The Best Seafood Near L'Embellie, by the Record

The dining room's sand-toned minimalism comes from MAArchitects, and the menu follows a similar logic: clean lines with the occasional surprise. Chef Benoît Neusy runs a modern seafood-forward restaurant in Mons where fish and surf-and-turf dishes carry most of the weight. He has a fondness for nudging classics sideways, like a vol-au-vent that arrives with sweetbreads and prawns folded into the familiar filling. Regulars who've been coming for years show no signs of stopping.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Le Fooding Le Fooding Guide

1. Le Fooding Le Fooding Guide

A light-filled fine dining room in Aalst, overlooking a manicured garden, where the front-of-house sets a warm, unhurried tone from the moment you walk in. The kitchen leans toward seafood and treats classical French technique as a native language rather than a costume. A cheese trolley still makes the rounds, which tells you something about how seriously they take the full meal. Kelderman holds a Michelin star.

1. Michelin Guide 1 Star

1. Le Fooding Le Fooding Guide

Shrimp fritters and saddle of hare on the same menu tells you exactly what kind of place this is: an old-school Franco-Belgian seafood restaurant on the Saint-Catherine square, nostalgic in the best possible, unironic way. The room feels like Brussels circa a much earlier decade, and nobody seems to mind. Fish arrives impeccably fresh, portions run generous, and the crowd is the sort that has been coming long enough to skip the menu.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

Vismet sits on the old fish market square at Place Sainte-Catherine, which tells you something about how seriously Brussels takes its seafood history. It's a classic seafood restaurant with an open kitchen and the kind of lived-in room that clearly predates the neighborhood's gentrification. The cooking is traditional and unshowy: pristine sole, properly made sauces, ingredients that don't need dressing up. Come hungry, not overdressed.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Le Fooding Le Fooding Guide
2. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

Tightly packed tables, wine bottles wedged wherever they'll fit, and a menu built around sharing plates with a heavy lean toward seafood: Bar Misera is the kind of casual, slightly chaotic bistro that Nieuw Zuid locals seem to treat as a second living room. The format is snacks first, larger plates to follow, with sides chosen separately. The fish comes bright and acidic, the kind of cooking that makes you slow down.

1. Le Fooding Le Fooding Guide
2. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

The Art Nouveau neighborhood of Zurenborg is an odd place to feel sea salt in the air, yet this seafood bistro pulls it off. The open kitchen keeps things honest, with langoustines on the teppanyaki and briny platters that suggest the North Sea is closer than it is. Nothing here is fussy, which seems to be the whole point: very fresh fish, direct cooking, and olive oil doing more work than any reduction ever could.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant