The Best Seafood Near Quai n°4, by the Record

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

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

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

Filip Claeys, grandson of a fisherman, runs this two-Michelin-star creative restaurant outside Bruges with a near-evangelical focus on North Sea fish, including species most chefs quietly pretend don't exist. The menu names the boats that caught your dinner. Sauces are delicate, classical in training but personal in execution. The room is stylish with warm wood, and the whole thing feels more like a dinner party than a tasting menu ordeal.

1. Michelin Guide 2 Stars

North Sea fish and natural wines are the bedrock of this bright, elegant bistro in central Bruges. The menu leans hard into the coast, with langoustines, scallops, and whatever else came off the boats, given a subtle, sometimes spicy edge that keeps things interesting. The kind of seafood bistro where the wine list gets equal attention to the catch, and nobody at the table seems to be in a hurry to leave.

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

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant