This is my third city guide to Bruges: I put the first one out back in 2022, and then I wrote another one two years later which I’ve been updating piecemeal ever since. Both times it shared the billing with Ghent, which has become increasingly ludicrous, so for 2026 Bruges finally gets a city guide in its own right. And I should warn you in advance that this is long, and as exhaustive as anything I write is ever likely to be, because I go to Bruges a lot.

Eight times in the last four years, would you believe, which has surprised me as much as it probably surprises you. Because when I got together with my wife Zoë, over eight years ago, two things I knew about her for sure were that she loved watching Top Of The Pops reruns on BBC Four and that she loved going to Belgium in general and Bruges in particular. Before we ever met, when I used to follow her on Twitter (back when Twitter was good) if she wasn’t posting about one she was posting about the other.

I didn’t understand it at first – hadn’t she been to Paris, or Granada? – but then I went to Bruges with her and I fell in love with it, the way it’s easy to fall in love with something when it’s so loved by someone you yourself have fallen in love with. It is an absolutely beautiful place – almost unreally so – from its medieval streets to grand squares, its picturesque canals and sleepy little bridges. It is chocolate boxy – and, of course, the easiest place in the world to buy a box of chocolates.

It has one other huge thing going for it. During the day, especially in summer, there are a shitload of tourists and yes, it can be a lot. But they do seem to be concentrated in the prettiest bits of the city – they’ll meander through the Markt, they’ll take forever outside the chocolate shops on Wollestraat, they’ll drive you mad posing for photos outside the Gruuthuse Hof. They’ll flock to the Rozenhoedkaai to take pictures of the prettiest view in the city, and they’ll pile on to their boats, zip down the canal and have an absolutely amazing time.

And, honestly, good for them. But you don’t have to stray too far from the touristy bits, or wander round the city long after about 6pm, and it can be almost eerily quiet. You can feel like you have the place to yourself, and that’s when the city gently exhales and you see its true beauty and hear yourself think, all at the same time.

Anyway, all the other guides will tell you about the quays and canals and boats, they’ll all talk about the Belfort and the Basilica Of The Holy Blood. The New York Times just updated its 36 Hours In feature about Bruges, and they would advise you to check out the new art gallery, walk round the parks or visit the Frites Museum.

But this guide is all about where to eat and drink because, beneath the surface, ignoring all the tourist brasseries on the main square that will serve you moules and the shops flogging waffles, nougat and marzipan there is an awful lot of interesting food and drink going on in Bruges.

I would say that scene has evolved and deepened even in my time visiting the city, to the point where every visit uncovers something new and makes the decisions about where to eat more difficult. It also highlights that certain kinds of restaurants – pan-Asian small plates for sharing, for instance – are having a moment across the city.

But even so, you will be bombarded with excellent choices and all of the options in this guide have something to offer. Whether you want awesome pizza or a classic Flemish beef stew, delicate and precise textbook gastronomy or one-of-a-kind choices from a genius one man band, whether you fancy some of the most intelligent pan-Asian food you’ll ever eat, fried chicken, skate wing in beurre noisette or – yes – tacos, Bruges has you covered.

Add in corking coffee, great wine, excellent natural wine and, naturally, a series of imperious pubs that both elevate beer and provide a pedestal worthy of it and you have a city that rewards visitors again and again. I wouldn’t go back pretty much twice a year if that wasn’t true, believe me: there are far too many cities and restaurants I haven’t eaten in yet to waste time somewhere I didn’t adore.

A few bits of housekeeping – this guide replaces one written in 2024 and updated a few times since, but the vast majority of it is new. Most of the recommendations date from a visit this year, practically all of the remainder are of places I visited and vetted last year (and in a lot of instances have been to a fair few times before that!). Only two of the venues in here date from 2024, but I have total confidence in those too. In each case I have put the year of my most recent visit in brackets, to be transparent and so you can trust my recommendations.

I should add too that you should always check opening hours and even then, have a Plan B up your sleeve, unless you have a table reservation. Bruges has the most erratic opening hours of any city I’ve ever visited and I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve rocked up somewhere Google is adamant is open to find the proprietors just didn’t fancy trading that day. You get used to it eventually and it becomes part of the charm, but the first few times it can be irksome.

This isn’t a shopping guide, but even so I have a few tips. If you want chocolate my personal favourite is Dumon, which is superb and very polished and has several branches across the city (you can even get a hot chocolate in one of them). If you want Belgian beer, go to the Bottle Shop on Wollestraat which can sort out the majority of your take home requirements: they also sell a phenomenal array of the correct glassware.

For more esoteric Belgian beers, Bacchus Cornelius on Academiestraat is excellent and for modern Belgian craft – or rare and marvellous craft beer from up and coming breweries throughout Europe – I love the two branches of Stacks, both of which are further out of the city (buses are contactless, tap on and very reliable).

Last of all, I know this is a big guide and I promise you everywhere on here has earned its place. But just in case you do find it a little tl:dr, here’s how to make it easy if you’re short of time.

If you only do one place for lunch, visit Bruut if you want to push the boat out or TouGou if you want a slightly more modest, but equally brilliant, experience. If you only do one place for dinner go to Assiette Blanche for classic cuisine or either Màs or Shibuya if you want something less traditional. If you only go to one coffee spot make it Dees. If you only have one daytime beer have the eponymous tripel at De Garre. And if you only go to one pub in the evening, it really has to be ‘t Brugs Beertje.

Hopefully you will have time to do far more than that, so without further ado I hope you enjoy this and it helps to make your trip to Bruges as joyous as all of mine have been. Let me know how you get on – I’m at ediblereading@gmail.com.

Where to eat

1. Assiette Blanche (2026)

I went to Assiette Blanche for my first ever dinner in Bruges, back in 2022. It set a high bar for the city and I’ve been back many times since, including on my most recent visit this summer. Simply put, it’s a class act.

It’s a very grown-up restaurant, all well-spaced tables, tasteful wood panelling and faultless service. In a city where sometimes dining feels split between stuffy traditional Belgian fare and a more Modern European procession of small plates – everybody does a steak tartare, everybody does fried chicken – Assiette Blanche sits above all of that and just offers an excellent, constantly changing menu of exceptionally executed food.

It has a very good set menu, with a couple of choices per course, or an à la carte menu, although they will allow you to mix and match to some extent. But the set menu has always sorted me out because I’ve nearly always wanted to order both the options on offer, so it makes matters quite difficult enough.

I have had countless exemplary dishes at Assiette Blanche, to the point where it would be easier to point out the dishes I haven’t liked – or would be, if I’d ever disliked anything. But really, if you book a table there on your trip to Bruges I find it hard to believe that you could go wrong. I’ve had scallop carpaccio with cauliflower couscous, delicate as you like, and big wedges of black pudding served with apple and pickled beetroot. Both were done equally well.

I’ve even gone often enough to have the same dish twice, two and a half years apart: a silky potato mousseline topped with a tumble of brown shrimp bathed in beurre noisette, the whole thing topped with a poached egg. Perfect execution, and perfect consistency: I look at the two pictures and they could have been taken the very same night.

That wasn’t the highlight of my most recent meal there, though: that honour goes to a fluffy doorstop of brioche toast, almost impossibly airy, loaded with snow crab, iceberg lettuce and mayonnaise. Ambrosial, although my monkfish wrapped in guanciale and sage, served on discs of courgette and strips of roasted pepper with a pistachio and olive crust, the whole thing in a moat of verdant herb oil, ran it a very close second.

The same team has looked after us every single time we have been, and when I told the charming, authoritative front of house how much we’d enjoyed it she told us that Assiette Blanche opened in 2007. Quite amazing, really, to be so excellent for so long. I asked whether she had any advice for other places we should try on our visit and she calmly listened to the bookings we’d already made and said “you’re going to the good places”. I don’t know whether that reflects well on me, but if Assiette Blanche says somewhere is good you’d better believe it will be.

Assiette Blanche
Philipstockstraat 23, Brugge
https://www.assietteblanche.be/nl

2. Bruut (2026)

On my trip to Bruges this summer, Zoë and I made a deal that we’d eat in new restaurants with two exceptions: she could pick one venue we’d visited before, and I could pick the other. Her choice was Assiette Blanche, and now you know how that went. But Bruut was my selection, and I’m so delighted that I made it back there after over three years. Far too long, if you ask me.

It’s in a handsome building next to a little bridge overlooking the canal. And the dining room itself is very cool – I’ve eaten there, and if you visit in winter it’s a great place to dine. But in the summer, especially if you go for lunch, you snag one of the tables on that bridge, watching the boats drift past, and you can have two and a half of the finest hours of your entire year.

Bruut is chef Bruno Timperman’s restaurant and it is very much in his image – iconoclastic, charismatic, allergic to compromise and impossible not to love. If you have allergies or a restricted diet, Bruut is not for you: he doesn’t pander. But otherwise, you go, you put yourself in his hands and you get course after course of imaginative, unforgettable food at a restaurant with no set menu where he cooks whatever he wants, every single day.

He also does a fair amount of waiting on tables, even if he’s done one of his feet a mischief (he showed us a picture on his phone once of his latest kitchen injury: it wasn’t pretty), because he loves to explain exactly what you’re getting.

No two meals there are the same, even if you go the same time of the year more than once. I’ve had a couple of dishes twice – his phenomenal steak tartare, made simply with salt and milk to extract the purest flavour from a herd Timperman works with exclusively; cherries served with a blushed white chocolate, dotted with herbs and sitting in a limpid pool of cherry gazpacho – but otherwise it’s the gastronomic equivalent of listening to a jukebox owned by a person with outstanding, idiosyncratic taste. Nothing you quite expect, but everything simultaneously delicious and fascinating.

