The inspiration for this week’s feature came from something that happened to me last week: I had an evening to myself and, fresh off the train, I stopped for a very quick dinner in one of Reading’s two branches of Nando’s (don’t judge, I like a Nando’s: it’s a very occasional treat). I went for my standard order there and it was, as chains always are, a known quantity and perfectly okay: not amazing, very far from terrible and precisely as it is every time I eat in the Nando’s on Friar Street.
As I was eating I found myself thinking about how chains, like everybody else, have hiked their prices over the last few years. My food cost fifteen pounds – hardly a fortune in today’s money, but I kept coming back to the fact that there were better ways to eat similar food, but higher quality, for less money at one of Reading’s great independent restaurants.
I went home, I posted about that on the ER Facebook page and mused that maybe there was a feature in this, running through the most prominent of the town’s many big chains and pointing people in the direction of equivalents, most of them independent, offering better food and better value. I wasn’t sure whether the idea had legs, but quite a few people told me to write it. So it’s mostly my fault, but you can blame them too.
The reason I initially thought there might be no point to a feature like this was good old-fashioned confirmation bias: I assume that if you read this blog you might already know all this stuff. I do review the occasional chain, if it’s new, small or unusual, but I’ve never made any secret of the fact that the focus of this blog is more on the stuff that gives Reading character and makes it different, and in the most part that means independent businesses.
But quite a few people said that, all the same, they thought it would be useful to have all these suggestions in one place. Besides, I’ve become increasingly aware this year of more newcomers happening upon the blog. Some of that might be the demise of Berkshire Live creating a gap in the market, and some of it seems to be the peculiarities of Facebook’s algorithm, but either way it means this may be useful to some of you.
If it helps a single person have a more interesting lunch or dinner it will have done its job. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve ambled through Christchurch Meadows on my way to Geo Café of a Sunday only to pass more than one person gripping a Costa cup. The popularity of Caversham’s Costa is for me, like the electoral success of Tony Page or the survival of Wild Lime, one of Reading’s great unsolved mysteries.
Sitting comfortably? Right, here we go – ten well-known chains and their excellent alternatives.
THE CHAIN: Nando’s GO HERE INSTEAD: Bakery House
I don’t mind Nando’s, and it definitely has its place. But wading through my butterflied chicken breast, rice and rainbow slaw my mind kept drifting to Bakery House’s boneless baby chicken. They don’t make you choose between breast, thighs or half a chicken, they just give you the whole lot, marinated, skin scorched, bones removed, fighting for space on a plate with a big pile of vegetable rice and a well-dressed salad. And they give you all that for fourteen pounds, which remains one of Reading’s ridiculous food bargains.
Recent tweaks to the chilli sauce have made it a little punchier, while the garlic sauce is toned down to the extent that you won’t repel people at work; I miss the old one, but I understand why they did it. I know that Bakery House isn’t Portuguese (nor, for that matter, is Nando’s) so it isn’t a like for like comparison, but I still think Bakery House’s chargrilled chicken is miles better than the stuff from Nando’s. And if you want some of the other things Nando’s can offer – halloumi, houmous and pita or even a sandwich made with chicken livers – well, Bakery House does those far better too.
THE CHAIN: Wendy’s or Five Guys GO HERE INSTEAD: Monkey Lounge
People complain all the time about Reading having too many burger joints, but actually there are fewer than you might think – since 7Bone left the town centre to cook out of Phantom (and, as a result, give greater priority to Deliveroo) there has been little to challenge the primacy of the big chains – except Honest, which is itself a small chain. Couple that with the closure of Smash N’ Grab earlier in the year and there are probably fewer spots to get a good burger than there have been for a long time. As if to compound that, The Lyndhurst itself does an excellent burger but closes in a couple of weeks’ time.
So my recommendation is the proudly independent Monkey Lounge, a little way out of the town centre on Erleigh Road. Their burger is miles better than it needs to be, given their captive audience of local students drinking the house lager and watching sport on the big screens. Nonetheless it’s a delight and one of the most pleasant surprises I can remember after doing this reviewing lark for a very long time – a very well executed coarse patty, a timeless sesame seed bun rather than modish brioche, bacon and cheese as standard. Even the chips, which are bought in, are thoroughly decent.
THE CHAIN: Pizza Express GO HERE INSTEAD: Sarv’s Slice at the Biscuit Factory
Again I don’t actually mind Pizza Express at all, although I miss the one on St Mary’s Butts where I had lots of happy occasions: the more soulless one on Oracle Riverside has never done it for me. For that matter, I also have fond memories of many a boozy evening eating Pizza Express’ wares takeaway in the Allied beer garden with a pint of Stowford Press on the go. And again, pizza traders in Reading are fewer than they used to be with the closure of a Pizza Express, Franco Manca and of course Pizza Hut, which had traded in the Oracle since the day it opened. Buon Appetito closing last year reduced the options still further.
It’s too early to judge newcomer Zia Lucia, although it comes highly recommended by hereditary columnist Giles Coren among others. And outside the town centre there are still options, with Papa Gee and the Last Crumb flying the flag north of the river and Vesuvio doing a tidy job out west. But for my money the finest pizza in Reading right now is by Sarv’s Slice at the Biscuit Factory – both the traditional Neapolitan pizza and the comparately recent addition of deep, airy Detroit pizza with its distinctive frico, the crown of cheese that makes it unlike anything else in town.
They also do regular specials, traditional ones like the classic anchovies and capers along with others that push the envelope: I still fondly remember their carbonara pizza, and a never to be repeated Iberian effort with chorizo, confit garlic fried potatoes and smoked paprika aioli which might be the best thing they’ve done. Day to day though, I find it hard to look beyond the diavola with salami and ‘nduja, perfected with a sticky drizzle of hot honey.
THE CHAIN: Zizzi, Prezzo or Bella Italia GO HERE INSTEAD: Mama’s Way
I find Reading’s chain Italian restaurants somewhat interchangeable, a perception which probably isn’t helped by the fact that I haven’t eaten in any of them for the best part of fifteen years: I fondly remember one of the very first Prezzos in Richmond, before private equity bloated and ruined the place. But actually, even with the closure of Coco Di Mama, the chains have won the battle for spend when it comes to Italian restaurants – only Pepe Sale, really, keeps going as a full-on Italian restaurant within the IDR.
That said, my recommendation is to try Mama’s Way in what someone recently described to me as Very Little Italy, that stretch of Duke Street that encompasses Mama’s Way and near neighbours Madoo. It is a tiny place, little more than a hole in the wall with just the three or four seats inside and three stools out on the street. But if you grab one of them you feel like you’ve really hit the jackpot. The Aperol spritz is exemplary, there’s a great selection of wines by the glass and I’ve heard they do a barrel aged negroni too, although I’ve not yet tried it.
There is a small selection of pasta dishes – and pinsa too, if you want something almost as carby. But they also have an incredible array of cheeses and cured meats and will do you a veritable smorgasbord of either or both. With some of these places, like Veeno, I always think it’s a shame to have such a great space but to buy in relatively uninspiring produce. Mama’s Way absolutely gets that when you have the good stuff you just need to serve it up and bask in the reflected glory of your excellent taste and buying power. They do that superbly, and their menu is an excellent shop window for their produce – a shop window which, if you play your cards right, you can eat in, making passers-by jealous.
I know this might seem harsh, as Pho is one of the chains many Reading folk like, with good reason. But my standard order there is their fried rice with chicken and dried shrimp, and I was very aware on my visit to the Moderation a couple of weeks back that the Mod’s nasi goreng is far better than Pho’s dish. You get a lot of it, packed with chicken and enormous prawns, with prawn crackers, pickled veg, a fried egg and a chicken satay skewer. If the two dishes were Top Trumps, the Mod’s wins on every category.
Not only that, but for me the pan-Asian menu at the Moderation gives you alternatives to most of Pho’s great dishes and more besides. The rendang is better than Pho’s curry, there are rice and noodle dishes in abundance and there’s even a ramen, if you want an alternative to Pho’s eponymous dish. I would say that I haven’t tried the Moderation’s spring rolls, and it’s hard to imagine that they’re better than either of Pho’s terrific spring rolls, especially the ones crammed with crab, prawns and pork. But given how good the rest of the Moderation’s food is, you might not bet against it.
If you think the Moderation isn’t quite a like for like comparison, how about Bánh Mì QB? You have to hand it to this restaurant for having the balls to open a Vietnamese restaurant a couple of doors down from what was previously Reading’s only Vietnamese restaurant. But to me they pull it off and have created an excellent independent alternative. It might not have the polish of Pho, but their spring rolls are also excellent, their crispy roast pork is an utter joy and, unlike their rival, they actually serve bánh mì, one of the great Vietnamese dishes and a genuine lunchtime treat.
