Brel Relaunch

by Roz

Bex and I went along to the relaunch night at Brel a few weeks ago, our hubbies were both working, so Bex brought her lovely mum along as her plus one and I brought Lauren who blogged about the event not long after attending.  It was a great night and I was impressed with the new look.  Brel is in Ashton Lane, a fab cobbled street with plenty of character, in the West End of Glasgow.  It's an area of the city that I know and love from my student days living on Byres Road :)  Brel has a fab new look and cosy new feel after a major refurbishment commissioned by its new owners, and west end locals, Oli Norman and Stephen White.  A lovely addition is the new look beer garden, which now features colourful, quirky and fun ‘Dancing Trees of Brel’ that twinkle with over 15,000 fairy lights programmed to ‘dance’ to music.  We saw them in action in the night and they looked fabulous, they were a bit tricky to try and photograph though!

We were treated to lots of free drinks and samples of food from the revamped menu.  The camembert came with lots of healthy veg and big chunks of bread to dip in.  Brel has always served mussels and it was nice to see them still on the menu, whilst I didn't try any myself Bex and Lauren (who was trying them for the first time) seemed to enjoy them as they didn't last long!

The dipping cheese - do you think we liked the cheese??

 

There was a BBQ set up in the beer garden and one of the chefs was outside happily cooking burgers to order.  I was pretty hungry so headed out to brave what I thought would be a long queue with Lauren.  Whilst in search of the BBQ I was asked by a lovely lady if I wanted to get my picture in Ashton Lane and potentially feature in i-on magazine.  I'll let you all know if I make the cut :)  I happily agreed, especially when she mentioned she could sort out a wee queue jump for the burgers afterwards!

Me posing in my pink dress :)

  

The pictures of us posing in the lane came from the lovely Toni at DADA who helped organise the event.  Toni also provided the first and last photo in this post, thanks Toni!

  

Lauren and I

Lauren being papped!

It was fun having our photos taken by a real life photographer instead of just taking each others pictures.  After our fun in the lane, we headed back out to the beer garden to grab a burger and they were delicious.  There had been a choice of meats for the burger but they only had beef left towards the end of the night, the patty was cooked perfectly.  It was still pink in the middle and the warm, seeded bun complete with a lovely amount of salad and sauce rounded off an excellent burger.  Mmmmm I wish I was eating one right now as I type this post....

Staying true to Brel's roots, the bar still hosts a number of great Belgian beers such as Hoegaarden, Rodenbach Tripel and Duvel.  It's  nice to see this Ashton Lane favourite get such a beautiful refurb - check out how amazing that beer garden is going to be on sunny days! - and Brel remains one of my go to places in the West End.

Roz xx

Bex here, I just want to add that my favourite on the night were the ribs - so meaty and tasty, I would definitely go back for some of those!  (Sadly my picture is a bit rubbish and blurry, I wasn't at my best that evening having just had our bad news that Monday but I enjoyed being able to get glammed up and go out for some nice food - an ideal distraction.)