On the most recent visit that included something almost like a maki, outstanding high-grade fish in a roll studded with the crunch of green and yellow beans. It included an edible bouquet, the foliage harbouring a yellow core of whipped goats cheese. It included Timperman’s play on ravioli, where a langoustine crudo is held in a clasp of lightly pickled courgette, the whole thing in a sauce barigoule of incredible complexity. Then there was cannelloni of fish, a strip of sauce made with plankton running through it, a piece of monkfish baked in a sheaf of herbs, duck with an intense quenelle of deep, sweet beetroot.

Honestly, it was part meal, part trance, part visit to another planet. And Timperman, charm himself, picked out a wine for us, suggested another to go with our dessert, joked, explained and scattered stardust every time he came to the table. In a previous guide to Bruges I called him a wizard, but on reflection genius is a more accurate description. It will undoubtedly be one of my meals of the year, as it would be any year, and I won’t want to leave it too long before I go back again.

Bruut is not cheap – it’s currently €89 for lunch or €145 for dinner, and if you go there for dinner you will be there all evening. But honestly, if you want a vision of what restaurants could be but almost never are, Bruut is a must-visit, and I feel very privileged to have eaten there three times, let alone once. Best of all, despite all kinds of acclaim Bruut has never been awarded a Michelin star. I don’t think Timperman cares in the slightest, to be honest. I’m not sure he’d want to join any club that would have him as a member.

Bruut
Meestraat 9, Brugge
https://bistrobruut.be/en/

3. Bij Koen en Marijke (2025)

One of the highlights of my visit at the start of 2025, Bij Koen en Marijke (also referred to as In’t Nieuw Museum in some places) is a magical restaurant which does a handful of things absolutely brilliantly. Run by married couple Koen and Marijke, both larger than life and exceptional at service, it has the perfect division of labour: he tracks down the very best meat and cooks it superbly over fire, she selects outstanding and interesting beers to accompany them. They have sidelines, too – home cured charcuterie for one, a couple of beers Marijke has brewed exclusively with brewery Hophemel for the restaurant for another.

You may read that and check out immediately because you’re not a carnivore, or more of a wine drinker. But if not, go here when you go to Bruges. I had a riot of an evening, and everything was marvellous. It’s a lovely spot off the beaten track, in a corner plot which positively shone with welcoming light when we approached it on a dreich January evening. It has two rooms, a main dining room and a very tasteful extension – so tasteful, in fact, that I didn’t mind being seated there.

The food is really good. We were brought a little plank of home-cured coppa while we made up our mind what to eat and it was an eye-opening start, with accents of juniper and rosemary. A full charcuterie selection showcased gorgeous pancetta and a moreish fennel salami, and our other starter – plump home-made fennel sausages with the restaurant’s very own raspberry vinegar – made me very happy indeed.

But the meat – well, the meat truly was next level. You can have smoked pork fillet, or châteaubriand, or crown of lamb, but the trick is to ask for Koen’s ribeye – for one person or two – cooked as the chef decides. And he makes excellent decisions: our ribeye was one of the best pieces of meat I can remember eating, beautifully marbled, perfectly buttery, medium rare and very special. A salad, dressed with more of that raspberry vinegar, was essential rather than garnish. And the potatoes, also grilled over fire, were truly gorgeous.

There’s a very famous restaurant in the Marais called Robert et Louise which does this kind of thing and is very popular with tourists; I ate there once, stuck in a joyless basement, and did not get the fuss at all. Bij Koen en Marijke is the restaurant Robert et Louise wishes it was. I should also mention that the tiramisu, shot through with Biscoff, was also exceptional.

But really, the other thing I should talk about is the other half of the restaurant, the beer. Marijke knows her beer, and her list features lots of excellent Belgian breweries you don’t see on many other beer lists in the city, like Hophemel, BramBrass and De Dochter van de Korenaar. The imperial stouts section alone is an absolute joy. I particularly enjoyed the milk stout brewed by the restaurant in collaboration with Hophemel, while De Dochter’s Fleur Sauvage – a barrel aged version of their Belle Fleur IPA – was possibly Zoë’s beer of the trip.

I didn’t get to return to Koen and Marijke’s place during my visit this year. But in the meantime, something sweet happened: two readers of the blog used it to plan a trip to Bruges and Ghent to celebrate a 50th birthday, and sent me a picture of them posing with Koen and Marijke after loving their meal. The couple at the next table were Australian, and they got to talking about how the Australian couple had chosen this restaurant for dinner. Apparently they’d found it on some little blog called Edible Reading; what are the chances?

Bij Koen en Marijke
Hooistraat 42, Brugge
https://www.koen-marijke.be

4. TouGou Fijnproeverij (2025)

In the U.K. in 2024 the broadsheets all got their knickers in a twist about a restaurant called The Yellow Bittern that – shock horror – only opened at lunchtime. Big deal: TouGou, my other discovery of 2025, only opens at lunchtime and yet when I went it was full of people with the temerity to consider that perfectly normal behaviour.

I recommend making the time to have a lunch there if you go to Bruges, because it’s an exquisite restaurant that gets everything right, with a menu that will cause you serious anguish. The first section is made up of bites, both hot and cold, and you’re encouraged to order and share, tapas-style. And it is full of really clever touches. I enjoyed the lamb koftes, studded with pine nuts, and I loved the chicken samosas, crammed with minced, spiced chicken. 

But I adored what were described as fried duck ravioli, which were actually a European gyoza, a fusion duck a l’orange stuffed to the gunwales with shredded duck and served with a tart orange sauce. And then, as if that wasn’t enough fun, a mini burger of black pudding and lobster: I didn’t have a better sandwich all year. By that point I felt like TouGou was almost more Andalusian than Flemish, with all those sharing dishes and little sliders. It reminded me, a little, of Malaga’s Gastroteca Can Emma.

All that would have earned TouGou a place in this guide, but then they sprang a main course which had all my favourite things in it. Four hugely generous ravioli, packed with crab, in a sauce with a hint of curry and a fair whack of Oud Groendal cheese. Samphire with beautiful saline firmness on top, a bed of sweet, buttery leeks underneath. I’m always loath to dust off the P word, but this was a perfect plate of food.

We were there on the restaurant’s second day back in the New Year, and they were buzzing, almost completely full and totally on it. TouGou is another husband and wife team – where would hospitality be without them? – him in the kitchen, her running the front of the house, both of them unerringly friendly and welcoming. 

At the start of 2025, I said: “Without any exaggeration, next time I go back to Bruges booking this place for lunch will be the first thing I do.” And when I went back that October, that’s exactly what happened. Many of those small plates were still on the menu, and I ordered them again, but my main – a delicate piece of swordfish on a bright lemon risotto – was new to me, and a doozy.

TouGou Fijnproeverij
Smedenstraat 47, Brugge
https://www.tougou.be

5. Más (2025)

Más is only open evenings and is walk-ins only, although they very nicely take your number and ring you when they have some space, leaving you free to enjoy a beer somewhere (this guide has a couple of excellent options, De Garre and Cafe Terrastje, for that). It’s worth jumping through those hoops, because Más’ Mexican food is as delicious as it is incongruous, from beautiful cheesy quesadillas to pork belly skewers with salsa, from tacos to their excellent fried chicken.

On my first ever visit in 2023 I ate up at the bar, and it was reminiscent of some of my happiest meals in more Mediterranean parts of Europe. Returning in January 2024 I found that, if anything, the food had got even better. The fried chicken now came with a tomato sauce with a deep touch of mole about it, the quesadillas were even more decadent and all three types of taco I tried were stonking, although my favourites remained the shrimp, peppered with crunchy little nuggets of chorizo.

They have cocktails on tap too, apparently, although I’ve never given them a try. They have a good range of beers from Brussels Beer Project, though, which went nicely, and the excellent Lupulus NEIPA which has, to my palate, notes of mango. It pairs perfectly with one of the two desserts on the menu, the “Solero Solero” which tastes exactly as you would expect from the name, only more so.

I made another really happy return to Más in March 2024 when they looked after my combined stag and hen do party, fifteen very hungry and extremely grateful diners. As before, the food was fantastic but there were further revelations, like the fact that Más made what I think may be the only sweet potato fries I’ve ever truly enjoyed. The churros at the end, served with chocolate spiked with a little chilli, were joyous. But what I’ll remember most was the natural, charming service, making us feel incredibly welcome and no trouble – no mean feat when you’re handling fifteen raucous punters.

We went back in January 2025, eating at Más on our final night in the city. The room was jumping at half six on a Thursday night and the food was as good as I remembered, although if anything the fried chicken had got even better, something I’d not thought possible. The owner, who had gone to so much trouble to sort out our stag and hen do the previous year, recognised us and wished us a happy new year, ten months later. That’s the kind of place Màs is.

I didn’t make it there on my most recent visit to the city but that’s because, as you’re about to discover, some serious competition has sprung up literally next door. Fortunately for all concerned, its neighbour is owned by the same couple as Más, so you don’t have to feel like you’re betraying anybody by enjoying either.

Más
Academiestraat 10, Brugge
https://www.instagram.com/mas.brugge/?hl=en

6. Shibuya (2026)

So yes, Shibuya – right next to Más – is owned by the same people, and was the best new discovery of my summer 2026 visit by a country mile. Shibuya is the Más team’s take on an izakaya, selling pan-Asian small plates, serving up cocktails and playing vinyl, and if that blend of mixing and mixology sounds very cool to you you would not be wrong. In fact I would have felt far too shabby and old to eat there, were it not for having a slightly (ahem) younger dining companion and but for Shibuya’s excellent and effortless service.

It’s a really stylish restaurant, all gorgeous muted colours, strangely both cutting edge and timeless, taking advantage of the room’s good bones, its huge windows and exposed stone walls. And the menu is difficult to choose from to a degree bordering on sadism, with Sichuan, Korean, Japanese and Thai influences all in the mix. Most of the dishes range between €10 and €20 and – get this – are both designed for sharing and eminently suitable for so doing. Which is good, because you want to try everything: I had a good go at ordering as much as I could.

