The Best Places in Belgium

The restaurant shares a building with Wilford X, a working exhibition gallery, and the art stays on the walls rather than the plates, though the chef does finish dishes tableside if the mood strikes. It's a modern French dining room with the calm, spare feel of somewhere that takes ingredients seriously, pairing them in combinations that sound odd on paper and tend to work in practice. The crowd arrives expecting to be surprised, which is usually the point.

Peter Wellens and Charlotte De Baere artwork covers the bar area, and the dining room behind it goes full Scandinavian, all pale wood and breathing room. This is a contemporary fine dining spot where the kitchen runs three to five courses and leans into the kind of pairing that puts dashi and ponzu alongside venison and churros without blinking. The crowd tends toward the occasion-celebrating end of the spectrum, which tracks with a room this considered.

Floor-to-ceiling picture windows frame a sweeping panorama of the Flemish Ardennes, which tells you immediately what kind of place this is: a Franco-Belgian restaurant where the view and the cooking compete for your attention. A veteran couple runs the room with practiced ease, she in the dining room and he in the kitchen, turning out seasonal set menus that lean classical without feeling stuck in the past. The terrace, when the weather cooperates, makes the whole thing harder to leave.

Fried pizza sits on the menu alongside the classics at this Neapolitan pizza spot in the Sablon, which tells you the kitchen is not here to play it safe. The dough runs thin at the center in proper Neapolitan fashion, and the five-cheese pie is the one regulars tend to circle back to. The room is nicely turned out and draws a well-traveled crowd. Service can be a little loose around the edges, so patience helps.

A Neapolitan pizza shop tucked into Etterbeek where the staff will happily make you something off-menu if you ask nicely, which tells you most of what you need to know about the room. The dough is soft and light, the ingredients are the kind that make you notice the ingredients, and the cacio e pepe pizza lands creamy and sharp without tipping into heavy. It ranked 59th on 50 Top Pizza Europe, which is a long way from nothing for a neighborhood spot in Brussels.

A Sicilian word meaning "let's go" names this Bruges pizzeria, which takes that spirit literally: the dough is slow-fermented, the sourcing leans Slow Food, and a vegan menu sits alongside the classics without apology. The room is unfussy, the rounds are well-risen, and the margherita, built on good tomatoes and proper fiordilatte, is the spine everything else grows from. Service is warm enough to feel like you stumbled into someone's family kitchen.

A portrait of Maradona watches over the wood-fired oven at this Neapolitan pizza spot in Ixelles, and the menu follows suit: margherita, marinara, the classics, treated with enough seriousness that no one needs to explain the point. The crust leans contemporary, with a puffier cornicione than the old guard might prefer, and the fried starters hold their own. A neighborhood place that knows exactly what it is.

Dry-aged beef, shared in generous portions, anchors this Ghent steakhouse where the menu is built around restraint rather than complication. The room pairs raw materials with warmth, and the pacing feels guided rather than accidental. A wine list heavy on Burgundy and Piedmont keeps up its end of the deal. Ranked 19th on the World's Best Steak Restaurants list, Gillis earns that placement the quiet way, by making the whole thing feel easy.

A Neapolitan pizza shop in the heart of Brussels that started, as many do, as a cure for homesickness and ended up pulling in everyone else on the block too. The dough is contemporary Neapolitan style, the ingredients are mostly sourced from Italy, and the whole operation runs on a refreshingly short set of principles. A good beer list keeps things honest. Two locations now, which tells its own story.

A pizzeria just off the Avenue Louise that leans into the raw-wood, exposed-structure aesthetic favored by establishments that know exactly what they're doing. The dough is well-leavened, the oven is wood-fired, and a bottarga and burrata pizza with lemon zest has become the one everyone orders. An Italian wine list longer than expected rounds things out, and the bread arrives with good olive oil before anyone asks.

Bakkerij Farine is a no-frills Moroccan and Belgian bakery in Borgerhout, built around msemmen, the layered flatbread that comes out warm and stays that way for roughly one block. There's no seating, so you order at the counter, wait outside with the short queue, and eat on the sidewalk like a civilized person. Boxes of honey-soaked baklava handle the dessert question. It's cheap, and The Infatuation has taken note.

Butchers Coffee is a bright corner cafe in Borgerhout, where prams are parked by the wall and nobody seems to be taking a work call, which almost feels like a rule. Parents read over cortados, the staff smiles without being asked, and the bacon breakfast buns arrive stacked high. The ricotta omelette is creamy enough to embarrass a hotel buffet. Plan on a quick stop, then check the time and stay another hour.

Cobra House is the dressed-up, candlelit big sister of Cobra City, a Modern European dining room where everyone has clearly thought about their outfit. Martinis get clinked, whole Dover soles get split, and the menu wanders the continent from pizzettas to entrecôte to a dame blanche for dessert. Ask for a corner banquette, sit side by side, and watch the room perform. The roast chicken is the quiet star.

Le John is a neo-bistro in Antwerp's Zuid with a Modern European menu that leans Italian and a dining room lit just dimly enough to forgive anything. Groups of friends settle in over Sicilian wine while couples claim the corners and conduct whole conversations through eye contact. The kitchen backs it up with a peppery steak and fries, pumpkin tortellini, and olive oil gelato.

Orbit Bistro is a French-ish neo-bistro where the dramatic mound of whipped butter on the counter gets more quiet staring than most paintings. Wood-panelled walls and candles on every table do the date-night work, and the curved half-booths at the back give you a view of the whole room. Fried chicken arrives topped with caviar, which is the kind of thing a neo-bistro does, and the butter sauce on the roast chicken ends up on everything else.

Salt & Mint is a small Zurenborg cafe that treats breakfast as a passport exercise, with Turkish, Persian, and Moroccan platters plus one diplomatically named "world brunch." Order a few with a group so the msemmen, honey, and mint tea can circle the table. The room is cozy enough that you'll hear the bastilla being demolished from every direction, and on Sundays the back terrace fills up whatever the sky is doing.

Samenloop is a polished, canteen-style restaurant in Antwerp's old center, run as a social project with refugees and asylum seekers on staff. A guest chef takes over the kitchen for roughly eight weeks at a time, so the menu never repeats and you find out what you ordered when it lands. Lunch is a two-course set that costs less than a pair of cocktails elsewhere in town. Dress for a nice canteen, not a gala.

Shorty is a coffee shop in central Antwerp done entirely in burgundy, which gives it the air of a restaurant that happens to serve flat whites. Iced drinks arrive in aesthetic cans rather than plastic cups, and the Moroccan msemmen comes with little pots of cream cheese and honey. It's built for the quick coffee that quietly eats your afternoon, and the window seats are good for watching other people do the same.

An open grill and warm industrial bones anchor this Antwerp steakhouse in Antwerp's Zuid district, where the room does a lot of the work and knows it. Dry-aged cuts arrive from Belgium, Austria, Spain, Denmark, and Japan, and when the kitchen is focused, the fire cooking shows real depth. It landed on the World's Best Steak Restaurants list, which tells you the concept has weight. The crowd is stylish and the atmosphere genuinely magnetic.