THE CHAIN: Taco Bell GO HERE INSTEAD: Mission Burrito
Most weeks on a Wednesday or Friday, and most weekends, you can probably go to either Blue Collar’s weekly market or its permanent site on Hosier Street and find someone doing tacos better than Taco Bell’s. Or you could just buy the distinctive yellow packets from Old El Paso, go home and knock something shoddy up in a frying pan: it would still be better, provided everything you used was still in date.
But for a permanent option, I still think Mission Burrito is the right choice. One of the only even vaguely independent restaurants in the Oracle (technically a chain, but there are only four of them), it’s been resolutely doing its thing for many, many years. And it’s still very good and an extremely consistent choice if you want a light meal slap bang in the town centre. I used to love their tacos, but my tastes have graduated to a carnitas burrito with smoky black beans, cheese and chipotle salsa. They’re a handful, and almost impossible to eat tidily but they hit the spot.
I think Mission is always a little forgotten about when people talk about town centre options but even if it’s unshowy it’s very good indeed. It’s seen off many of the restaurants on that bank of the Riverside – Wok To Walk, Franco Manca, The Real Greek – and you wouldn’t rule out it outlasting most of its other neighbours. Except perhaps McDonalds: I suspect that McDonalds, like cockroaches, would even survive a nuclear holocaust. Mission Burrito gets bonus points from me for stocking A&W root beer, possibly my favourite soft drink in the whole wide world.
THE CHAIN: Wetherspoons GO HERE INSTEAD: Oakford Social Club
Have you noticed how Wetherspoons fanboys (they’re always men) are so often awful people? They invariably crop up on social media, the eternal sealions, to defend the pubs, or the way they “rescue” heritage buildings, or stick up for their spiritual king Tim Martin (or “Timbo” as they like to call him). Come off it: Wetherspoons is just Brewdog for penny-pinchers. Personally, I aim never to set foot in one again.
And I know I’m on shaky ground here because although the Oakford positions itself as indie and hipster it is in fact a Mitchells & Butlers pub, part of their “Castle” portfolio which also includes the Hope & Bear. And yet here I am saying you should go here instead of Wetherspoons: why is that? Well, first of all, the benchmark to be better and more palatable than Wetherspoons is not the most exacting standard in the world.
But secondly, the Oakford has acquired the status of Reading institution over the course of over fifteen years opposite the train station, to the point where I don’t think anybody cares that it’s an M&B establishment. And its food is surprisingly good, I think, especially their fried chicken and crispy onions, which are a bit like an onion bhaji that’s had the crap beaten out of it. They have a good-looking menu, from ‘nduja and pecorino croquettes to poutine, schnitzel and beef dripping tater tots. Exactly the kind of stuff you want with a beer in a buzzy pub, and unlike Wetherspoons you can have some confidence that a microwave oven didn’t play a starring role.
THE CHAIN: Costa, Caffe Nero or Starbucks GO HERE INSTEAD: Coffee Under Pressure
I might be on to a loser with this one because I know some people are very wedded to their enormo-cups of coffee from the three big coffee chains that dominate Reading. It’s a sign of how things change – we used to have four Burger Kings, now we only have the two, we may have lost a Starbucks on Queen Victoria Street (and the one on Oracle Riverside closed this week) but Reading Station has two branches alone. I’ve lost track of the Costas in Reading, and we still have three Caffe Neros.
That’s a lot of places to drink middling coffee. And yet in the time they have proliferated we’ve lost Tamp, Anonymous, the Grumpy Goat and now the town centre branch of Workhouse. Next time an independent coffee place opens, I hope we don’t have to endure the cries of “not another one” from dullards, but I expect we will.
This is all the more reason to spend your money at Coffee Under Pressure instead. Their big and busy branch is the one off St Mary’s Butts, and the outside space is a great summer spot to see and be seen. But my favourite is the one on Blagrave Street, and I love sitting up at the window there on those stools, looking out on the handsome Victorian brickwork of the Town Hall. C.U.P.’s mocha is a work of art, as I’ve said many times, but they also do an extremely respectable latte and some great spanakopita.
Almost as good, and definitely among the best coffee in Reading these days, Compound Coffee does a fantastic job operating out of the ground floor of the Biscuit Factory. You have to hand it to the Biscuit Factory – you can have great coffee in the morning, unbeatable pizza for lunch or dinner and then avail yourself of their admirable selection of local beers. I’ve been there loads of times, and I’ve not even seen a film there yet. That might make me a philistine – but at least I’m a well-fed, well-caffeinated philistine.
I’m treating Gail’s and Pret interchangeably here, even though everyone knows that Gail’s is to Pret what Pret is to Greggs. But for these purposes I’m lumping them into the single category of lunch places with ideas above their station which are remarkably expensive. Gail’s, to be fair, isn’t terrible, although its chairman Luke Johnson is. I have a harder time liking Pret, whose prices have gone up and up and whose sandwiches are claggy, costly and usually sodden with mayonnaise: their coffee has hit the skids too, since they introduced a subscription scheme.
Anyway, I think Shed wipes the floor with both of them. A recent refurb has made their upstairs dining room an even nicer place to while away time, but in nearly twelve years Shed has turned feeding Reading’s discerning lunchgoers into a fine art. The Top Toastie, a magical combination of chorizo, chicken, jalapeños and cheese, is rightly fêted, as is its sibling the Tuna Turner. But Shed doesn’t rest on its laurels and a more recent addition – the Chaat, with samosa, mango chutney, sev and mint yoghurt – is an absolute riot on a plate.
The other veteran of Reading’s lunch scene, Picnic, is another venue far more deserving of your money than the chain neighbours on what used to be called Coffee Corner. It’s nearly seventeen years old, and on my recent visits it’s been better than I ever remember. They went through a phase where I didn’t much like the seating arrangements but they’ve clearly given that more thought and make much better use of the room now.
Better still, they’ve restored the stools up at the window which gives you one of Reading’s best people watching opportunities. It’s mad to think that I’ve been doing that for the best part of seventeen years, on and off. The coffee is as good as it’s ever been, too, and credit to Picnic for using heavenly milk from Lacey’s, the only place in Reading to do so.
Their food is going through a purple patch as well. The toasted sandwiches are terrific, especially if they have their coppa, burrata and grilled peppers on offer, but the real draw here is the salads which gradually get better and more imaginative. There are always two salad boxes, one of which is vegetarian, but I have an enormous soft spot for their chicken shawarma salad and find it hard not to order it.
I don’t know if there’s a Couscous Marketing Board but if there is, they really ought to put a plaque up outside acknowledging Picnic’s sterling commitment to shifting bucketloads of the stuff over the years. Oh, and the cakes are also great (although the one Pret product I will defend to the death, come to think of it, is their brownie).
THE CHAIN: TGI Friday GO HERE INSTEAD: Literally anywhere else in Reading
No, seriously. Don’t act surprised – you do read this blog, don’t you? TGI Fridays was comfortably one of the very worst places I’ve reviewed in 10 years, with dirty glassware, Legendary Glaze that could strip tooth enamel, staff leaving me a voicemail halfway through my meal asking why I hadn’t turned up and sizzling platters that didn’t. Worst of all, the really mediocre food was at elevated prices. I thought it was very expensive for what it was when I went there five years ago so I dread to think what it’s like now, but even if they’d inflation-proofed their menu and you were still paying 2018 prices it would be shocking value.
I’m not saying I’d rather lick a bin lid, but I find it hard to imagine a restaurant in Reading I wouldn’t pick over TGI Fridays: Cosmo, Taco Bell – which is at least cheap – or anywhere with a hygiene rating of zero from the council. The fact that the Oracle bunged Tampopo, a superb restaurant, over half a million pounds to make way for this dross tells you everything you need to know about how the Oracle, ultimately, is not a force for good in this town. Hopefully this piece, Mission Burrito notably excepted, gives you the inspiration to eat elsewhere.
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In 2013, the first year of this blog, I reviewed the grand total of fourteen Reading restaurants (don’t hold it against me, I only started in August). And there must have been something about those very first venues, because the majority of them are still going strong: Picasso, The Warwick, The Lobster Room, Kyklos and Forbury’s are no longer with us but the other nine are still going over ten years later. I won’t list them all because I don’t want to jinx anything in the here and now – 2024 is hard enough as it is – but you get the idea: for those restaurants still to be trading, a decade on, is truly no mean feat.
But time has passed and those reviews have become increasingly out of date; they might have reflected what a restaurant was like back in those days, when I wasn’t yet forty and mistakenly thought I had the rest of my life figured out, but you couldn’t necessarily use them now with confidence. So over the last couple of years I’ve been gradually revisiting the survivors from the class of 2013 to write new reviews and see how it all went so gloriously right. And generally, with the exception of Zero Degrees, I’ve had some good meals in the process.