Everything was pretty much superlative, from the nori crackers dusted with wasabi to a smacked cucumber dish with the restaurant’s own chilli crisp and peanuts, and confit pork belly yakitori skewers glazed and heaped with dukka. There is a lot going on in every dish, but never too much: every element has been composed, considered and balanced to create the platonic ideal of each.

The reason I know that is that Prasanth Murali, the chef, came out with every single dish and explained, concisely and winningly, exactly what was in it, and that was how you realised just how much thought and tinkering had gone into each one. The karaage chicken, genuinely some of the best I’ve ever had, was chicken thigh – of course – marinated and dredged in a kind of potato flour coating to create the pinnacle of fluffy crunch. And then of course it was anointed with not one sauce but two – a deep peanut sauce which would have been good enough on its own and a gochujang about which you could say exactly the same. Together, in audacious harmony, they made for a dish I could eat every week for the rest of my days.

But the dish that most demonstrated Murali’s talent and laser focus was the prawn gyoza. Effortlessly crunchy and generously packed with prawn, they would have been more than enough in a heavenly hoisin ginger sauce. But Murali explained that the whole thing had also been glazed in an oil, an emulsion, made from the head of the prawns, giving that deep and unmistakable savouriness without having to be confronted by how that flavour is normally experienced. Total obsession with flavour, inside and out, and with making each dish the apex of accomplishment: honestly, it was extraordinary.

I could go on. The beef tartare, again humming with gochujang and topped with a yolk slow-cooked in smoked soy, was even better than the life altering rendition at Paris’ Double Dragon. The cocktails, and the AF beer by Dok Brewing, were top notch. The music was Shazammable from beginning to end. I want to go back, and then go back again. All that and, unlike Más, you can book.

Bruges has a reputation as a bit of a sleepy backwater with a lot of moules and ribs spots, catering to the people who come in by coach and leave by sundown. But Shibuya, more than anywhere else, embodies the changes I’ve seen in its dining scene since I first came here four years ago: the rising tide of innovation and entrepreneurial spirit gradually lifting all (canal) boats. If Shibuya opened in London, people would be talking about it. If it had, and I’d reviewed it, it would easily get a 9 from me.

Shibuya
Academiestraat 8, Brugge
https://www.instagram.com/shibuya.brugge/?hl=en

7. Brasserie Raymond (2025)

The one gap that used to exist in my Bruges repertoire was the traditional Belgian brasserie. It’s not as if Bruges lacks them – every pretty square is ringed with them – but I guess I was never fussed. I went to Gran Kaffee de Passage and found it hit and miss, the interior better than the food. But on my trip in March 2024 I had a booking for sixteen at Brasserie Raymond, and I came away really impressed with the place. It had been recommended to me over a year ago, by a couple sitting at the table next to us on a sunny afternoon, and I’d made a mental note but never got round to it.

It’s squarely in the grand brasserie tradition, very much Franco-Belge with a huge and interesting menu that covers a lot of ground from lobsters and oysters to chateaubriand and steak tartare. I saw the chateaubriand arrive at my table for others and was more than a little covetous, especially of the gorgeous frites, but I felt a lot less resentful once a bronzed, fat skate wing was placed in front of me, covered with capers, glossy with beurre noisette, served with a salad and baby potatoes with more than a hint of smoke to them.

I was determined to return next time for the full three courses, the whole nine yards, the Mr Creosote Experience. So we went in January 2025 and were rewarded with a really stonking meal. My smoked duck salad with choucroute and sweet slivers of foie gras was a kaleidoscope of flavour, and Brasserie Raymond’s chocolate mousse is as smooth and glossy as any you’ll find anywhere. But I had the skate wing again, because I couldn’t not. I’ll try something different next time, and there will be a next time.

Again, on a quiet Tuesday night in the epicentre of the low season, the restaurant was properly bustling in a way that spoke of a great reputation. The staff were twinkly and at the top of their game, and there were several really gorgeous wines available by the carafe: restaurants should make a New Year’s resolution to offer these, if you ask me. At the table next to me, two preposterously foppish men and their debutante dates (who seemed to have wandered in from Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan) were part dinner theatre, part installation art and thoroughly watchable.

Brasserie Raymond
Eiermarkt 5, Brugge
https://www.brasserie-raymond.be

8. Locàle by Kok au Vin (2026)

I’d been tempted to visit Locàle on many of my Bruges visits but somehow never got round to it: finally, on this trip I made it there for their set lunch. Better late than never, and this tasteful space at the bottom of Ezelstraat, a likeable street with a scattering of tasteful boutiques and wine bars, provided a very assured meal indeed.

They offer a “Lunch Experience” menu where you are charged differing amounts depending on whether you want 3 courses, 3 courses with an extra starter, 3 courses with dessert or 5 courses. Lots of Bruges restaurants like to structure their menus in this way, best described as needlessly ornate: it was all a bit beyond me so we went for the whole shebang, and added in one of the two other optional dishes, described as “amuses to share”.

So you can do it cheaper, but I’m glad I didn’t. That’s especially the case because that amuse, despite being something of a cross between various other dishes I ate that week, was delectable: a lean, almost mineral steak tartare on an ethereally light semi-circle of brioche, topped with a clump of caviar. A little bit Assiette Blanche, a little bit Bruut, a whole lot of gorgeous.

Everything else was pretty masterful too, from a bright and summery aubergine and cheese starter with delicate slices of courgette to a hugely appealing escabeche of redfish served in a curry and kohlrabi sauce that had no business working as well as it did.

Pink-centred bavette tumbled with girolles and potatoes, served with an Andalusian sauce which was surprisingly like béarnaise was a big hit, and a strawberry dessert with meringue and hefty helping of sorrel sorbet was the Flanders mess I didn’t know I needed. Only the lobster with peaches in a sort of cold camomile soup didn’t work, a strangely cacophonous way to unnecessarily zhuzh up your most premium ingredient, but I sort of rolled with it because they’d more than earned my goodwill by then.

On a Friday lunchtime I was sorry to be only one of three tables eating there: service was outstanding, the mocktails and AF beer were a great excuse to give my liver a rest and the place felt like it deserved to be far busier than it was. One thing I did love, though, was that the front table in the other room was taken up by a bunch of tradespeople, hi-vis and all, taking a break from working nearby and also enjoying the “lunch experience”. It would never happen in Britain, would it?

Locàle by Kok au Vin
Ezelstraat 21, Brugge
https://www.locale.be/en/welcome/

9. Onesto Pizzabar (2026)

You can learn a lot from where chefs and restaurateurs eat, and last year when I saw that the husband and wife owners of TouGou had gone for dinner at Onesto Pizzabar I made a mental note to visit it at my earliest convenience. Maybe they should write a city guide to Bruges, because on this evidence their recommendations would be worth following.

Onesto is out past the very end of Langestraat, past the windmill and through Kruisport, one of the city’s gorgeous fifteenth century gates. It’s nothing to look at from the outside but the dining room is very attractive, yet better still when they take you through it you wind up on a decked terrace, surrounded by trees hung with lanterns. On a summer’s evening it felt like all of Bruges’ coolest and luckiest people were there, chatting, drinking wine, eating well and exuding the kind of ease in their own skin British folk find so difficult. I loved it, and even though we both ended the evening absolutely peppered with insect bites I wouldn’t change a thing.

Onesto’s menu is very simple – antipasti, pizza, a couple of desserts – and it has decided to settle for just being stellar at a few things rather than merely good at many. That’s ridiculous, though, because there was no settling involved. We scooped focaccia through a genuinely surprising dip of stracciatella, spicy tomato sauce, sharp green tomatoes and toasted hazelnuts and toasted our good fortune with spritzes, before moving on to a carpaccio of beef which did the surf and turf thing, ribbons of smoked salmon strewn on top of it.

It was a risk that paid off: later the staff told us it had only gone on the specials menu that week, and they were keen to find out whether it worked. We told them they had nothing to worry about.

Onesto’s real strength, though, is its pizza: the best base and tomato sauce I’ve ever had in Belgium I think, even counting the sadly departed Superette in Gent, and easily better than other Bruges options like Otomat and Amuni. The “Diabolico” was a slight misfire (although the name was far from a Freudian slip) being a little too wet and somehow missing the advertised ‘nduja, but the finocchio more than made amends: coarse knots of glorious fennel sausage, pickled fennel and a pastis crème lifting it head and shoulders over any similar pizza I’ve had elsewhere.

By this point I was on the restaurant’s own recipe picon, a beautiful mixture of white wine and bitter orange, and wondering where Onesto had been all my life. I asked the staff, after finishing a textbook tiramisu, how long they had been open, expecting the answer to be a year or two, only to find that Onesto has been trading for over 6 years, since before I ever came to the city, having started out as a mobile van. It just goes to show: Bruges remains full of surprises, and probably always will be.

Onesto Pizzabar
Driekoningenweg 2, Brugge
https://www.onesto-pizza.be

10. Jacobin (2026)

As I said close to the beginning, although Bruges has a good food scene it can sometimes feel like a homogeneous one: a lot of multi course set menus, a lot of small plates restaurants where everything is designed to share, a lot of tartare and gyoza and fried chicken and monkfish and so on. I’ve tried to capture as wide a range of types of restaurant as possible in this guide, across many visits across many years, but, however hard you try, that can still peek through.

And actually, Jacobin is as good an example of that as anywhere. I went there for dinner on my final night of my most recent visit to Bruges, and although everything was good it didn’t change the fact that I slightly felt I’d seen most of it before elsewhere, done slightly better or worse.

The interior is attractive – sort of a little Scandi meets Japanese, so a little like Onslow and a little like Shibuya. The menu contains a beef tartare, a Korean fried chicken and a monkfish dish with vadouvan, the French take on masala. Everything is very tasty and very competently done and you would have an excellent meal there, but it felt a little like some restaurateurs’ blog posts I read that have clearly been created with AI: it looks good, it looks like the work of others, I didn’t see a distinctive voice at play.

That sounds like faint praise, which is probably unfair. I went on the last night of the latest of many trips, and I wouldn’t say I was jaded but I came away unamazed. But restaurants don’t need to amaze you, and perhaps if this was your first meal on your first trip to the city you would be singing its praises the way I have Shibuya. Michelin likes it, anyway: they gave it a Bib Gourmand last year, a plaudit also awarded to Onslow.

Jacobin
Predikherenstraat 13, Brugge
https://www.jacobin-brugge.be/en/

11. Cuvee (2024)

Bruges is a beer city, no doubt about it. So you really have to admire the pluck and persistence of Cuvee, a wine bar right in the centre which has been going for something like 20 years. Not only that, but for over 15 of those it has exclusively stocked natural wine, which makes it a trailblazer in more ways than one. The owner told me all about this as I settled our bill at the end of a hugely enjoyable lunch in January 2024.

She said it was especially tough when they switched to natural wine, and that this made them a bit of a figure of fun in Bruges’ food and drink fraternity. Well, to quote the great Alan Partridge, needless to say, Cuvee has had the last laugh. Because what they’ve built is really something: a deceptively huge, incredibly tasteful space packed with cool furniture and gorgeous bottles of wine. There’s space out front for groups, a little snug at the back which would be perfect for drinking with friends and some tables for dining, looking up at the counter. 

There is also, I am happy to say, a really terrific menu of the kind of food that goes well with wine. On my first visit I adored my duck rillette with piccalilli and thin melba toasts, and was blown away by a couple of enormous cheese croquettes, so glossy under their crisp shell, completely different from their Iberian distant cousins.

We made a mental note to return and descended on the place in a bigger group in March 2024 – ten of us, sitting at the long central table sharing small plates and tasting a range of very enjoyable natural wines, one sparkling, one white, one orange and one red. And the food was even better than I remembered. I loved the plate of capocollo, adored Cuvee’s marinated salmon with olive oil as much as I had on my previous visit.

And then to finish, two knockout dishes. First, a nutty, just-right risotto with asparagus, samphire and beautifully done monkfish, and then a cracking chocolate mousse dressed with olive oil and salt flakes. Throughout we were treated so well, and the passion and energy the staff had for each of our wines was properly infectious. I was already a Cuvee convert, but that experience made me an evangelist.

Cuvee
Philipstockstraat 41, Brugge
https://cuvee.be/en/

12. Lion Belge (2025)

I think Langestraat is my favourite street in Bruges. It starts at Molenbrug, the Mill Bridge, and heads out of the city, getting less and less touristy, more and more interesting. Some of the other businesses in this city guide are on that street, others – like Rock Fort, Michelin starred Sans Cravate or Latin American street food spot WuaKmole – are on my to do list for future visits. Right at the other end you’re at the canal that rings the city, not far from the windmills.

Lion Belge was recommended to me by a regular reader of the blog, and I finally made it there on my visit in October 2025. It’s no reservations, and its fame must have spread because turning up at a deeply unfashionable half-five, when it opened, I was by no means first in the queue. Inside it was fetching, all deep red accents and cosy little tables. A neon sign on one wall glowed Sip. Eat. Share.

I’d thought Lion Belge was a trad place, but the menu did a great job of hedging its bets. Starters or small plates were pretty global, from sliders to grilled octopus with polenta and chimichurri, mortadella naan bread pizza or tuna carpaccio with mango. Mains were far more conventional – pork knuckle, meatloaf, hare and the like.

In that sense it felt like it was doing the same thing as TouGou, albeit in a slightly less coherent way. But actually, everything we ordered worked. I thought the pork dumplings, four of them in a brick-red miso sauce of astonishing depth, were a complete joy and the crispy chicken with kimchee and sriracha mayo, though not as good, was still respectable. 

And the mains went down a treat: my half roast chicken came slathered in a sauce singing with tarragon, accompanied by some of the best rough-edged frites I’ve had in Belgium, or indeed anywhere else. My friend Dave, always a sucker for venison, had a stoofvlees made with the stuff, served with some potato croquettes that couldn’t match the frites.

I would definitely go again, although paradoxically the fact that you can’t book would make me less likely to go all the way out of town on the off chance (I suspect it’s easier to get a table in summer, when they have plenty of tables out on the pavement). Nonetheless this one is for you if you like an early bird dinner, so you can devote more time to post-prandial beer. Stop at De Kelk, as I did, on your way back into the centre – or, better still, head to my new favourite pub ’t Hof van Beroep, which is next door.

Lion Belge
Langestraat 123, Brugge
https://www.instagram.com/lion.belge/?hl=en-gb

13. Bierbrasserie Cambrinus (2026)

Cambrinus is one of those brasseries in the grand Flemish tradition, and probably one of the most touristy establishments in this guide. I’d never got to it on any of my previous visits, but thought I should tick it off this year because I’d heard multiple accounts that actually, the food was really very solid and probably better than it needed to be.

And all that is true, I think. My carbonnade, made with Cambrinus’ own beer, was very good stuff, extremely tender and enormous hunks of beef – cheek, at a guess – in a sauce with more depth than its thinness might suggest. I’m not sure I see the point of serving it with a puddle of apple sauce or a pointless pile of cress, but happily Cambrinus’ frites are also on the money. Zoë ordered better than me, I think: a half roast chicken with a nicely salty skin and more of those fries, more killer and less filler.

It’s also a really lovely main dining room, with little booths and panels and the kind of blood-red ceiling that seems à la mode in Bruges. Sadly I didn’t get to enjoy that because they did something that really irks me: we had a reservation, and they walked us past all those lovely, unreserved tables to an unlovely bit at the end, round the corner, near the bogs. They couldn’t have said “tourists” more if they’d made us wear dunce’s caps with a big T on them. Never mind: I sipped a fantastic Jack’s Precious IPA on draft, I ate my carbonnade and I resolved not to hold it against them.

Bierbrasserie Cambrinus
Philipstockstraat 9, Brugge
https://www.bierbrasseriecambrinus.eu

14. De Halve Maan (2026)

De Halve Maan – the half moon – is one of the two breweries inside Bruges’ city walls. I’ve done the brewery tour on a previous visit, and it’s quite an amazing way to spend an hour – the guide I had was a charismatic livewire, and it’s quite mind blowing that all the brewery’s beer, drunk in Bruges and around the world, is brewed on the premises and then transported to a plant via a specially constructed pipeline running under the streets of this medieval city to be pasteurised and bottled two miles away.

The courtyard outside is a great place to have a beer in the sunshine, but the brasserie on the premises is truly impressive in its scale and polish. It’s an extremely handsome and buzzy place, and it’s worth visiting even if you just have a drink: the brewery is the only place where you can enjoy an unpasteurised Brugse Zot or Straffe Hendrik right from the tank, the only beer that doesn’t travel down that pipeline. Maybe it’s the power of suggestion, but I thought both beers tasted even better.

But the menu, which is packed with classics much like Cambrinus’, is also worth trying. They do try hard to flog you the stoofvlees – the Dutch term for carbonnade – so I felt like I should have it for comparative purposes. I think it’s better than Cambrinus’, with more meat and a thicker sauce with miles more character: it is, of course, made with their own Brugse Zot Dubbel. Still a bit of pointless garnish in the shape of a salad that doesn’t go, but never mind: the fries are better, the mayo is better. It’s just better.

Everything else was also dependable to a fault. Zoë’s quail looked fiddly but tasted extremely good, coppa might not have lived up to the standard elsewhere in Bruges but was still streets ahead of most of what you’d get in the U.K., Brugse Zot croquettes were deep-fried orbs of decadence. Service was a little brisk for my liking, but most of the mains are south of €25, it does a roaring trade and you felt in very safe hands.

I know it’s not fair to compare this kind of offering to craft breweries in the U.K., because almost none of them have the funds to pull off this kind of operation (or to build a two mile pipeline under the city: Reading finds it hard enough to build a cycle lane that isn’t a laughing stock). But even so it felt great to drink amazing beer in such an immaculate space, without any chipboard, car parks, trestle tables or street food trucks in sight.

De Halve Maan
Walplein 26, Brugge
https://www.halvemaan.be/en/visit/restaurant

15. Onslow (2025)

Onslow was the discovery of my trip in January 2024. I absolutely loved it there. Slightly off the beaten track in Bruges’ Sint-Anna district, it’s the kind of achingly-cool-without-trying restaurant you wish was just around the corner from you, and I detected some similarities with some of my favourite places in the U.K., like Bristol’s Marmo, along with Ghent’s sadly-closed and much missed De Superette. It’s all plain unshowy tables and bare white walls, but the place had a real verve when I visited.

The menu is made up of a handful of snacks and a bunch of sharing plates, and the enormously personable staff tell you to aim for about two sharing plates per person. I over-ordered on my first visit and returning in March 2024 for lunch in a bigger group we stuck firmly to that approach. It paid off handsomely, and across both meals the food was outstanding.

Actually I’d go further than that and say that even in a few short months the food had gone up a level. Since my first visit to Onslow it had been awarded a Bib Gourmand by Michelin and it showed, especially when comparing dishes common across both visits. Onslow’s fried chicken back in January was some of the best I can remember eating but in March, with the addition of lemongrass and an even crunchier coating, it was improved further.

