soon. It’s not a radical prediction to suggest that some of the first places to go will be the zombie businesses - those that have survived the post-pandemic recovery in a sort of a limbo with their base motor functions intact but without much prospect of a meaningful revival. In 2024, expect the definitive blow to arrive for more of these kinds of bars of cafés. For some of these, time was already called in 2023. The Old Hack, in Brussels’ European quarter, was one such zombie put out of its misery for good.
On November 8, Brussels resident Ben Ray posted a photo on Twitter of the upside-down red enamel sign from the facade of The Old Hack Pub, left abandoned on the street next to a couple of bike racks. Ray captioned the photo with “a piece of EU Quarter watering-hole heritage”, and underneath the original tweet were posts expressing shock, disappointment, sadness, and reminiscences of sessions past. Despite the shock of some, the Old Hack’s was a death long foretold. The last time I was in the neighbourhood - recording an interview at the nearby Kitty O’Shea’s Irish pub - I sneaked a look through the locked doors and dusty curtains but there was nothing to see; the pub, occupying a corner plot between the Berlaymont and Charlemagne buildings, had clearly been in hibernation for some time.
The Old Hack was a bit of a curio for me. News reports always referred to it as an Irish pub, and so did its landlord, one Michael O’Neill, who took over the running of the place in 2012. But when I lived nearby and thought of Irish pubs, I thought not of the Old Hack but of Kitty’s just down the road, or the James Joyce, the Coolock or the Old Oak up the hill on the other side of the Berlaymont European Commission headquarters. Clearly my radar was off, because - if Politico is to be believed - it was in its time a hotbed of Irish networking. If I thought of the Old Hack at all, then it was in relation to two overlapping Brussels communities: the Brits, and journalists.
Brussels used to be full of English pubs, places with window adverts for Whitbread Pale Ale and red Bass triangles on the tap fonts. The BBC archives have a video of British civil servants celebrating the country’s entry into the EEC on New Year’s Eve in 1972, at the since-demolished Le Pub Queen Victoria on the nearby Wetstraat. But by the 2000s that presence had shrivelled to a couple of outposts - the Churchill in downtown Brussels, and places like the Old Hack, adopted by the diplomats, secondees and permanent civil servants who’d come to Brussels in the years after 1973 to populate the European institutions in the surrounding streets.
One such Englishman abroad - anonymised for discretion - remembers the no-bullshit approach to politics of the landlords that preceded O’Neill:
“We virtually lived there, and when Mabel and Klaas [Klaasen] decided to give it up we very seriously looked into leaving our jobs to take it over, but we didn’t really have the finance to do it. We really had some of the best times there, and I miss it enormously. My favourite story is Mabel loudly telling [Nigel] Farage to piss off one night. He’d hang around the place…trying to earwig on the conversations after work. His trick was hovering in the middle of the tables pretending to be on a phone call.
“One night we were quite pissed and having a more or less heated discussion with a [European] Commission colleague…and he was hovering right next to our table. Mabel clocked what he was doing and shouted “Hey Nigel, piss off and take your fake phone call outside” across the bar, to which we and all the Flemish journo regulars pissed ourselves laughing as he forlornly took his beer outside.”
Farage became, by the mid-2010s, the Old Hack’s most recognisable regular, with it repeatedly referred to as his “local” across news reports in 2016 and the years post-Brexit. “Everyone knew who he was when he came in. I didn’t,” O’Neill said in an RTE radio interview in 2018. “He had his few pints of Guinness and his Dingle Irish Gin.”
When the UK government triggered Article 50 in 2017 - officially announcing their intention to leave the EU - Farage’s party colleagues converged on the Old Hack for cake and what one European parliamentarian described as “very liquid” celebrations (Nigel himself was otherwise engaged in Westminster). A little over a year later, in September 2018, Farage was inviting journalists to an impromptu press conference at the pub for a Brexit negotiations debrief. But by then, his relationship with the pub’s ownership had soured.
Irishman James Candon was on the scene of the fateful day when Farage’s Old Hack privileges were rescinded. “[That] was the day Farage and most of his crew were barred,” he says. Not because of his politics, “but because they showed up with cameras on the one year anniversary of the Brexit vote and broke some cardinal rules of the joint: discretion and leave the real world (mostly) outside,” Candon says:
“It was a sunny day and lads were sitting outside having a smoke even though they were officially off them. Can't be having that on camera. Then some [people] inside walked out as soon as the cameras came in. Our hero barman Michael who normally hated his customers leapt swiftly into action when he figured out what had actually happened.”
“I had actually told them ‘no flags,'' landlord Michael O’Neill said to The New European newspaper the same month. “Waving Union Jacks outside an Irish pub – well, just for a start, that kills me. Mr Farage chose my pub. I didn’t choose him. Having that character drinking here was rubbing my other customers’ noses in it.” People would come in, see him, and leave, O’Neill said in his 2018 RTE interview. It was, all things told, becoming bad for business, and O’Neill told Farage: “Nigel, I think it’s about time you found another watering hole to drink.” According to the landlord, his customer accepted his banishment with some equanimity.
If the British association with the Old Hack waxed and waned depending on the politics of the day, the pub’s relationship with the Brussels press corps was a more stable one. “I will never forget going to the Old Hack after my first summit in 2011, with the late, great Ian Traynor and a motley crew of misfits,” says Matina Stevis, currently Brussels bureau chief for the New York Times, and then the Eurozone reporter for the Wall Street Journal. “[They] took me in and made me one of their own.”
The Old Hack’s connection to Brussels’ EU journalists was one of convenience and proximity - not to mention the name of the place. The entrance to the European Commission’s press centre is almost directly opposite the pub, and across the Wetstraat is the European Council headquarters - host to those regular late-night summits attended by Stevis. A couple of hundred metres from the Hack’s front door is the International Press Centre, home to a host of newswire services and media outlets. UK newspaper The Guardian had their offices two floors up in the same building as the pub.
It was, alongside Kitty’s, the Coin du Diable and Le Franklin, a regular haunt for post-summit decompression sessions. EU reporter Jack Parrock worked over the Hack, and got to know the building’s owner well. “I shared the office above the pub with Dennis [the building owner] for around five years and we've become firm friends,” he says. “I wanted to take it over for years. Begged Dennis to let me run it.”
Parrock never got the chance. The pub closed along with everything else in early 2020 and failed to reopen along with the rest of the neighbourhood's café’s when Covid-19 restrictions were relaxed and eventually abandoned. But when Parrock saw that tweet in mid-November 2023, for all his self-confessed aversion to aspects of the pub, he felt this local landmark deserved a more respectful end. He sprung into action. “I knew of the saga of the pub over many years…[so] when I saw the photo of the sign doing the rounds on Twitter, I called Dennis to let him know,” Parrock says. “He asked me to go over and help him drag it back into the pub because he's nearly 90 years old and can't be dragging a massive sign himself. I met him after work and we pulled it into the pub and then went to Kitty’s for a pint and a catch up.”
As for the old sign, who knows where it might end up next - a future exhibit in a Brexit museum, anyone? There are, Parrock says, moves to re-open the place under new management and a new name.
The Old Hack is dead. Long live the New Hack?