Not only that, but I’ve left some of those Reading institutions delighted that they’re still with us. In a world where everything seems to change beyond recognition, more and faster, with every passing day, I was relieved to find that London Street Brasserie, for instance, was still a reliable benchmark in the centre of town. I was pleased that Pepe Sale, at the time freshly under new management, was recognisable as the place I had so loved on my first ever review. And returning to Café Yolk I found that the slightly iffy brunch place I wrote off eleven years ago had blossomed into a polished and Instagrammable performer.
All those places were older and wiser, as you would expect: I, on the other hand, was probably just older, but you can’t win them all. And that brings us to the subject of this week’s review, The Moderation, a place I really should have revisited long before now. When I went there in December 2013 I remember thinking they’d had an off night, because I’d eaten there a few times before that visit and always enjoyed it. I tried to say something to that effect in my review, but ultimately I was a little underwhelmed.
Back then the Moderation was part of a little chain, under the name Spirit House, along with the Warwick Arms on Kings Road, now closed. I’m pretty sure that at one time or another that group also included The Queens Head up on Christchurch Green and even the Lyndhurst, in a far earlier incarnation. The theme with those places was that they did pub food with a sideline in Thai food, as was the fashion ten years ago, and when I went to the Moderation on duty I found it a little unspecial, not bad by any means perhaps not quite as good as the Warwick in the centre of town.
In the intervening ten years I’ve been back a few times, but only really for drinks. I’ve always had a soft spot for the Moderation’s garden, a natural suntrap that never seems to get the plaudits it deserves, but the location has always been a little tricky for me: if I’m in that area I’m probably at Phantom instead, and if I was crossing into Caversham I’d wind up at the Last Crumb. So despite being fond of the Moderation I’ve made it there rarely.
I’m also not sure I’d have been entirely welcome there anyway, because I blotted my copy book with them a few years ago. It was in the run up to the 2019 General Election, when the Tories had selected car crash candidate Craig Morley to fight Reading East and he turned up in the constituency, not a place he knew well by the sounds of it, with Sajid Javid for a spot of campaigning. They were photographed pulling pints behind the bar at the Mod before scooting over to the Caversham Butcher, presumably to massage some gammon, and I’m afraid I might have been less than my usual diplomatic self about that on social media.
Anyway, there’s been a lot of water under Caversham Bridge since then. Craig Morley is now just a surreal footnote in Reading’s history, I’ve been known to purchase the occasional sausage at the Caversham Butcher and I reckoned it was about time I reassessed the Moderation. After all, Alok Sharma visited But Is It Art in the summer of 2020, maskless, less than a week after displaying Covid symptoms in the House Of Commons, and I still buy all my birthday cards there. So last Saturday I headed there with my old friend Dave, visiting from sunny Swindon, to honour a reservation we’d made – in his name, just to be on the safe side.
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I still remember the first time I gave out a really good rating on this blog. It was towards the end of 2013, when we were all a lot younger and more carefree, and my blog had been running for just over three months. I wasn’t drunk on the power (next to nobody read the blog in those days) but even so giving out a rating in the high 8s felt like a proper stake in the ground. This is my kind of thing, that rating was saying. Go here on my recommendation and I promise you won’t regret it.
Ten years on, unlike a lot of restaurant reviewers who think their pronouncements should be on tablets of stone – why do so many of them write like they’re on coke? – it still feels like a big thing to say. And a presumptuous one, too: for me, that trepidation about writing a rave review has never quite gone away. Nor has the euphoric relief when anybody visits a restaurant on the back of one of my reviews and tells me they didn’t hate it, let alone loved it. I know the blog’s free, so nobody can ask for a refund, but I can’t give anybody back the money they’ve wasted on a bad meal.
The recipient of that first rave rating, a rating that wasn’t beaten for two whole years, was a gorgeous pub called the Plowden Arms in Shiplake. Run by married couple Matt and Ruth Woodley, it was the most beautiful spot – snug in the winter, with a fantastic garden in a little corner of South Oxfordshire for the summer. The crockery was vintage before everyone jumped on the chintz and retro bandwagon, the menu revived classics from the pages of Mrs Beeton and there was 20s jazz playing all the time. I adored it, and I went there often – with friends, with my partner, with my family, with anybody I could persuade to head to Shiplake.
Just over three years later, the Woodleys left the pub. It reopened under new management, but it wasn’t the same. You looked at the menu and thought that food was just something the management thought it should offer, all function and no passion. It was the first in a long string of disappointments, of places that had the temerity to close despite my loving them. Since then there’s been Dolce Vita and Buon Appetito, and soon there will be the Lyndhurst, but that first one stung. I wish I’d gone more often. As Andy Bernard says in The Office – the funnier version – I wish there was a way to know you’re in the good old days before you’ve actually left them.
When it closed two years later, I wasn’t surprised. It sat vacant by the side of the road, and for a while it looked like it would just be the latest pub to turn into accommodation, the latest community to lose a hub and gain a handful of extra residents with nowhere to drink. It was empty throughout Covid, but then in summer 2021 there was an interesting development: the owners of nearby Orwells announced that they had saved it from near-certain demolition and were going to open it as The Plough in early 2022.
That news was welcomed beyond the narrow confines of Shiplake: Orwells has a lot of fans, and I’m sure they liked the idea of a more affordable, more casual venture from the same people. But then something strange happened in 2022. The Plough didn’t open early that year and at some point – I suspect we’ll never know exactly why – Orwells dropped out of the picture. But the Plough did open, just before Christmas 2022, owned instead by Canadian-born Jill Sikkert, her first hospitality business after a career in interior design. Last month she appointed a new chef, Charlotte Vincent, who has been on Great British Menu and got one of her previous venues into the prestigious Top 50 Gastropubs list four years ago.
All very impressive: who needs Orwells anyway? But I would be the first to admit that the revitalised Plough isn’t the kind of venue I would normally review. A lot of that’s down to accessibility: I know that the countryside around Reading has plenty of food pubs which ordinarily would interest people, like the Dew Drop Inn at Hurley, the Crown at Burchett’s Green or even the Wellington Arms at Baughurst. But as a non-driver who relies on public transport they don’t generally fit my catchment area, so you’re more likely to hear about restaurants near a train station, like Seasonality.
Besides, you don’t need me for those kind of places because they’re the province of the website Muddy Stilettos, which you may know. They love rural gastropubs, and they gush about them in their weirdly infantilised language where things are “yummy” or “scrumptious” and go in their “tummies”, where food and drink are summed up as “scoff and quaff”. Apparently if you like this kind of restaurant you also like twee: I even read one review which referred to something called a “Michelin twinkler”, presumably this is awarded when your scoff and quaff are particularly yummy and scrumptious. Goody gumdrops!
If I say more about Muddy Stilettos – especially that their annual awards are an exercise in epic grift where they get small businesses slogging away to promote their website while giving back nothing in return – I’ll probably get in trouble, so let’s move on. I found myself reviewing the Plough because a very good friend got me one of their vouchers for my birthday last year, so Zoë and I finally found an opportunity to get there on Good Friday, at the end of our holiday, literally days before it expired. So I suppose, technically, I only paid for part of my bill: I wonder if that gives me something in common with Muddy Stilettos?
The makeover the Plough has received is quite something. In its previous incarnation it looked like a pub, like a beloved local that also happened to serve food. Now it is a really gorgeous series of rooms – you can tell Sikkert has a background in interiors – that take advantage of the pub’s good bones, its bricks and beams and parquet floors, but create something much more luxe. That said, the chairs looked better suited to lounging than dining, but that’s probably just me being a bit old-fashioned.
We were seated in a room I remembered well, having eaten in it many times when it was the Plowden Arms, and yet it felt completely familiar and totally different all at once. Even though it was the end of March there was still a nip in the air and the fire was burning, and it felt properly comforting: I can’t wait for summer to come, but I’ll miss the smell of woodsmoke.
The menu is written in that way that was modish a few years back, listing ingredients but nothing else: sea trout pastrami, mussel, apple gremolata, that kind of thing. I know this annoys some people but it didn’t bother me – it was more detailed than other examples I’ve seen and, besides, a little element of surprise when you order dishes can add to the experience. Perhaps I’m just getting soft.
As is the fashion there were snacks, starters, mains and desserts – most of the snacks just over a fiver, the starters just over a tenner, the mains between twenty and twenty six pounds, desserts a tenner. You’ll have your own views about whether that’s steep, but I compared it to what things cost at London Street Brasserie these days and decided to judge it at the end, not the outset.
There’s also a no-choice set lunch menu, twenty-seven fifty for three courses, which didn’t overlap with the main menu. But in honesty I think if you’re going to only offer one option on a menu it has to be more interesting than the likes of swede and carrot soup, so I gave it a miss. The Plough could learn from the likes of Quality Chop House, whose set lunch costs about the same and seriously makes you consider swerving the à la carte. Besides, that voucher was burning a hole in my satchel – in for a penny, in for a pounding, as my fiancée likes to delicately put it.
