The Best Places in Haringrode & around

The Butcher's Son sits inside the De Koninck brewery, sharing a building with a bakery, a chocolatier, and the butcher's shop where the chef once worked, which tells you something about how seriously he takes his sourcing. This is a Michelin-starred restaurant where red meat is the heart of it, though the kitchen drifts cheerfully into surf-and-turf territory. The industrial-loft room makes it feel looser than the cooking actually is.

1. Michelin Guide 1 Star

Bakker Aldo is a neighborhood bakery with two shops, one in the old center and one in Zurenborg, and they keep staggered hours so you can only ever visit whichever is open. The plain croissants are there for the purists, but the cream cheese and blackberry bun, part cinnamon roll and part cheesecake, is what you'll be eyeing. Expect a pastry line and a very reasonable bill.

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2. The Infatuation Where To Eat & Drink In Antwerp

The website insists "this isn't a restaurant," which is a bold claim for a place serving modern French-Belgian tasting menus inside a 1920s building with parquet floors and period wooden mouldings. The chef is quietly obsessed with sauces and spices, and has a way with a knife that shows in the plating. He also comes out of the kitchen to serve you himself, which either charms or unsettles, depending on your disposition.

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2. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

This Zurenborg coffee shop bans sugar in your cup so you can taste the fruity, floral notes, which sounds precious until you taste them. The rule stops at the pastry case, where cardamom buns, madeleines, and carrot cake loaves operate on a looser honor system. Seats fill with laptop people, hushed catch-ups, and readers working through a slice of matcha cheesecake between chapters. It's a casual stop, no dress code required.

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2. The Infatuation Where To Eat & Drink In Antwerp

Tables packed close enough that you'll learn your neighbor's business, and a window that makes the whole thing look like a dare. This is a creative restaurant where the chef's Polish roots steer the menu toward earthy, tangy combinations that tend to surprise. Pearl barley stands in for risotto rice, squid ink involved. The wine cellar is taken seriously, which the room's cosy, nostalgic clutter doesn't necessarily suggest it would be.

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2. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

You push through a curtain off the gravel path and land in an all-black room lit like a film set, which turns out to be a fine-dining Italian restaurant in Antwerp doing something genuinely unfamiliar: contemporary Italian cooking stripped of every cliché. The tasting menu is the move, built around obsessive sourcing and a kitchen that treats playfulness as a technique. It placed in the 50 Top Italy global rankings, which is quite a thing for a room this far from Rome.

1. 50 Top Italy #38 · The Best Italian Restaurants In The World
2. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Le Fooding Le Fooding Guide

1. Le Fooding Le Fooding Guide

1. Le Fooding Le Fooding Guide

1. Le Fooding Le Fooding Guide

1. Le Fooding Le Fooding Guide

1. Le Fooding Le Fooding Guide

1. Le Fooding Le Fooding Guide

1. Le Fooding Le Fooding Guide

1. Le Fooding Le Fooding Guide

1. Le Fooding Le Fooding Guide

The smoke hits you before the menu does, which is pretty much the point. Black Smoke is an Antwerp barbecue joint with a dim, rough-edged interior and pitmasters working in a Texan tradition, though Latino touches and Belgian sourcing keep things from feeling like a theme park. The drinks list runs nearly as long as the food, so settling in for a while is the implied agenda.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

The 1913 Art Deco bones of a Zurenborg townhouse set the tone: marble staircase, velvet curves, the kind of room that makes you sit up straighter. De Aarde is a modern French restaurant where the chef brings an Asian undercurrent into classically generous cooking, so a butter sauce arrives laced with kombu and pigeon gets a shoyu koji marinade before hitting the wood fire. Rich, bold, and unapologetically big-portioned.

1. 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

A 19th-century rotunda in Antwerp's Zurenborg district houses this classic French brasserie, its walls layered with old photos and cooking utensils the way a Parisian grandmother's kitchen accumulates decades of useful clutter. The menu runs the Gallic greatest hits, foie gras terrine, regional poultry, and a chocolate tart that regulars order before they've sat down. Open nearly every day, which in Belgium counts as a civic virtue.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

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.

1. The Infatuation Where To Eat & Drink In Antwerp