Brussels for digital nomads

Best cafes

Brussels does not have a single cafe culture; it has three overlapping ones, and the interesting move is to notice which room you are in. There is the coffee-shop-as-office, where the espresso is precise and the wifi is why most people came. There is the pastry-and-sandwich lunch counter, where the bread does the arguing and the coffee is honest but secondary. And there is the older Belgian cafe, closer in spirit to a beer room than to a roastery, where a filter coffee arrives with a small speculoos and no one is in a hurry. The 12 rooms below span all three, from a bilingual sandwich bar off the Grand Place to a coffee counter on Avenue Louise that opens at 07:30 for the commute. They are grouped by what a visitor asks for, in order: a good morning stop, a working afternoon, an early-evening seat that is neither restaurant nor bar. Addresses and hours are the OpenStreetMap record; the judgement is ours.