We got some snacks while we made up our mind about everything else, and they were the first indicator that it wouldn’t all be plain sailing. Homemade focaccia/blue cheese butter was the first thing we tried. Now, I don’t object to minimalist wording provided there isn’t anything significant in the dish it neglects to mention, and so long as what you’re told will be there is actually present and correct.
So the menu really should have said homemade bread/garlic butter, because that, weirdly, is what I got. The picture below is one of the dullest ever to grace my blog, but I put it there for a reason, to demonstrate that this bread wasn’t springy or spongy or aerated. It wasn’t open-crumbed at all. It wasn’t permeated with olive oil, it didn’t have salt or rosemary or anything else to zhuzh it up. The reason it was none of those things is that it wasn’t focaccia.
It was, instead, perfectly serviceable bread. And as for the butter – well, we went from the blue cheese in this must be very subtle to there’s no blue cheese at all in this, is there? before ending up at isn’t this garlic butter? The menu wasn’t just economical with words, it was a little economical with the truth too.
The second snack was a lot more enjoyable. I’ll do away with the stripped down wording from here on in, but this was a clump of battered, fried enoki mushrooms, strewn with shoots, more mushrooms (pickled, I think, but my mind might be playing tricks) and a little Walnut Whip of mushroom ketchup. This was far more like it – wild mushrooms cropped up in a few places on the Plough’s menu, and the mushroom ketchup, lending gorgeous depth, was the star of the show.
But at the risk of nit picking again, the ratio of the enoki to batter was so out of kilter that I felt like I was eating a savoury churro that just happened to have a tiny bit of mushroom in the middle. That said, if it had been described as that on the menu I might still have ordered it. Anyway, it was only a fiver.
The starters proper were more successful, and started to give me an idea of what the kitchen could do. My pork terrine wasn’t bad – a slab of pork, bound up with jamon iberico and strewn with gubbins – cups of onion with thyme crumb nestling in them, and more of those little shoots. I would have preferred some acidity in the mix – a piccalilli, or some caperberries – and without them it was nice but a little well behaved for my liking. A tad too fridge-cold, clean and pristine where it needed to be gutsy.
This came with what was billed as sourdough bread – I wasn’t sure it was sourdough but if anything, it was more open-textured than the focaccia had been. This dish felt sanitised, but it would probably have been a hit with the Muddy Stilettos crowd – every time I read a review by them, the reviewer practically apologises for having three courses and makes a tired joke about undoing the top button of her trousers. I never feel like I have to apologise to you lot for ordering too much food: it’s one of the reasons I’m so fond of you all.
Zoë had chosen scallops, a couple of plump specimens in a puddle of dashi beurre blanc, topped with some kind of sea vegetable whose name I’m sure I used to know but have since forgotten. I wouldn’t have ordered this – I’m not sure beurre blanc is improved by cross-pollinating it with dashi – but Zoë really enjoyed it. Unfortunately I wasn’t allowed to try any, and when I asked her for a more detailed critique she said “I fucking loved it, I’d order it again, what more do you want from me?”.
This will please fans of her expletives, and I know there are a few of you out there, but probably isn’t of practical help. She did eventually tell me under cross-examination that the scallops were beautifully cooked, the contrasting textures managed just right, but that’s all I have for you.
At this point I was feeling slightly underwhelmed, but the Plough rescued things with two exemplary and very different main courses. Fish and chips – just described as “day boat fish”, so I have no idea what it was – was outstanding. A thick cylinder of pearlescent, just-cooked fish was hugged by brilliant, almost ethereal batter. I was allowed to try a bit and it was miles better than I’d been expecting, and weirdly it made me think of my dad. He has a bit of a habit of ordering fish and chips in fancy restaurants, so I’ve seen him try it at Rick Stein’s place in Padstow, at the Beehive in White Waltham and in my opinion, the Plough’s rendition was better than either of those.
The accompaniments were bang on too – excellent peas which were crushed rather than mushy, and a tartare sauce Zoë could tolerate, which meant that it wasn’t quite vinegary enough for me. Having it with fries, although that was clearly communicated on the menu, felt a little strange to me. They were very good fries but, in an inversion of how I feel every time I look in the mirror these days, I’d sooner they had been chunky rather than skinny.
If that covers the pub classics end of the menu, my choice was cheffier and one of the best plates of food I’ve eaten this year. Lamb rump was just stellar – thick and tender, accurately seasoned, the perfect shade of pink with just the most beautiful stripe of fat, the kind of thing I could eat all day. It came with a little of everything wonderful – more onion, this time smoked, chewy and delectable nubbins of Jerusalem artichoke, a sweet and glossy puree, a little jus and, by the looks of this picture, some extra virgin olive oil thrown in for good measure.
Oh, and I neglected to mention my other favourite part of this dish – described as hash browns, they were a couple of golden pyramids of pressed and fried potato that were worth the price of admission by themselves. I truly loved this dish, and it single-handedly justified the trip to Shiplake. A few forkfuls in and that dense non-focaccia and the slightly timid terrine were completely forgotten. All was forgiven: this dish was twenty-six pounds and, I reckon, worth every penny. Even looking down at the picture I can remember how happy it made me.
As it was a little light on the veg I’d ordered some green beans on the side with pickled chilli and soy sauce. They were well enough executed, the beans with a little bite, but I didn’t think they quite worked: the sauce didn’t adhere, so you ended up with a pool of the stuff at the bottom. I’ll go for the ubiquitous hispi cabbage next time.
We both wanted dessert, which is a good sign, and we both wanted the same dessert. So we had it, unrepentantly and without loosening any garments. Again, it was good but not perfect and again, it wasn’t quite as billed. It was allegedly a dark chocolate cheesecake but, for my money, it wasn’t in any way dark. And texturally I didn’t think it entirely worked – that huge layer of chocolate was a tad gelatinous, the base so heavy and thick that you couldn’t get a spoon through it without risking injury to passers-by.
And again, it was a pity because the minor details were all excellent, from the chocolate soil on top to the blobs of yuzu gel and – especially – the warming, boozy cherries. I finished it, because it’s rude not to, but I would have liked something slimmer and more refined. That is something I often say when I look in the mirror, come to think of it.
Replete and satisfied, we asked for our bill and prepared for the trip home. And it would be remiss of me not to mention at this point that – more than once on my visit to the Plough – Zoë had raved about the bathrooms. “Seriously, you have to go to the loo before we leave” she said. “I think they’re some of the best restaurant toilets I’ve ever seen.” So I did, and they were indeed very chic and the handwash smelled magnificent. But, just as with Zoë and those effing scallops, that’s all I can remember. I wish I’d taken a picture.
Our bill for all that food, a non-alcoholic cocktail called a tropical something or other which Zoë found too sweet (and at nine pounds, a little too rich) and a couple of bottles of sparkling mineral water – because I was on antibiotics – came to a hundred and thirty-eight pounds, including a 12.5% service charge. And it feels like an insult to shoehorn the service in here, between the loos and the conclusion, because it was faultless from start to finish. We had just the right level of attention, enthusiasm and smiles from the moment we were greeted to the point where we said goodbye and went out the front door. It made me think what a boon this place must be to genuine locals, although if you live in Shiplake I imagine you had enough to be smug about even before the Plough came along.
I’ve ummed and aahed since about what I made of the Plough, on balance. In the debit column, some of the dishes were underpowered or didn’t work, and the feng shui menu didn’t always reflect what turned up on the plate. I suppose I compare it in some ways to the robust, magical cooking of somewhere like the Bell at Waltham St Lawrence, and it doesn’t quite match that standard. But on the other hand, some of the dishes were exceptional, especially the mains, and the little touches with much of the food show an imagination which quite won me over. And then there’s the room, the welcome, that open fire and – yes, let’s mention them again – those bathrooms.
But the main thing I took from my trip to the Plough was a feeling of being in really capable hands, of a menu that could please almost anybody and managed to walk that very fine line where it was accessible and clever. That’s not an easy balance to strike, and many chefs or restaurants, despite their best intentions, end up falling clumsily on one side or the other. That the Plough has avoided that pitfall, and that the team have created somewhere so universal but sophisticated is a more skilful trick than you might think.
“This is the kind of place we could take your dad and stepmum” said Zoë in the car on the way back to Reading, and that’s as good a summary of its appeal as I can think of: it might mean more if you’d met them, but hopefully you get the drift. I think you could take anybody here for a meal – either for a special occasion or for no reason – and have a properly charming time.
This might not read like an out and out rave, I may not have talked about tummies or the fact that they might be awarded a Michelin twinkler at some point, but regular readers will know that this is me saying I was quietly impressed. This is my kind of thing. Hopefully, if you go here on my recommendation, you won’t regret it.
The Bruges section of this guide has been further updated after two more visits to Bruges in January and October 2025 – I’ve added quite a few new venues, and removed one which has now closed. Where a visit dates from 2025 I’ve tried to make that clear, and where a 2024 entry was also visited in 2025 I’ve tried to make that clear, too.
This city guide is far and away the most popular piece on my blog, so thanks in advance for reading it, using it or sharing it with anyone you know who is planning to visit Bruges or Ghent – it really is appreciated.
My last guide to Bruges and Ghent was a bit of a patchwork quilt: I first published it in summer 2022 after a trip to both cities, and I’ve gradually added to it over the past couple of years because of three intervening trips to Bruges. In that time I’ve uncovered more and more interesting places to eat, and gradually fleshed out that side of things. By contrast, the Ghent half of it looked a tad neglected.
Anyway, I’ve just come back from spending the best part of a week across both cities and rather than update the 2022 guide again, making it somewhere between Trigger’s broom and Frankenstein’s monster, I’m publishing a new 2024 version. Where the recommendation dates from a couple of years ago I’ve tried to make that clear, and where it’s more recent I’ve said so. Where possible that means new text, which means that this supersedes my previous guides to both cities.
As I said in my 2022 guide, both cities are very easy to get to – Ghent is half an hour from Brussels, Bruges an hour. Both are on the same train line, which makes them easy to do for a two centre holiday. Yet although both cities are gorgeous, both well worth your time, they’re surprisingly different with different things to recommend about them.
Of the two, Bruges is prettier and more chocolate-boxy, all absurdly beautiful buildings, canals and bridges. It’s lovely in summer but arguably lovelier still in winter when the place has a brooding splendour and the snug comfort of those brown pubs truly comes into its own. I’ve taken to going there at the start of the year when the doors are still bedecked with garlands and Christmas beers are on tap everywhere. It is especially gorgeous then.
And if your focus is more on beer, Bruges is the place to go because it boasts possibly the best pub in the whole wide world: more on that shortly. I think its dining scene was possibly the thing that lagged behind, but even in the short time I’ve been going there it feels like the range of restaurants has expanded and moved beyond moules joints and tourist-pleasers.
Ghent on the other hand is larger in every way. It still has the canals and the splendour, but on a bigger scale – bigger buildings, wider bridges, grander squares. But it also has a more modern edge. Part of that is down to the university but there’s also a far bigger retail scene, more craft beer options rather than just the traditional Belgian stuff, public transport, trams and, I would say, a range of inventive places in which to dine.
But that’s not all. For me Ghent has a better coffee scene, a couple of excellent galleries and museums and a lot of street art – the tourist office even does a street art map, and you can spend a very enjoyable afternoon ambling from one piece to the next.
Having done both cities in a week, I still find it difficult to pick a favourite. Bruges probably edges it, though I wish I could pick up a few Ghent restaurants and drop them in Bruges (Bruges is a trickier place to get a great light lunch, for instance). But then if I could move the Little Bear to Ghent, the choice between the two would be almost impossible.
The only other thing to say is that in previous guides I’ve said Bruges was more touristy than Ghent: that may have been true in the past but the huge quantities of guided tours I saw in the latter suggest that’s no longer necessarily the case.
Bruges
Where to eat
1. Bij Koen en Marijke (In’t Nieuw Museum)
One of the highlights of my January 2025 visit, Bij Koen en Marijke (it’s still referred to as In’t Nieuw Museum in some places, so I’ve used both in the heading) is a magical restaurant which does a handful of things absolutely brilliantly.
Run by married couple Koen and Marijke, both of them larger than life and exceptional at service, it has a 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 their own 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 glowed 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, really good. We were brought a little plank of home-cured coppa while we made up our mind what to eat and it was as good as any I’ve had, with what felt like accents of juniper and rosemary. A full charcuterie selection showcased gorgeous pancetta and a corking fennel salami, and our other starter – plump home made fennel sausages with the restaurant’s home made 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 possibly the best piece of meat I can remember eating, beautifully marbled, perfectly buttery, medium rare and very, 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 October 2025 visit, mostly because they aren’t open Saturdays. But in the meantime, something lovely 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 a lovely meal there. 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?
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 2025 discovery, 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 absolutely 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, completely 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. If I have a better sandwich than that in 2025 I shall be very surprised. By this 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 don’t want to dust off superlatives so early in the New Year, 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 brilliantly 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 in 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 superb.
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, Franco Belge or ‘T Hof van Beroep – 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 most recent 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 quite 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, brilliantly, 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 quite as good, was still respectable.
And the mains went down a treat: my half roast chicken came slathered in a sauce singing with plenty of 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 quite 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. 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.
Bruut is in a handsome building next to an absurdly beautiful bridge overlooking the canal, and inside it’s all rather convivial – leather chairs, fetching tiled floors and exposed light fittings. But there are a few al fresco tables by the side of the bridge with a gorgeous view, and that’s where I sat when I had lunch there in 2022, one of my meals of that year. Chef Bruno Timperman offers a no-choice, no-substitutions set menu for lunch or dinner and comes out to introduce and talk through many of the dishes himself. And put simply, the man is a wizard: I don’t normally talk about chefs in my blog but this is all very much in his image and it’s very much his show.
Nothing I ate was short of dazzling, and there were almost too many highlights to mention, but a steak tartare made simply with high-grade beef, salt and milk to draw out all the flavour was a tender, mineral miracle. A pre-lunch nibble of prawns, cooked whole and dusted with a vivid raspberry powder was like nothing I’ve eaten. And our dessert, cherries halved, hollowed and filled with rose-coloured chocolate, topped with discs of elderflower jelly and sitting in a cherry gazpacho dotted with cherry balsamic, has stayed in my memory ever since. My one regret was not taking up the wine pairing – although in my defence it was only lunchtime, and the beer list had excellent lambics on it which made for an original alternative.
I made a repeat visit in January 2023 for dinner and sampled the full whistles and bells experience, although with no booze because I was a little below par. Not everything worked – a beautiful piece of cod wrapped in crispy nori and topped with caviar was submerged under an icky spooge of what Bruno called “plankton sauce” and wasn’t quite my bag – but he served the most tender pigeon I’ve ever eaten, with a pigeon confit ragu wrapped up in a leaf on the side, an astonishing scallop with a Belgian take on XO sauce and a poached pear with yoghurt parfait which made a tried and tested staple seem fresh and new.
More classic and formal and a little less cutting edge, Assiette Blanche has an attractive wood-panelled dining room and every meal I’ve had there has hit the spot with unerring precision. They have a set menu or an à la carte in the evening, although you can sort of switch between the two. It’s old school, but not fussy, and it’s always packed with customers, many of whom seem to be regulars.
The food matches the room. The dishes here are generous – robust but not clumsy, but certainly not a fiddly-plated exercise in nouvelle nonsense. On my most recent visit in January 2024 I was really impressed with the standard, loving a carpaccio of scallops with cauliflower couscous, hulking wedges of black pudding with apple, pickled beetroot and little dabs of foie creme and a beautiful sabayon with blood orange.
They also do a more economical set menu at lunchtime which is both delicious and excellent value, and comes highly recommended. And if you want to try a Dame Blanche – the ubiquitous Belgian dessert of vanilla ice cream and chocolate sauce – you won’t find one better than the one on offer at Assiette Blanche.
Más is only open evenings Wednesday to Saturday, 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 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 simply brilliant, 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 a really happy return to Más again 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 exquisite. 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 Màs 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 in my October 2025 visit, but am determined to return when I am back in the city early next year. That said, the team behind Màs opens a new Japanese small plates restaurant called Shibuya right next door in December, so what to do? I might just have to eat at both.
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 really 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 is good the beer list, including some excellent sours from Dust Blending, matches 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 quite 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, is still almost worth a visit in its own right.
You might think it’s a little meh to have pizza in Bruges, and you might be right. But I have a soft spot for Amuni, and if you want somewhere for a good lightish lunch that isn’t a moules frites place I think it’s a handy restaurant to know about.
Just next to the Burg it’s a stylish space which does excellent pizza – although my favourite thing there was the vitello tonnato. We foolishly ordered it to share back in 2022 and returning in March 2024 I was dead set on having my own portion, only to find they’d sold out. A nicely done scamorza and ‘nduja bruschetta went some way to making amends. Another reason Amuni is worth having in your back pocket is that if you find yourself in Bruges on a Sunday, when nearly all restaurants seem to be closed, it will sort you out.
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 the 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 (whatever that is), 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 a la carte next time. Not only is the wine list great, and the aperitif cocktail equally so, but the drinks list also contains 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 brilliant. 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.
The one gap that always existed in my Bruges repertoire was the traditional Belgian restaurant. I went to Gran Kaffee de Passage and found it hit and miss, the interior better than the food. My friend Dave raves about the moules at Brasserie Cambrinus, though I’m yet to try them. But on my trip in March 2024 I had a booking for sixteen at Brasserie Raymond, and I came away very impressed with the place. It had been recommended to me over a year ago, by the couple at the next table sitting outside De Windmolen 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 absolutely 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. And 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.
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 quite 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 distant Iberian 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 brilliantly, 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.
On my most recent 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, this is a thing it turns out: servers wander the restaurant with trays of extra ribs and tongs, dishing more up on request. This might surprise regular readers, but even I can see the appeal of that.
So we nearly booked at Mozart but my Bruges mole Jezza, who loves the city so much he moved there from London and maintains the excellent Bruges Beer Guide, 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 brilliant 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.
For an actual light 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, a likeable street with a scattering of tasteful boutiques, and it offers a menu which is sort of Le Pain Quotidien but independent. So there’s lots of lovely 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.
The thing my Bruges guide always lacked, with the exception of Kottee Kaffee, was places to go for a light lunch. Not a light three course lunch, or a set menu, but a properly light lunch. 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 (there’s also a brunch place people rave about called That’s Toast, but in truth I’ve never been able to get past the name).
Sanseveria was just round the corner from my hotel, and I absolutely loved it. It’s small and cosy and yes, it only really does bagels. But beyond that the number of variations on that theme is quite impressive, with good options for vegetarians and vegans. I think bagels have fallen out of fashion somewhat in the U.K. (which is a shame, because I used to love eating them at the Santa Fe Coffee Company in Bracknell, of all places), 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.
So that’s lunch in Bruges sorted in future. Oh, and you can book online which gives you one less thing to worry about in terms of getting a table. I went back, in October 2025, for a solo lunch and had exactly the same thing all over again. They’ve still got it.
It’s criminal, really, to wait this long in the city guide to introduce the best pub in the entire world. Sorry about that.
The Little Bear is the Belgian pub elevated to its ultimate form, a welcoming little place with a great selection on tap and an eye-wateringly huge and brilliant list of bottled beers, including many Belgian breweries I’d never heard of and a “vintage” section which gave you the chance to try dark beers and lambics which had been properly cared for across the best part of a decade. My favourite drink on their list was an aged imperial stout, a Cuvée Delphine from 2013 by De Struise which has the kind of depth and complexity the uninitiated wouldn’t necessarily associate with beer.
But more than the impressive selection, it just felt like the perfect place to stop, drink, eavesdrop, people-watch and potentially get into random conversations. The middle room – complete with plaque to original Belgian beer spod Michael Jackson (not that one, a different one) – was nice, but the front room was where you wanted to be, at a table with your favourite person, making inroads into that excellent list, in no hurry to be anywhere else. It reminded me of the Retreat 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 the Retreat of years gone by.
But either way, whether you were there as a pair or, as I’ve experienced several times, in a big raucous group of beer obsessives, all diving into the depths of the gigantic beer list, congratulating one another on their choices and swapping anecdotes and in jokes, it is for me the epicentre of Bruges, and absolutely not to be missed.
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 knew because it’s not a pub, it’s the pub, and once you go you will compare everywhere else to it, in some way; 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.
It opens at 4pm and, happily, it’s open on Sundays when so little of Bruges is. And it doesn’t have lock-ins per se, but I have no idea when it really closes. I’ve certainly never been the last to leave, which is a life goal to keep 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 glow of the windows and thought what the fuck are we doing? We went back in for one last nightcap.
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. That’s what de garre means – the alley. It feels completely hidden away, and its opening hours are a little erratic: on some of my trips to Bruges they’ve just been closed the whole time, off on holidays which never seem to be announced in advance, anywhere.
But if you do stop by, and they are open, and you can grab yourself a table on any of their three floors, finding your way up the steep stairs, you are rewarded with a drinking experience quite 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, that is 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 glowing 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.
From hearing Zoë talk about Café Rose Red I was expecting to like it a lot, and I wasn’t disappointed. A rather attractive room, all red walls and roses hanging from the ceiling, it had a decent if not incredible beer list and an interesting range of options on tap. I’d heard good things about the food and so we ordered a few bits and pieces to graze on.
The assorted cheese and charcuterie was surprisingly disappointing, but I think the trick is to go for dishes that the kitchen has cooked rather than simply dished up: the kibbeling – battered chunks of fish with a mild, soothing tartare sauce – was the equal of any similar dish I’ve had in Andalusia. This is also the place to try Orval, one of Belgium’s signature Trappist beers, and Rose Red’s list has multiple vintages if you want to be super fancy.
My understanding is that in the last few years Rose Red has moved from being a bar more to being a hotel restaurant so reservations are increasingly required if you want to try it out. It’s also worth noting that following a recent refurb they now have a very nice outside space – something many Bruges beer places lack – in an attractive internal courtyard.
De Kelk, closer to town than Lion Belge and on the other side of the road from Cherry Picker, further down this guide, is quite unlike 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 cracking 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.
I’ve 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’s not until my most recent trip in October 2025 that I finally managed to drink there. It’s hard to imagine a more welcoming vision than the light shining out through those scarlet doors, though I imagine its eponymous terrace would be a marvellous 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 marvellous time and my Brugse Zot on draft was a positive joy. I had been missing out on previous visits, I decided.
The landlord and landlady, another husband and wife team, were really welcoming and 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 reasonably well: bitterballen were crisp-shelled and enjoyable, kibbeling was good, if not as good as Rose Red’s version. Only the chicken satay skewers were slightly swervable, the peanut sauce rather good but the chicken itself bouncy and homogeneous.
Nevertheless I loved Cafe Terrastje and, if it’s open, 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.
Cafe Terrastje Genthof 45, Brugge
6. Bernie’s Beer Bar
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 that means that 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, the next entry on this list. 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?
Dave and I faced this exact dilemma when we walked into the city with our suitcases, fresh off the train from Brussels Midi, keen for a sharpener before checking into our B&B. Fortunately Jezza’s excellent Bruges Beer Guide came to the rescue, recommending Bernie’s Beer Bar, a spot off the Zand, the large square with the concert hall at one end where all the buses depart from.
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 Mann Brewery – and so my first beer of the trip was their iconic Straffe Hendrik Tripel. 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.
Overall, Bernie’s Beer Bar struck me as better than it needed to be, and after a somewhat strong beer and a sharing portion of keesballen we were fortified and ready to start exploring the city. Oh, and if you do want to pair Bernie’s Beer Bar with pre or post lunch drinks, it’s a short stroll from TouGou.
De Windmolen, out past De Kelk at the edge of the city and a stone’s throw from the windmills from which it takes its name, isn’t a place for beer purists. It’s sort of part-pub, part day café and most days it closes at 8pm. The inside is pleasingly eccentric: when we went this month one table was taken up by a very competitive-looking card game. The beer list tends to bottled triples, although they do have Brugse Zot on tap which never disappoints.
But for me it’s a special place – especially when I visited in October 2022, and could sit outside, coatless, while the back of my neck was gently baked by the completely unseasonal autumn sunshine. Worth a stop, even if only for the one.
De Windmolen Carmersstraat 135, Brugge
8. Dees Specialty Coffee
There are four other Bruges coffee places in this guide, garnered over the course of going to the city many times over several years. And they’re all good in some ways, less good in others. They’re either small, or rammed, or out of town, or not totally 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 paraphernalia. I became really attached to the place, and quite 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 went back on my final morning, with half an hour to spare before the Uber to the train station, and had one last latte. I did not ask for dairy.
Bruges has lots of pretty patisseries where the priorities are the cakes and pastries and the coffee, though perfectly pleasant, plays second fiddle. Far better, in a little square with some outside space, was Vero Caffè. It also sells excellent squidgy brownies, exactly as you would like them, so it gets my vote. They were packed to the rafters when I returned in January 2024 but still doing superlative coffee – along with a decent carrot cake and sublime dark, fudgy chocolate cake.
Come for the music, stay for the atmosphere! is the slogan of this record shop in the east of the city. Come for the music stay for the coffee, more like, because it served 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 needs to be. Make sure you have Shazam installed on your phone before you go to Cherry Picker, because you will end up using it.
After the boozy lunch at Cuvee in March 2024, most of our party wandered off to De Garre, one of their favourites, to get back on the beer. But a small splinter group of us, including me, beetled off to Cherry Picker because I couldn’t imagine a trip to Bruges where I didn’t pass at least half an hour there drinking coffee and daydreaming that I lived just round the corner. As always, it was blissful.
Naturally when I visited in January 2025 I made a beeline for Cherry Picker and it was, again, excellent. But on this trip I found out why, because I complimented the chap on the coffee and he told my that they bought it in from Dees, above on the list. Makes perfect sense. So of course I went back again in October, 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.
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) with their over-reliance on chipboard. The coffee was pretty good, the pastries spot on, the service friendly and speedy.
I’ve been back on subsequent 2024 visits and if it isn’t Bruges’ best coffee it might 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.
The final spot on my guide for coffee used to be filled by a place called Cafune, which subsequently changed its name to We Are Coffee Makers. I loved their coffee, but they were intensely frustrating: they couldn’t decide on a name, or when they were or weren’t open, and sometimes it felt like they didn’t want to be open at all. So I wasn’t surprised, hugely, when I got to Bruges in October 2025 and found they had closed for good. 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 a little 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, the final spot in my guide went to a place discovered by Dave on our final morning in the city, AVI ’38. 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 chairs were Tolix, the walls racing green metro tiles, the overall look confusing. Dave, I should add, loved it: he also 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. And actually, I think he might be right: it was a really silky, very enjoyable latte. And 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, for just one coffee in Bruges, I would still pick Dees but I do think that if you’re a coffee purist, AVI ’38 might well serve the single best espresso or latte you’ll have on your trip. Their Instagram says they plan to open a second branch in Ghent, a fitting segue into the second half of this guide. They’ll fit in well there.
AVI ’38 Specialty Coffee Bar Niklaas Desparsstraat 8, Brugge https://avi38.be
Ghent
1. Roots
Roots was one of my favourite finds of last month’s trip to Ghent, a small and exceptionally tasteful restaurant in the Patershol district, possibly the prettiest part of the city. It’s a really beautiful space, the staff speak the kind of English that made me ashamed of my nonexistent Dutch and the lunch menu, a crazy forty-five or fifty-nine Euros for three or four courses, is an utter bargain.
I loved everything I had on a beautiful fish-led menu to the point where it was difficult to single anything out. But a langoustine tartare served on little lozenges of toasted brioche, like an open sando, was simply terrific. So was deft and delicate sea bass with potatoes and a leaf called bulls blood, which was a new one on me. But even better was a precisely cooked piece of ling with whey, draped in lardo, crowned with broccoli and striped with an intense, deep sauce.
Throw in an exemplary cheeseboard and a dessert of pear, chocolate ganache, chicory and caramel and you have as good a lunch as I can remember in Belgium. The fact that the room is so gorgeous was just the icing on the cake, as was the presence of a very agreeable-looking courtyard for the summer months. When I go back I’ll have dinner there and do it properly, but it will have to go some to top this magnificent first impression.
Boris & Maurice was the Ghent restaurant I expected to adore, but merely came away really liking. It’s in Sint Amandsberg, a suburb out to the east a short bus hop away, in an area which is resolutely for locals and not tourists. In case you’re wondering, that’s a good thing: I loved the fact that the wait staff told us they didn’t have any English language menus, not realising that if anything that was a draw rather than a disincentive.
It is – as seems par for the course with Ghent restaurants – an impossibly stylish place full of impossibly stylish people, and if we got the least appealing table, nearest to the door, it merely proved to me that they had no intention of lowering their standards. Fair play to them for that. The restaurant has connections to a place, now long closed, called Bodo that I ate at and loved in 2018, and the menu is every bit as tempting as Bodo’s was: not masses of options, just a handful of snacks, three starters, mains and desserts and a cheeseboard to choose from.
Much of what I had was gorgeous, from bone marrow with gremolata and sourdough toast to a veal tartare with anchovy tapenade and capers, all the way through to a spot-on onglet with béarnaise, frites and something which was referred to as “spicy salad” (it wasn’t, really). All that makes the menu sound very robust and meat focused, which is unfair to the place because there was also white asparagus, hake with brandade, sea bass carpaccio with fennel vinaigrette. I just wasn’t in that mood when I went there, so I can’t tell you about those.
What I can say is that my dessert – rhubarb on crushed sablé Breton, punctuated with citrus and moated with crème anglaise, an upside-down crumble – was one of the nicest things I ate all week, and a dish I thought about a fair few times the next day. Other than that I found Boris & Maurice more amiable than exceptional, but I’d still go back. Especially because, as you’ll see shortly, it’s a brief walk from the most amazing bar.
Although Aperto Chiuso has been on my Ghent to do list for some time, I only finally managed to tick it off last month. It was open on Monday evenings, which many Ghent restaurants appear not to be, and the dining room was packed when we took our table at half seven. It’s on the beautifully named Sleepstraat, which is the road where Ghent stops being pretty and starts feeling gritty, and I’ve noticed it before because of the front half of a Fiat 500 gazing out of the window.
Inside the dining room is all dark muted tones – I love the picture of the Last Supper on one wall, looking down on the diners – and the menu looks a darned sight more authentic than many Italian restaurants you find both in the U.K. and elsewhere in Europe. Interestingly it offers antipasti, starters and desserts yet all but one of the main courses were pasta dishes – almost no secondi here, and no pizza.
Everything we tried was utterly glorious, offering that comfort which Italian food brings quite unlike any other. It was a drizzly night, I felt a bit jaded after three consecutive evenings of boozing on Belgian beer, and Aperto Chiuso turned out to be exactly what I needed. Bruschetta came as little canapés topped with tomato and mozzarella, red pesto, anchovy butter. Burrata, so often derided in the U.K., was superb with blood orange, toasted hazelnuts and coriander seeds and an olive oil infused with lavender and honey.
And then my main course was the best spaghetti carbonara I’ve ever had – not a white creamy blob of blandness but a bundle of beautifully al dente, top quality pasta hugged by a a thick, mollifying sauce of egg, bacon, parmesan and nothing else. Honestly, it was as close to a panacea as I’ve ever found in a bowl, and when I’m in Ghent again I will eat it again. All that and a stonking house red for a ridiculous four Euros a glass: I wandered back down Sleepstraat well-fed, full of carbs and ready for a little sleep of my own.
Still my favourite place in Ghent for traditional Belgian food, De Rechters is a contemporary-looking restaurant which is far better than it needs to be given its plum spot next to St Bavo’s Cathedral. When I visited in 2022, I got to sit outside in the sunshine and it made a good meal, if anything, even better. We drank Orval, and Zoë pointed out to me that her beer and mine were bottled on different days, which explained why mine was fizzier than hers: I love it when she goes full Raymond Babbitt about beer like that.
Never having had moules in Belgium – I know, such an oversight – I had some as a starter, cooked simply with thyme and they were plump and fragrant. But next time I’ll go the whole hog and have them as a main with garlic and cream, which for me is the only way really to eat moules, dipping your bread and frites into the sauce until you are truly replete.
The frites, incidentally, were a bit wan on that visit – which is a shame, because frites are something Belgium does better than practically anybody. But the stoverij, beer slow-cooked in beer until the whole thing is a symphony of dark brown, almost-sweet ambrosia, is worth the price of admission alone. You can get frites anywhere but beef like that requires patience and skill, both of which De Rechters has in abundance.
STEK, in between the centre and Sint Pieters train station, is a lovely little cafe and a perfect spot for brunch, a meal which Ghent, in my experience, does better than Bruges. On a previous visit in the summer I sat out on their gorgeous terrace and enjoyed an exemplary avocado toast with crispy bacon, a splendid latte and a great dose of people watching.
This time around the less clement weather meant I could sample their indoors, a very tasteful space full of cool people and foliage – not necessarily in that order – and very friendly and attentive service. The coffee was as good as I recalled, the fresh lemonade with ginger was a sinus-tickling treat and the lunch game was, if anything, at a higher level than before. I had a potato salad with hot honey smoked salmon, caramelised onions, yoghurt dressing and pistachios which felt relatively virtuous while tasting a little sinful. I got there just before noon and grabbed pretty much the only table which wasn’t either occupied or reserved, so it might be making a lunch reservation online if you fancy giving STEK a go.
I really loved Take Five when I visited Ghent in 2022, and on last month’s visit I was there every morning without fail for a latte, to sit inside at those big windows and enjoy what could feel like Ghent’s single biggest sun trap. The coffee is exceptional, the service is brilliant and they play effortlessly cool jazz – as you’d expect from the name – to soundtrack the start of your morning. The pain au chocolat from Kultur next door are so good that I’ve never tried Take Five’s food, but if it’s as good as their coffee it would be a treat indeed.
I follow Take Five on Instagram and there’s something about some places you visit on holiday that means you feel invested in them long after you have headed home with a heavy heart. So when I heard that Take Five had been so successful that they’d expanded and taken a second site across the city, I was as happy for them as I would have been any Reading-based business. But the original branch on Voldersstraat, with its beautiful tiled floor and its soothing, sophisticated atmosphere, will always be my first port of call.
According to their website, Café Labath was the very first third wave coffee joint in Ghent, opening twelve years ago. And I felt like I could sense that when I stopped there for a latte, that this was a place that didn’t feel the need to try too hard, that was comfortable in its own skin, knew what it was about and had nothing to prove. That showed too in the beautiful space they had created, all parquet floor and Ercol-style chairs, making best use of the corner plot and the huge windows to allow the very best people-watching experience. I loved the way that, as with Take Five, the public seating outside had been worked into the space, giving multiple options for al fresco drinking in better weather.