There were other stupendous dishes both times I ate at Onslow, from a yoghurt dip smothered in gochujang to top-notch salmon sashimi topped with something like smacked cucumber. Calamari were light, tender and so moreish we ordered a second portion. Pork belly came with kimchee, a really exceptional steak tartare was strewn with enoki and coriander and broccolini was better than broccoli has any right to be. “Why is it never like this when we cook it at home?” asked Zoë – a very fair question, even if it sounded more like an accusation. It’s also worth mentioning that although the wine list was good the beer list, including some excellent sours from Dust Blending, matched it glass for glass.

As a result it was the first place we booked for our return visit in January 2025, and I do have to sound a note of caution, because it wasn’t entirely up to its usual standard. Some of the dishes felt smaller, or had been tamed and toned down or, in the case of the yoghurt with gochujang, both. The fried chicken, though, remained almost worth a visit in its own right.

Onslow
Jeruzalemstraat 53, Brugge
https://www.onslowbrugge.be

16. Goesepitte 43 (2025)

Another January 2024 discovery, Goesepitte 43 is a very accomplished restaurant in a handsome townhouse in the south-west of the city. I went there for my final lunch of that holiday, partly because chef Jan Supply offers a no choice 34 Euro set lunch even on Saturdays and I wanted to see if it was any good. It really is, and you eat it in a really beautiful dining room with top-class service: one man covers all front of house, is perfectly bilingual and charm personified.

It’s so nicely judged and a great place to go if you want an excellent lunch where you leave thoroughly satisfied but not stuffed. An amuse bouche a little like a mushroom duxelles set the scene nicely, but far better was to come: a risotto with fine herbs, edged with olive oil, was topped with a beautiful slice of parsnip, cooked on their Mibrasa oven, carrying a precious cargo of toasted pine nuts and dill. Pork was served pink on a slab of charred cauliflower, its fractal edges blackened and savoury. 

And if I was a little underwhelmed by my chocolate and coffee ganache, it might mostly have been envy from staring at the dame blanche opposite me. Even so, my meal was easily enough of a treat to make me want to explore the à la carte next time. Not only was the wine list great, and the aperitif cocktail equally so, but the drinks list also contained some excellent beer – especially Dupont’s Avec Les Bons Voeux – if that’s more your scene.

As luck would have it, I went back in October 2025 for that rare thing, a solo lunch. I had been intending to repeat that set lunch menu but I suspect Goesepitte might have done away with it, because only the à la carte was available. But I really enjoyed everything I had – from a focaccia-style pinsa topped with ricotta, iberico ham and wild mushrooms to a very good piece of chicken bathed in a vin jaune sauce so good I wished I’d held back some bread.

Some things never change, though, so this time I made a beeline for the dame blanche and was a completely FOMO-free zone. Oh, and the service is just as good as I remember: the same chap, still effortlessly hyper-competent. I did him a disservice, though, because watching him charm the socks off the French couple dining opposite me it turns out he’s at least trilingual, if not even more of a polyglot than that.

Goesepitte 43
Goezeputstraat 43, Brugge
https://www.goesepitte43.be/en

17. Ribs ’n Beer (2025)

On my trip in October 2025, I went to Bruges with my old friend Dave. He fell in love with the city when he came to my stag and hen do the year before, and had been back since with his wife, and one of the things Dave really loved was a ribs place called Mozart where they do bottomless ribs. Yes, it turns out this is a thing: servers roam the restaurant with trays of extra ribs, dishing more up on request with tongs. This might surprise regular readers, but even I can see the appeal of that.

So we nearly booked at Mozart but a Bruges mole told me that Ribs ‘n Beer was even better. That was good enough for both of us, so we had an early dinner there on a buzzing Saturday night. It really was packed which was nice to see, even if some of the tables were occupied by the kind of dreary British lads who cheer every time a server drops something. That’s not the restaurant’s fault, after all.

In the world of Bruges dining, Ribs ‘n Beer is very much a value proposition: all you can eat ribs along with potato wedges and coleslaw will set you back something like 26 Euros, although they do have set menus too if you want to add croquettes and a dessert (although why would you, when you’re giving away valuable space in your rib compartment?). 

What distinguished Ribs ‘n Beer from Mozart, Dave told me, was that not only could you have your ribs grilled, as they are at Mozart, but you can also opt for them to be slow-cooked. And really, that’s the way to go because the meat slumps off the bone, leaving you with a row of piano keys on your plate waiting to be chucked into the tall tin they give you to dispose of them. 

You can have them drenched in smoky or spicy barbecue sauce, or some wasabi and apple concoction which sounded modish to me, or a chocolate and beer sauce which managed to be very nice without tasting hugely of either. It’s not a dinner to linger on – we were out in just under an hour – and there is a little bit of a sense of diminishing returns with your top-ups which maybe aren’t as heavily sauced as they could be. But it’s still a very good cheap and cheerful option and if you do wander away from the Sports Zot I was on, the beer list is pretty decent too.

Ribs ‘n Beer
Ezelstraat 50, Brugge
https://ribsnbeer.com/home-brugge

18. Kottee Kaffee (2025)

For an actual lunch, instead of a pizza or small plates, I highly recommend the muted but chic Kottee Kaffee. It’s just past Ribs ‘n Beer on Ezelstraat, and it offers a menu which is sort of like Le Pain Quotidien but independent. So there’s lots of good bread and salted farmhouse butter, cheeses and charcuterie but the menu offers lots of more brunchy stuff if that’s your bag. Very fetchingly put together, decent value and there’s good coffee too. But perhaps just as winning were the staff and the constant playlist of 90s music, most of which they enjoyed singing along to. 

On my first visit at the start of 2023 we asked how long they’d been there and apparently they’ve been open less than a year. You’d never have known. Returning a couple of times in 2024 I was delighted to see it thriving, and as stylish and buzzy as ever. I enjoyed both their tartiflette and their baked eggs, and enviously eyed the waffles with halloumi materialising at a neighbouring table. The coffee is better than you might expect from the tall, old-fashioned latte glasses, and if you feel even remotely sub-par their ginger shots are a positive tonic.

Naturally I went back in January 2025 and enjoyed that feeling that comes from knowing somewhere is an absolutely safe bet. I had a ham pizzette with a little spiced oil drizzled on top, which was solid and reliable, a good latte and a better ginger shot. Zoë had some kind of croque monsieur made with waffles instead of bread, an inspired if slightly nuts concept, and I resolved to pick it next time.

Kottee Kaffee
Ezelstraat 68, Brugge
https://kotteekaffee.com/en

19. Sanseveria Bagelsalon (2026)

The thing my Bruges guides had always lacked, with the exception of Kottee Kaffee, was places to go for lunch. Not a three course lunch, or a set menu, but a genuine lunch: you know, a single dish, a sandwich or a salad, with coffee. So in January 2025 I endeavoured to redress that by heading to Sanseveria Bagelsalon, a place I’d heard of many times but never got round to visiting.

It was just round the corner from my hotel, and I loved it. It was small and cosy and yes, it only really did bagels. But beyond that the number of variations on that theme is impressive, with good options for vegetarians and vegans. I think bagels have fallen out of fashion somewhat in the U.K., but my lunch at Sanseveria made me think we were missing out.

This wasn’t a mingy, dense supermarket bagel. It was a huge, golden, sesame-speckled brute of a thing, and mine came with very good, buttery avocado and crispy ribbons of hot, just-fried streaky bacon. The menu said it also came with black pepper, which I thought nothing of, but the way it had been deployed managed, in the immortal words of Brazzos, to send the investigation into a whole new direction. Zoë’s bagel, with brie, bacon, walnuts, apple and honey, was apparently equally ambrosial.

The coffee was decent, if not top tier, and the freshly squeezed orange juice was sweet and very welcome. But the other thing I have to say about Sanseveria is that the chap’s work ethic was amazing. Just one guy, taking orders, making drinks, prepping bagels and then scuttling into the tiny kitchen out back to cook bacon, or toss cubes of butternut squash in a frying pan. I felt a little tired watching him, but also grateful and, if anything, slightly in awe.

I have been back on every Bruges trip since. In October 2025, battling what I thought was a hangover but turned out to be a cold, I had a solo lunch there on my last day in the city. And then this month I returned with Zoë, again on our final morning, to discover that they’d moved across the street into a much bigger site, but one retaining all the charm (and plenty of the objets) from where they’d started out. I had exactly the same bagel, the same freshly squeezed OJ, the same coffee. They’ve still got it.

Sanseveria Bagelsalon
Predikherenstraat 10-12, Brugge
https://www.sanseveria.be/en

20. Bar Lowie (2026)

One of the reasons Bruges doesn’t really have many pure cafés, with the exception of the ones in the second half of this guide, is the popularity of brunch spots. Honestly, Bruges has loads of them, and after a while they seem to be interchangeable. They all do sandwiches and avocado toast and waffles, and sometimes the only thing that seems to be different is the name. There are the prosaic (That’s Toast: it does toast), the pretty (Blackbird), the nominative (Balthasar, or Margritte) and the slightly ludicrous (one is honestly called The Novel).

I walked past a spot on my recent trip where a bar used to be, and it had reopened, with the same Kartell furniture, as “Toast by Liza”. And I’m sure it’s nice and all, but I looked at the name and thought you really want to be eponymous with toast?

Anyway, I had brunch on this trip at another of those places, Bar Lowie, and it made me wonder whether this whole genre exists because plenty of places are very good at it. Because Bar Lowie was lovely: it had a very tasteful inside space and a courtyard for the sun (which we had) and a retractable canopy (which we soon needed, because the heavens opened).

And the brunch options were by and large pretty good. I rather liked my barbecue chicken waffle, although it was slightly undersauced, underchickened and overwaffled, if you catch my drift. But Zoë had a tuna and sriracha thing on toasted sourdough, and she enthused about this comparatively humble lunch for the rest of the holiday. She would have gone back, if she could. 

Add in bright and effervescent service, thoroughly decent coffee, delicious ginger shots and an outrageously good hot chocolate that we only ordered because we were waiting for the rain to abate, and you have a winning formula. I’ll tick off another brunch place in Bruges next time, but Bar Lowie has set a standard that will be hard to beat.

Bar Lowie
Eekhoutstraat 24, Brugge
https://www.barlowie.com

21. Oyya (2026)

I always like to include an ice cream venue in my city guides but, until this year, that’s always eluded me for Bruges. You actually have the Bruges subreddit to thank for this recommendation: I asked them where the best spot in the city was, and everybody was really helpful and friendly. The two recommendations I got are opposite one another in the main shopping centre of the city, old-school Da Vinci and up and coming Oyya. Both stay open until late – god bless the continent – and when I reached them with dairy on my mind the queue for Da Vinci was huge, so Oyya it was.

I have no complaints, though. Oyya’s chocolate and salted caramel gelato were both up there with the best of what I’ve had on my travels, and Zoë raved about her chocolate brownie gelato – as in, would go back and try it again at the drop of a hat, no need to sample other flavours. Oyya is a small chain, with two branches in Ghent and a truck in the summer months, and I was delighted to be eating there rather than some generic waffle and squirty cream emporium.

Here’s how small a world it can be: I put a picture of Oyya up on the Bruges subreddit to say thank you for the advice, and I got a message from a chap called Fred.

“Super random but I just saw your post asking about the best ice cream in Bruges. I’m the guy with the beard in the picture you posted in the comments! Hope you enjoyed your icecream!”

I did, as it happens, and Fred was quite lovely.

Oyya
Noordzandstraat 1, Brugge
https://oyya.be

22. Frisson (2026)

I always like to include an ice cream place in my city guides and, to make up for letting Bruges readers down to date, in this guide you get two. The splendidly named Frisson is just the other side of the Zand, not far from the likes of TouGou and Bernie’s Beer Bar, and is excellent and enormously likeable. It looks like it’s been there forever, but actually it only opened last year at the bottom of Smedenstraat, one of my favourite little pockets of Bruges.

Like Oyya and Da Vinci it opens late (until 10pm in this case) but I went there mid afternoon in the blazing sun with Zoë and we ate our bounty in delighted silence on a bench a little further up the road. I think Frisson’s chocolate ice cream might have been even better than Oyya’s, but just as impressively they served a fior di latte gelato, which I always take as a sign of supreme confidence in your product. It was utter bliss.

I might go back even in the winter and, if I do, I promise not to smirk at the fact that they sell a product that looks like a jar of chocolate truffles under the name Crème-Knikkers (on reflection, I may not be able to promise that).

Frisson
Smedenstraat 8, Brugge
https://frissoncreme.be/eng/

Where to drink

1. ’t Brugs Beertje (2026)

It’s criminal, really, to wait this long in the city guide to introduce the best pub in the entire world. I can only apologise. ‘t Brugs Beertje, The Little Bear, is the Belgian pub elevated to its ultimate form, a miracle of a place seemingly plonked on a side street out of nowhere. You could think it was a mirage, wandering up to it. And it makes me positively aggrieved that anybody might visit Bruges without having at least one drink there, if not more, so I am determined to make sure, if I can, that this doesn’t happen to you. It’s closed Wednesdays, by the way, so don’t go then.

It is a cathedral of Belgian beer, more so than anywhere else on this list. It usually has half a dozen interesting choices on tap but the real motherlode is the bible, the eye-wateringly huge and brilliant list of bottled beers which, on my last visit, had been treated to a makeover and a jazzy new dark cover. It includes nearly all the beers you can get in all those other places, many Belgian breweries I’d never heard of and a “vintage” section which gives you the chance to try dark beers and lambics which have been properly nurtured and sheltered across the best part of a decade.

My favourite drink on their list, since you asked, is an aged imperial stout, a Cuvée Delphine from 2013 by De Struise which has the kind of depth and complexity the uninitiated – which, for a long time, was me – wouldn’t necessarily associate with beer. I make sure to have one on nearly every trip to Bruges, and I’ll be sad when that well runs dry.

But the Little Bear is more than its beer. It is decades of tradition and reverence, now under the custodianship of owner Dries. And it’s random conversations and people watching and, for me, it’s also now the accumulation of every happy evening I’ve ever spent there. And there have been many: I visited on my first ever trip to Bruges and, apart from one time when I took ill on holiday, I’ve been back on every trip since, usually more than once.

The other places in this guide are great for a beer, better still for two, but the Little Bear is where you go for all the remaining drinks before you wend your way back to your hotel. It doesn’t have lock-ins per se, but I have no idea when it closes. I’ve never been the last to leave, which is a life goal to leave on the list. On one particularly beautiful evening there we settled up, well past midnight, put our coats on, stepped through the front door, looked back at the golden light shining out of the windows and thought what the fuck are we doing? We went back in for one last nightcap.

You can nearly always find space in there, because it’s a little like a Tardis. They have a back room they open up when it’s busy, and I’ve spent several boisterous evenings there in bigger groups – with my combined stag and hen do, or that time a bunch of us surprised our friend Brendan for his fortieth birthday, all turning up in the pub when he thought he was just having a romantic break away with his wife. I’ve loved that, sitting with a raucous gang of beer obsessives, all picking their deep cuts from that gigantic beer list, congratulating one another on their choices, swapping anecdotes and jokes. Those nights are the very best of life.

The middle room – complete with plaque to original Belgian beer spod Michael Jackson (not that one, a different one) – is nice, but the front room is my favourite place in Bruges. It’s where I love to be, at a table with my favourite person, making inroads into that excellent list, in no hurry to be anywhere else. It reminds me of the Retreat, Reading’s iconic pub, in its previous incarnation under Bernie and Jane when it stocked shedloads of Belgian beers, and always the right glasses to go with them, and it made me miss all that. If only I’d been a Belgian beer fan, back then.

Before I went I don’t think I understood the hushed tones with which Zoë and her beer fraternity referred to it. How good can it be? I thought. It’s just a pub. Well, that shows what I know because it’s not a pub, it’s the pub, and since I’ve been I’ve compared everywhere else to it, in some way.

Some places, like Oviedo’s Cerveceria Cimmeria, Granada’s Capitan Amargo, Glasgow’s Laurieston – or Reading’s very own Nag’s Head, for that matter, share its lineage and have echoes of its magic. All those places are my kind of wonderful, and I can’t wait to go back to each and every one of them. But there’s only one Little Bear. I’m fairly sure that if George Orwell had got to visit, through some wormhole in space and time, he would never have written “The Moon Under Water”. Instead he would have penned a paean of praise to the Little Bear, one far better than this. But he’s long gone, so this will have to do.

’t Bruges Beertje
Kemelstraat 5, Brugge
https://www.brugsbeertje.be/en/home-2/

2. De Garre (2026)

De Garre is right in the centre of Bruges, up a little alley just off Breidelstraat, the road that connects the city’s two grandest squares, the Markt and the Burg. That’s what ‘de garre’ means: the alley. It feels completely hidden away, hiding in plain sight in the heart of tourist territory and yet somehow not sullied by the droves flocking to the chocolate and waffle spots metres away on the main drag.

Head through that unremarkable door in the alley and you can grab yourself a table on any of their three floors. Make your way up the steep stairs and you’ll be rewarded with a drinking experience unlike anything else. Classical music wafts through the rooms and most tables are enjoying the Tripel De Garre, a house beer brewed exclusively for the pub by Brouwerij Van Steenberge and only available on draft there (a few select Bruges restaurants offer it in bottle, but not many).

The likes of Pellicle have already waxed lyrical about De Garre, and that beer and its distinctive, fishbowl-like heavy-bottomed glass. They’ve done all the stuff about how the beer is poured effortlessly so the name of the beer appears as if written in the foam of the thick, creamy head, in prose purpler than I can manage, or would want to.

But they, and everyone else who raves about De Garre, are right. Because there is something about that beer, only available in that place, in those rooms, in those glasses, that is somehow magical, like you are experiencing one of the wonders of the modern world. It’s wickedly strong stuff – 11% – and they limit you to three of them, but there is something about seeing that oval tray turn up, complete with paper doily, two spectacular glasses and a little dish of cubed cheese that feels like the most incredible still life you’re not only allowed but positively encouraged to consume.

I have to be honest and say that although I’ve been to De Garre many times, usually for just the one, I don’t think I ever really “got” it. It was only on my October 2025 visit when I went with Dave, a De Garre fanboy and a Tripel De Garre addict, and we spent a proper evening settled in on the first floor that I finally appreciated what the fuss was about. I do think, really, that you have to like that beer – I don’t think I saw a single table without at least one of those telltale glasses on it – but if you do, De Garre is positively unmissable.

Remember what I said at the beginning about Bruges’ erratic opening hours? De Garre is a prime example, and many’s the time I have wandered up the lane to find the Doily Of Despair stuck to the door announcing that the owners are on holiday. On my most recent trip it was there, announcing that they were closed due to extraordinary circumstances, but the rest of the week they were open, although for reduced hours because, well, De Garre does that kind of thing. If you go, and you find it open, make the most of it because that, like the ready availability of beer as good as their tripel, can’t be taken for granted.

De Garre
De Garre 1, Brugge
https://degarre.be

3. ‘t Hof van Beroep (2026)

On my visit to Bruges in late 2025 I ate at Lion Belge but I didn’t check out ‘t Hof van Beroep, the pub next door. Returning this summer, I’m convinced that I missed out. My research suggested that it was more of a locals pub, with perhaps limited appeal, but that was mistaken.

It is in fact a properly gorgeous spot, and a triple threat. In summer, sitting outside on the pavement with a beer affords you some of the best people-watching opportunities in Bruges with people ambling or cycling past in the sunshine, into the city or out past the canals. There’s a beautiful enclosed terrace out back, another of those pleasant surprises that places in Bruges seem to revel in concealing. And the inside is really easy on the eye, warm green and brown panelling, handsome high tables and stools with backs.

The beer list is excellent too – well-curated with an eye to some of the more interesting breweries that Bruges’ mainstream crowd-pleasers sometimes overlook. They have a pale brewed especially for them by Circus Brouwerij, but when I went I tried beers from some of my favourite more modern Belgium breweries: BramBrass; Dok Brewing; Brouwcompagnie Rolling Hills. All of it was fabulous, and because they are verified on Untappd I had the whole of their extensive list at my fingertips.

It reminded me, in some ways, of one of my very favourite Belgian pubs, Ghent’s peerless Gitane, and If I’d discovered it earlier in the holiday I would have gone even more often. Maybe not a locals pub, but a pub where you could kid yourself that you, too are a local. I’ll be back next time, when the nights are shorter and that inside space looks even more inviting.

‘t Hof van Beroep
Langestraat 125, Bruges
https://www.thofvanberoep.com

4. De Kelk (2025)

De Kelk, closer to town than Lion Belge and on the other side of the road from Cherry Picker, further down this guide, isn’t like the other beer places on this list. Although it does have an excellent range of Belgian beer, the list leans more towards the wider craft scene with fascinating beers from breweries I’d never come across before. I tried a couple of beautiful DIPAs from Madrid’s Cerveceria Peninsula and Latvia’s Ārpus, and if I’d stayed longer there was plenty more to explore. Their bottle list contained countless imperial stouts I would dearly have loved to try.

The interior is striking too – a far cry from Belgium’s more traditional pubs with a tiled floor, high leather stools and lighting that’s more speakeasy than boozer, with some random streetlights used to good effect. I also loved the bar snacks, which included some disgraceful keesballen and very creditable jamon serrano. I went back in January 2024, January 2025 and October 2025 and if anything it cemented its place in my affections. I was especially delighted to see a beer by Spanish brewery SOMA, from Girona, whose IPAs I have loved in both Granada and Oviedo.

Normally I go to Bruges with Proper Belgian Beer Enthusiasts and it’s hard to lure them into De Kelk because it’s more my bag than theirs; I think they feel like going somewhere that does the cream of European craft beer when you’re literally drinking in the OG of craft beer is missing the point. I get it. It’s brave to be like De Kelk in a city full of brown pubs and Belgian beer. But personally, I wish them every success.

De Kelk
Langestraat 69, Brugge
http://www.dekelk.be

5. Bernie’s Beer Bar (2026)

It can be a challenge getting a decent beer before around 4pm in Bruges. Many of the places in this guide open around that time – De Garre notwithstanding – and if you want a beer just before or after lunch it can be tricky. On previous visits I’ve tried a place called The Pub, which is central and has a decent range but wasn’t my kind of thing, or De Windmolen, which has featured in previous editions of this guide.

But De Windmolen is on the edge of town, and an afternoon tripel at De Garre might wipe out the rest of the day. So where else? I faced this exact dilemma in October 2025 when I reached the centre of the city with my suitcase, fresh off the train from Brussels Midi, keen for a sharpener before checking into my B&B. Fortunately Bernie’s Beer Bar – a spot off the Zand, the large linden-lined square with the concert hall at one end – came to the rescue.

The interior had plenty of character, like a modern updating of the traditional brown pub that didn’t veer into kitsch or airport Wetherspoons – far more the thing than, for instance, The Pub had been. The range of beers was excellent with a good range on tap, many of them from De Halve Maan, so my first beer of that trip was their iconic triple. But there was also a regularly rotating guest tap and, if you’re into your lambics, a great range of sharing bottles from the likes of Cantillon and 3 Fonteinen. 

Returning this summer, I liked it even better. Service was just a little bit sharper and even more friendly, and sitting outside with a beer looking out on all those long shadows was a fantastic way to while away the first hour of the evening. My bottle of Jack’s Precious IPA slipped down nicely, and when we moved on to another bar to explore it wasn’t entirely without regret.

They also do light nibbles – the keesballen are good – and to put this in context it’s not far from TouGou, if you fancy a pre or post-lunch drink, or Frisson, if you fancy a pre or post drink gelato.

Bernie’s Beer Bar
Vrijdagmarkt 16, Brugge
https://bernies.bar

6. Cafe Vlissinghe (2026)

Café Vlissinghe (pronounced ‘fliss-singer’ – you’re welcome, I got it wrong many times) is famous for being Bruges’ oldest pub and one of the oldest pubs in the world. It’s been there since 1515, and the inside is so attractive that the staff have to put signs up reminding you that it’s not enough to wander round taking photos: they do rather expect you to have a drink.

Which is fair, I think. Although it’s beautiful inside it’s also a lovely place to stop for a beer. They have one brewed especially for them by Bruges brewery Fort Lapin – you can only get it there – and it, along with the interior, is reason enough to stop there. I’ve done so before, on my many winter visits to Bruges, and I quite liked Vlissinghe but I didn’t love it. I think that’s because, during the day at least, the place is invariably rammed.

All is not, however, entirely what it seems. The interior was extensively renovated in the nineteenth century, so it’s old but not old like Nottingham’s Ye Olde Trip To Jerusalem, or The Royal Standard Of England in Beaconsfield. And it’s an urban myth that Rembrandt used to drink there: he could have done, but there’s no evidence that he actually did. Sorry to piss on your frites.

It’s in the summer this time that I grew to love Vlissinghe, though. Because that garden out back, which I’d only seen misted in the cold or lashed with drizzle, emerges from its cocoon in the summer months as a beautiful butterfly of a place. Plenty of tables in the sunshine, people outside having a wonderful time in one of the most venerable boozers in Europe, with great beer and a view of a very attractive building in the sunshine. Just don’t eat there: it’s not worth using up one of your lunches or dinners there, because the food is no great shakes.

Cafe Vlissinghe
Blekersstraat 2, Brugge
https://www.cafevlissinghe.be/vlissinghe_UK.html

7. Parazzar (2026)

If you walk west out of the centre, over the Zand, past Bernie’s Beer Bar and Frisson and TouGou (assuming you can avoid the temptation to stop in any or all of them) and you keep walking down Smedenstraat, within a couple of minutes you will reach Smedenpoort, another of the surviving ancient city gates: this one was rebuilt in the fourteenth century. And if you walk through it and keep on going, in a little over five minutes you reach another fantastic spot where you are unlikely to find any tourists, Parazzar.

It’s a lovely little pub, as cosy as they come, a classic brown café with deep red walls, jazz paraphernalia everywhere and, rather incongrously, a yellow display cabinet with the Teletubbies in it for reasons which never became clear. But ignore the Teletubbies – I rather wish I’d never mentioned them – and focus on the welcome and the beer, both of which are worth the walk out of the city. Again, we are in locals Bruges here but we weren’t made to feel anything less than regulars.

The owner who served us – immaculate, gorgeous spectacles, a touch of James Hoffman about him – looked after us brilliantly and, not for the first or the last time in Bruges, I wished I had a local back home that felt like Parazzar to drink in. The beer list isn’t half bad either, and I enjoyed a Dulle Teve by the inimitable De Dolle before finally trying Fourchette, the more available, more accessible, slightly less strong beer by the makers of the Tripel de Garre.

I was at Parazzar on a warm, sunny day, but I can easily imagine what a marvellous place it would be on a cold night, a live band playing jazz up on the little stage. Hopefully next time I update this guide I won’t have to imagine.

Parazzar
Torhoutse Steenweg 10, 8200 Brugge
https://www.parazzar.be

8. Avenue Bar À Vin (2026)

On this trip I wanted to try another wine bar – just having Cuvée on the list made wine look a little underrepresented – so I considered a couple of options. Two spots on Ezelstraat tempted me – namely Lucy, which does natural wines and a stripped back range of snacks and Cavelia, which is further out of town and offers more sharing plates. Next time, perhaps.

But instead I took an Uber a little further out, past both those places, to Avenue. This far out you are definitely not in tourist Bruges, and Avenue had a feel of being something somewhere else entirely. It had a handful of outside tables under golden parasols, the owner Pete and some friends were drinking and chatting out front and a speaker, propped up in the doorway, was spilling out mellow, sun-bathed beats. The feel was far more Balearic than Flanders.

Sometimes in a spot like that you can feel like a nuisance or a distraction rather than a customer, but the welcome at Avenue was warm and genuine and we had a super time on their terrace for a couple of hours. There is an excellent list of wines by the bottle, with plenty of representation from Germany; Pete told us that German wine is having a real moment, and not yet getting the credit it deserves for that. In addition, the compact menu contains exactly the kind of things you’d want to eat outside on a sunny evening with wine: cheese and charcuterie in abundance.

And everything was so good. One of the best coppas I’ve had in a very long time, infused with fennel and served correctly with plenty of tart, crunchy cornichons. A young Comte, fresher and less gritty than I’m used to, was a revelation, and a wild boar rillette was perfect slathered on thick slices of bread. The wine was superb too: a German Riesling vindicated everything Pete had said, and my white Bordeaux was almost as spectacular. The list of wines by the glass changes weekly, but it was hard to believe any of it would be less than delightful.

As we settled up, Pete told us their story. Pete and his partner Valerie’s main business is as wedding planners: she does the event, he provides the wine. They ended up needing a space where they could consult clients and get them to sample wines, and the bar span out of that. What a happy, harmonious pair of businesses: I think their brides and grooms are a lucky bunch.

Only after I left did I remember that I’d mentioned Avenue to Bruno at Bruut and he’d told me to say hi to Pete from him. And in a pleasing daisy chain of paying it forward, when I posted about Avenue on Instagram Pete messaged me to say that I should eat at L’Aperovino, and at La Tache, which had the best wine cellar in the city. That’s the food community in Bruges, over and above all the great beer, all over: interconnected, friendly, loyal and tirelessly promoting one another.

