Brussels for foodies

Best restaurants

Brussels eats well, but it eats without the spotlight Paris or Copenhagen attract. The city's restaurants run the spectrum from seafood rooms to one-table sandwich counters, and the most rewarding choices rarely sit on the central Grand-Place tourist drag. This list is twelve restaurants worth crossing the city for: among them a Brazilian rodizio, an Ethiopian kitchen, two Italian rooms working in different registers, a Japanese counter, a fish-and-chips shop that takes its frying oil seriously, and a sandwich counter that opens before most other rooms in town from 09:00. The bias is toward kitchens that picked a cuisine and committed — no fusion menus, no concept restaurants, no places trying to be the new thing. The other bias is toward kitchens that publish their hours and answer their phone. Brussels rewards readers who will pick up a tram or walk fifteen minutes from their hotel; the city is small enough that nothing on this list is really far, and every entry below is mapped in OpenStreetMap so a phone with offline maps can find it.