If anything, the less calculated interior led me to underestimate the coffee, but when my latte – ordered through a QR code at the table with no need to queue – turned up it was creditable. I had only stopped at Labath on the off chance to grab a quick shot of caffeination before lunch in the area, but when I return to Ghent I plan to have a far more leisurely drink there.
Clouds In My Coffee is one of the most stylish cafés I’ve seen in over a decade of going to Europe and seeking these places out. Quite aside from the Carly Simon reference, which manages not to be naff, the inside is truly gorgeous, like something out of Living Etc. From the street it looks small (and is surprisingly hard to find) but through the back is a wonderfully light, airy extension and beyond that another of those idyllic secret gardens that Ghent cafés seem to all have up their sleeves.
Did I want a coffee? Absolutely. Was my latte delicious? Of course it was. Did I look at the menu and wonder if it was too early for an Aperol Spritz? You bet I did. And did I feel like I was soaking up design tips for the duration of my visit? Yes, along with thinking Why doesn’t Reading have anywhere like this? The only drawback is that Clouds In My Coffee is the epitome of the best house on a bad street: Dampoort, where it lives, is an up and coming part of Ghent that, from my visit, has more upping and coming to do (the cafe’s website calls it a “multicolour fuse”, which I think is nicely poetic). The walk there from the tram stop involved walking through an Aldi car park and, for an awful moment, I thought I’d wandered through a wormhole in space and found myself on the outskirts of Basingstoke. Still worth a visit though, if only to go somewhere that fitted in about as much as I did.
On my first visit to Ghent, at the tail end of autumn 2018, I rather liked Het Waterhuis aan de Beerkant, a tall building by the canal (aren’t they all?) with rooms across several floors: the room right at the top reminded me of mid-90s boho drinking culture in a way which somehow summoned up memories of Bar Iguana. But it wasn’t until I went back on a hot July afternoon in 2022 that I really got what the fuss was about – sitting at a sunny table, overlooking the canal, surrounded by other afternoon revellers of all shapes and sizes it was an extremely agreeable place to while away a few hours and sink a tall, cold Brugse Zot on draft. We don’t have a word, really, for what time spent like that is like but I believe the Dutch describe it as gezellig.
There are two very traditional beer places in Ghent with enormous lists, the kind of places CAMRA types hit up on a tour of the city. One is Trollkelder, which I’ve never really taken to – I had a drink outside it once but was faintly perturbed by the models of trolls in the window, glaring at you as you sip your beer. But Dulle Griet, named after a character called Mad Meg from Flemish folklore, was more my sort of thing.
On previous visits I’ve had a drink outside in the front room and enjoyed the idiosyncratic decor: just look at all the random shit hanging from the ceiling. But I now realise that didn’t really do it justice, and on my most recent trip we had a few drinks there in the evening, sitting in a little booth out back, admiring the way any good Belgian bar covers every inch of wall space with signs, mirrors and memorabilia from the country’s seemingly limitless roster of breweries.
The beer list is indeed extensive – around 500 different options, apparently – and so intimidating that it makes the Little Bear’s look like a pamphlet. Prices are elevated compared to their neighbours in Bruges too, with many of the beers a few Euros more expensive (in fairness I’ve never settled up at the Little Bear without thinking is that all?), but I’d say it’s worth it for the experience. I was there on a Thursday night when the place was rammed, and when I gave up my plum spot left before closing time, knowing that I had packing and an early checkout in my future, I felt something of a wrench.
Oh, and however hungry you are, don’t order the cheese. I don’t know what that stuff is, but it’s not cheese in any meaningful sense.
Gitane remains my favourite bar in Ghent, and one of my favourite bars in the whole wide world. When I went to Ghent in 2018 I fell completely in love with it, although when I returned in 2022 it was in the summer, the whole world was sitting outside and being at the only occupied table indoors felt a little bit forlorn and neglected.
Well, I don’t know why I thought that, because returning last month I was reminded of just what a wonderful place it is. It’s all panelled walls and red banquettes – I know I overuse the word “conspiratorial” to describe places like this, but I’m yet to find a better word. It’s louche without being sleazy, dimly lit without being dingy, and I like it a great deal. It helps that the beer list is good too – a model of pared-down focus compared to the bloat of places like Dulle Griet, but with a great yet compact selection including options from less widely seen breweries like Brouwcompagnie Rolling Hills and the always excellent De Leite.
When I booked a table at Boris & Maurice, in Sint Amandsberg, I thought it would be nice to have a pre-dinner drink in the area. And the only thing I could find that was suitable, really, was a bar just over five minutes away called Django. We’ll go there, I thought. How bad can it be? And I love it when this happens, because it was the find of the holiday.
It was so louche, so hip, so suitable for nighthawks that it made Gitane look like the Hope Tap. From the red lighting to the formica topped tables, from the leather booths out back to the neon sign on the wall, from the wood-panelled bar to the textured concrete ceiling with a mirrorball hanging from it, it was an interiors nut’s Christmasses all come at once. It even has an upstairs balcony floor, nearer that mirrorball, where you can look down on all the ineffable coolness below. Why had I never heard anybody talking about this place, or ever seen a review anywhere? It was almost the perfect bar.
All it needed was great drinks. Except it transpired that they had those too, with brilliant Belgian pale Ouwen Duiker and iconic Tripel Karmeliet both on draft. The barman even apologised for bringing the latter in the wrong glass, something you would only ever hear in Belgium. So really all it needed was great food – but the local sausage with mustard, yours for three Euros, was coarse and unbelievably delicious. To think people in the U.K. get all excited about a packet of Tayto: they must be laughing at us on the continent. And although I didn’t get to try it Django also did a very attractive range of pizzas – just looking at the menu made me want to cancel my dinner plans.
Next time I go to Ghent I will spend a whole evening here, although if I do I may be sorely tempted to go the whole hog and move to Sint Amandsberg. I wonder if Ghent needs an itinerant restaurant blogger?
HAL 16 is the craft beer capital of Ghent, a combination of food hall and tap room for local Dok Brewing out in the docklands, about ten minutes from the centre by bus or twenty on foot. It is honestly one of my favourite places in Ghent and since discovering it I’ve never visited the city without giving it a try. My first visit was in January 2019, when I think it had just opened, but it and the complex around it have gone from strength to strength on every successive visit.
I turned up on a Wednesday evening around 6 o’clock after buying some beer at the excellent De Hopduvel just around the corner, and the place began to fill up almost immediately after, the long tables being taken by group after group of young, cool, happy urbanites. None of them were saying dreary stuff like “but it’s a school night”, and they were probably drawn by the colossal range of beer on offer. Thirty lines on keg, many of them by Dok Brewing but with a number of guest beers including stuff you just wouldn’t otherwise see. On my most recent visit I got to try a sharp, peachy sour by tiny Trial & Ale Brewing, from Edmonton, Alberta, and I really loved it.
But the booze isn’t the only draw, because HAL 16 also has three terrific food traders to make sure you stick around. One, Officina Raffaelli, does pizza, pasta and antipasti and the stuff I’ve had from them has been decent. A second does burgers, and I’m sure they’re excellent, although I’ve never tried one. But the reason for that is that the third trader, RØK, does some of the best barbecue I’ve ever eaten – better than anything in the U.K., and for my money better than Copenhagen’s Warpigs. In the past I’ve raved about their pork chop, rhapsodised about their lamb neck.
But on this trip, although I liked my confit duck leg and absolutely adored Zoë’s beef rib, smoked for 10 hours, the standout dish was a vegetarian one – cauliflower, brick-red and sticky with a savoury marinade, its perimeter blackened and crispy from the grill, the whole plate festooned with a zigzag of curry mayo. Even writing this makes me hungry and sad because we only ordered one dish of it, shared it between two and then moved on somewhere else. This is how you get people to become vegetarian, by offering something this good so everyone wants their own, reluctantly sharing some beef rib into the bargain just to keep up appearances.
Gruut is the city centre’s only working brewery. It’s far more central than Dok Brewing and far more trad – they serve an amber ale, a blonde beer, a wheat beer, a brown ale and a triple and that’s it, no sours or lambics or more esoteric stuff. And they have a rich brewing heritage – their little booklet shows you that founder Annick De Splenter, who began the business in 2009, comes from a veritable family tree of Belgian brewing expertise.
So it might not surprise you to hear that it’s a really lovely, quirky and slightly eccentric place to while away some time. I tried their amber ale, which I really enjoyed, on a quiet weekday afternoon when the weather wasn’t quite nice enough to take advantage of their outside seating: a British delegation, seemingly from CAMRA, were camped outside before 2pm waiting for the place to open and had no such qualms. It’s a lovely place and I could happily have dallied there longer but I had places to go, food to eat, other beers to drink and, ultimately, a guide to write. Plus they charge you fifty cents to use the loo, according to one of the signs, and who carries cash any more?
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