Avenue Bar A Vin
Scheepsdalelaan 44, Brugge
https://www.avenue-lw.com/general-clean

9. Cafe Terrastje (2025)

I always wanted to make it to Cafe Terrastje, a picture-perfect pretty spot on the edge of the canals not far from Jan van Eyckplein. But I generally visit Bruges annually in early January, when it is invariably closed, so it wasn’t until my trip in October 2025 that I finally managed to drink there. It’s hard to imagine a more welcoming vision than the light coming through those scarlet doors, though I imagined its eponymous terrace would be a great place to drink on a summer’s evening.

Inside it positively exuded ‘what took you so long?’ vibes. It was snug and cosy with wood-panelled walls, a red ceiling and beautiful beams, and felt like a place to settle in and shut out the cold outside. Jazz seeped through the speakers, everybody was chatting and having a thoroughly agreeable time and my Brugse Zot on draft was a positive joy. I had been missing out, I decided.

The landlord and landlady, another husband and wife team, were really friendly, so Dave and I decided to fortify ourselves with some of the tapas available on the menu. The landlady was refreshingly honest that “he makes some of it and we buy the rest in” and we fared well enough: bitterballen were crisp-shelled and enjoyable, kibbeling was good, although I’ve had better in Bruges. Only the chicken satay skewers were swervable, the peanut sauce rather good but the chicken itself bouncy and homogeneous.

Nevertheless I loved Cafe Terrastje and it could definitely do you a turn: space for an al fresco beer when it’s clement, or a comforting boozy cocoon when it’s not. And if you need somewhere to drink while you’re waiting for a table to come free at Màs, it’s hard to imagine you could do better. 

I had every intention of returning on my most recent visit but it was closed, yet again (as I said, this is always a problem in Bruges). Sadly, that’s because it is under new management: their brand new Instagram account suggests the incoming owners were doing some work on the interior. I hope they manage to improve the place without losing what made it cosy and special. And that they elevate the food somewhat.

Cafe Terrastje
Genthof 45, Brugge
https://www.instagram.com/terrastje.brugge/

10. Dees Speciality Coffee (2026)

There are four other Bruges coffee places in this guide, garnered over the course of going to the city many times over the space of four years. They’re all good in some ways, less good in others. They’re invariably small, or rammed, or out of town, or not entirely comfortable, or erratic with their opening hours. And then in January 2025 I checked out Dees, not far from where I was staying, and I thought oh, perfect, I’ll just come here then.

They’ve been roasting for something like four years but only opened the café in October 2024, in a spot which used to be a wine bar called Riesling & Pinot that I never got round to visiting. When I went you would never have guessed it was three months old, it had that feel of somewhere that had been open forever. Comfy, cosy, not too packed in, well lit, tasteful and making amazing coffee (which comes served in tinted glass beakers that I coveted immediately).

I went every single day, and might have gone multiple times in a day if that wasn’t so ridiculous. The coffee was gorgeous and mellow, and of course they sell beans to take away, along with brewing kit. I became really attached to the place, and almost sad that I was leaving the city before the English language barista lessons advertised on their blackboard were due to take place, and that’s before we get to the chess tournament they had scheduled at the end of the month.

In case I haven’t lavished enough praise on Dees, I noticed on their Instagram stories, towards the end of my stay, that the default milk they used in their lattes was oat milk: they’ll give you dairy, if you specifically ask, but otherwise it’s oat. I didn’t feel conned, or ripped off, or tricked. I just thought good for you, because your coffee is magnificent. 

I returned multiple times on my most recent visit, being fortunate enough to stay just around the corner, and nothing had changed. It was where I had my first coffee on arrival, and where I squeezed in one final latte on my final day, before trudging despondently back to my B&B to call an Uber to the station. Once, just for experimentation’s sake, I had a latte with dairy milk: it was nice enough, but it just didn’t feel right.

Dees Specialty Coffee
Hoogstraat 33, Brugge
https://deeskoffie.be

11. EspressoBar I Love Coffee (2026)

EspressoBar I Love Coffee – they love a literally named café in Bruges – has been trading for over ten years, and yet it was only on this trip that I finally gave them a whirl. I think I was put off by the uncomfortable tables outside, the slightly OTT Rolling Stones logo-a-like, plump lips parted, holding a single coffee bean between bared teeth. It seemed a bit, well, tacky.

But I finally gave it a go on a bright summer morning and discovered a couple of things about it which revised my opinion entirely. One is that it has a really pleasing and spacious terrace out back, something you would never know from the entrance on Sint-Jakobstraat, which transforms it as an option for an al fresco latte. The other is that the latte really is extremely good: it’s almost as if being there for more than a decade has made them very good at what they do.

So a salutary lesson in not judging a book by its cover, and another excellent spot for caffeination in Bruges, in a very handy central location. The seats inside looked pretty comfy, too: I’ll be back in the winter to test them out.

EspressoBar I Love Coffee
Sint-Jakobsstraat 10, Brugge
https://ilcoffee.be/en

12. Cherry Picker (2026)

Come for the music, stay for the atmosphere! is the slogan of this record shop on Langestraat. Come for the music stay for the coffee, more like, because it serves one of my favourite coffees in Bruges. I love places like this – it reminded me of Truck Records, out on Oxford’s Cowley Road – and I’d have happily whiled away longer sitting outside or inside with a good book.

Multiple return visits have confirmed that it’s simply one of the nicest places to sit nursing a coffee, and I simply love the fact that the coffee is so much better than it has to be. Make sure you have Shazam installed on your phone before you go to Cherry Picker, because you will end up using it. And it can be full of surprises: I found myself enjoying some stuff by Jack White, and I would never have put money on that.

I make a beeline there at least once on a trip to Bruges and it was in January last year that, when I complimented the chap on the coffee, I discovered that they buy it in from Dees, above on the list. Makes perfect sense. So of course I went back again on the following trip, drizzle spattering the streets outside, and enjoyed coffee, good company and blues on the stereo, knowing I intended to do a long walk to a beer shop out beyond the canal but, somehow, not quite ready to leave.

Change happens slowly and incrementally at Cherry Picker I suspect, and on my most recent visit the coffee was as good as ever. But I also discovered that, even though they are only open during the day, they’re building up a compact and interesting list of beers for day drinkers, including some excellent pales by Brussels’ excellent Brasserie Surrealiste. If they ever decide to open in the evening and put a few small plates on they could seriously challenge many places on this list: perhaps next time. I can dream, anyway.

Cherry Picker
Langestraat 74, Brugge
https://www.cherrypicker.be

13. Coffeebar Adriaan (2024)

On my visit in October 2022 I became a regular visitor to Adriaan for the first coffee of the day and I became thoroughly attached to the place – it’s a tasteful, classy spot, all muted mint green and comfy furniture, the antithesis of craft coffee places in the U.K. (and abroad) which so often look rough and ready. The coffee was pretty good, the pastries spot on, the service friendly and speedy.

I went back multiple times across my 2024 visits and if it isn’t Bruges’ best coffee it might still be one of Bruges’ more reliable place to find one – it’s open when it says it is, including on Sundays, whereas some of the other coffee places I like do seem to be closed on random days, or shut early just because they feel like it.

Coffeebar Adrian
Adriaan Willaertstraat 7
https://coffeebaradriaan.be

14. AVI ’38 Speciality Coffeebar (2026)

The final spot on my guide for coffee used to be taken by a place called Cafune, which then changed its name to We Are Coffee Makers (see, another literal name). I loved their coffee, but they were frustrating: they couldn’t decide on a name, or when they were open, and sometimes it felt like they didn’t want to be open at all. So I wasn’t hugely surprised when I got to Bruges in October 2025 and found they had closed for good: Shibuya occupies that site now. Where to go instead?

I tried out a couple of options. One was a place called Two Point Oh Coffee, off one of the main shopping streets, which I rather liked. It was very pink – so pink your phone camera thinks its white balance must have gone for a Burton – from its chairs to its seat cushions to its banister and the glittery herringbone tiling on the bar, and the music was somewhat relentless. But I liked their flat white, and I noticed a tin on one of the shelves: their coffee was by We Are Coffee Makers.

But in the end, I opted for AVI ’38, discovered by Dave on our last morning in the city. It’s also very pink – though more muted, dusky pinks – and that potential tastefulness is slightly offset by the glitterball hanging from the ceiling and the neon sign on the wall, promising F*CKING GOOD COFFEE (the mugs say that too: the slogan reveals itself on the inside as you work through your latte). 

The chairs were Tolix, the walls racing green metro tiles, the overall look confusing. Dave, I should add, loved it. He said that the loo was a whole other matter: “they even have different music playing in there”, he said. But Dave also told me that AVI ’38 made the best coffee he’d had in Bruges, and that claim deserved to be tested. 

Actually, he might have been right: it was a really silky, very enjoyable latte. The provenance probably had a lot to do with that, with beans from Antwerp roastery Kolonel, who I hadn’t heard of, and Rotterdam’s Manhattan, who have roasted some of the best coffee I’ve tasted anywhere on the continent. 

So all told, I don’t think Dave was miles wide of the mark. For the overall ambience I would still pick Dees but I do think that if you’re a coffee purist, AVI ’38 might well serve the single best latte you’ll have on your trip. I returned this year, to find that AVI ’38 was even better in the sunshine, with tables out front to sit, sip and observe folks wandering by. F*cking good people watching, too.  

AVI ’38 Specialty Coffee Bar
Niklaas Desparsstraat 8, Brugge
https://avi38.be

(Click here to read more city guides.)

Since January 2025, Edible Reading is partly supported by subscribers – click here if you want to read more about that, or click below to subscribe. By doing so you enable me to carry on doing what I do, and you also get access to subscriber only content. Whether you’re a subscriber or not, thanks for reading.