What are the most delicious foods, refreshing drinks, coolest cafés and intriguing restaurants in Brussels now? Here are some that recently caught the eye of our food and drink expert.
Restaurant: Entropy
My stock of superlative words is quickly exhausted by Entropy’s cuisine végétale. The sophistication of the dishes, the variety and freshness of the ingredients, the beverage pairings, the atmosphere and perfect service…I cannot understand why it has not yet earned a Michelin star.
Let’s be clear about the sophistication. It means that each part of a dish is independently prepared and then assembled in a gastronomic combination that enhances each component’s taste, using aromas, scents, temperature, texture and visual presentation.
Entropy Restaurant
The restaurant has an astonishingly creative menu of four to seven vegetarian dishes, and each dish is named after a theme, such as naturality, resilience, passion, development and souvenir. The starters are similarly designed around the four elements of water, air, fire and earth. While one might expect the fire starter to be spicy, co-founder and chef Elliott Van de Velde instead plays with charred and charcoal aromas.
The chef’s creative and intuitive work is further enhanced by its presentation on beautiful ceramics by Studio-Mattes (Ghent). “You buy art,” Van de Velde says. It also summarises his cuisine style.
Entropy’s cuisine is advertised to be 90% local and 95% vegetable-based, with some dishes containing very little gluten or dairy. The restaurant works closely with three local farms to source their vegetables and a constellation of small and local producers no more than 80 kilometres away (except the wine).
For a gastronomic restaurant, Entropy’s price is fair. I suggest their spécialité fromagère – you won’t regret it. Like all dishes, you can accompany it with carefully chosen natural wines, Brussels Craft Sake (see below) or a home-made non-alcoholic drink as sophisticated as the food menu and made with, among other things, plants and flowers from the restaurant’s urban garden.
The restaurant was a byproduct of a social project to fight food waste, and the team still provides 120-150 meals cooked with unsold produce to social associations. What’s even more incredible is its location: right in the centre of town on Place Saint-Géry.
Entropy Place Saint-Géry 22, 1000 Brussels
Drink: Brussels Craft Sake
Ex-IT consultant Laurent Dejaer became enamoured with sake after visiting Japan in 2018, and after attending a sake fair, decided to make a Belgian version of the Japanese rice wine. This summer he began selling to premium restaurants including Entropy Savage/Goods, Kamo, Old Boy, Le Tournant and Bouchéry.
Brussels Craft Sake
Premium sake is made from four basic ingredients: water, rice, yeast and koji-kin. The latter is a mould – aspergillus oryzae – which produces koji (ferments) when cultivated with rice and breaks down the rice’s starch into fermentable sugars. Steamed rice, hoki, water and yeast are then fermented through several stages that can last up to a month, after which the mix is pressed, filtered and blended.
Dejaer uses traditional recipes to produce his sake with two different yeasts and organic round rice from Italy, the same used to cook risotto.
A key factor in sake quality is the level the rice grain polishing. Brussels Craft Sake’s basic rice is polished at 90%, creating a very fine sake with fruity and floral aromas and 14-14.5% alcohol content. It has low residual sugar – as much as a dry white wine – but is less acidic.
Brussels Craft Sake has four different sakes, with labels that draw inspiration from Katsushika Hokusai’s sketchbooks. Two are classics: the ‘dragonfly’ Junmai Nama is unpasteurised and dry; the ‘yellow frog’ Junmai Nama Chozo is medium dry and pasteurised in the bottle.
His third, the ‘green frog’ Junami Nama is macerated with Belgium’s thee gallium odoratum plant, or sweet woodruff, creating a perfumed, soft sake, with an aroma of tonka bean. His fourth, the ‘pink frog’ Junami Nama, is also a fusion drink: macerated with raspberry, giving it a distinctive dark pink colour and a powerful scent.
“I sell to innovative restaurants,” Dejaer explains. He is now working on more sake fusion flavours, using ingredients such as fig leaf and elderflower.
Café: Goods
Goods is hipster-foodie playground that started during the COVID pandemic when Louis Leysen turned his rotisserie KipKot at the corner of Place Saint-Boniface and Rue de la Paix in Ixelles into a mostly vegetarian culinary destination called Savage and put ex-San Ghent chef Joel Rammelsberg in the kitchen.
Savage, launched in 2022, quickly earned a Gault & Millau award and proved so successful it expanded across the street. Last year, it partnered with pastry chef Alice Jaroszuk to create a bakery-grocery fusion called Goods.
Goods
In a gentrified area that already hosts cafes and excellent bakeries, Goods offers much, much more than a cappuccino or croissant. It has exceptional pastries, including brioche crème brûlée (a must!), cacio e pepe or kimchi stuffed croissants and pain au chocolat with Jerusalem artichoke cream.
Goods is part of the Savage ecosystem, so the bakery is also part grocery shop where you can buy homemade jars of pickles, spicy peanut butter, lacto-fermented veggies, chilli, kimchi and even homemade broths. The most amazing product might be garum: fermented fish juice.
Drinks include softs like Rish kombucha, Chouette Canette, zero-alcohol botanical drinks from Sobr, a great selection of Brussels craft beers, Brussels craft saké (see separate article) and a small selection of natural wines. The latter include Flat Tire, a blouge (i.e. made from white and red grapes) from Sancerre made by Savage’s talented sommeliers.
Goods 25, Rue de la Paix 1050 Ixelles
Food: Chilli
Traditional Belgian cuisine is anything but spicy. Thanks to globalisation and evolving food habits, however, it’s now possible to buy chilli made in Belgium - and Brussels hosts four chilli sauce manufacturers.
The hottest manufacturer is SWET, which sources most of its chilli peppers from BIGH, an aquaponic farm on the rooftop of Anderlecht’s slaughterhouse. SWET chilli comes in 100ml bottles, and there are 20 or so varieties permanently in their catalogue, including very hot ones for people who eat aji by the spoon. They are incredibly fruity, colourful and as crazy as their creator, Thibault Fournal.
Les piments de Fati offers a delicious series of chilli sauces created by power couple Maxime Poncelet and his Nigerian wife Fati with chillies sourced from a social economy farm in La Louvière. Their offerings include the sauce Belbisco, the spicy olive oil Pica-Oli and three chilli pastes in pots: a raw and lemony green, a cooked mango and ginger yellow, and cooked tomato red.
The most recent Brussels manufacturer is Ryan Abdesselem, a Franco-Tunisian from Brussels, who shares his passion for harissa under the Felfel brand. Felfel is supported by Food’Up, a regional programme that boosts sustainable local food, and Abdesselem also offers Tunisian cooking workshops to learn how to use harissa in the kitchen. All his chillies are locally produced.
Felfel chilli
Flanders also has chilli sauce manufacturers, such as Jeremy Bosman, the founder of an Antwerp restaurant Jerry’s Fine Foods. His Dr Octopussy peanut sauce is a must-try with chicken, fish, veggies, rice, salads or as a marinade. The Kinshasa Heat Bourbon is a Congolese-style hot sauce based on an ancient family recipe from Central Kongo, perfect in sandwiches or on grilled food. The Xi’an smoke is a unique dark red flavour bomb that’s not too spicy and adds a smoky touch to your palette. The Granada sun is refreshing and combines sunny flavours like orange and red pepper with more earthy ones like cumin and fennel.
Finally, Max De Cock in Koekelberg sells spicy oils uniquely packaged in beer bottles under the brand Madmax. The oils come in three strengths: original pique oil, mild Max and Madmax extreme (in a droplet bottle). Max also sells pickled jalapeños.
Now you can finally stop relying solely on Tabasco or sriracha. Burn Belgium, burn!
