My Michelin-starred restaurant tour of Antwerp

Times

09-05-2025

Artificial intelligence doesn't have all the answers, you know. Ask for the best European cities for a food-heavy short break and it will trot out the usual French, Italian and Spanish candidates. It even finds room for Belgrade and Budapest. Good suggestions, all of them. But ask me and I'd put Antwerp ahead of the lot.
Yes, Antwerp, the de facto capital of Belgium's Dutch-speaking north. It might be known mainly for its diamond trade and legacy of fine arts (famous sons include Rubens, Bruegel and Van Dyck), its guild houses and narrow streets on which luxury brands sit happily alongside milliners and glove shops unchanged in almost a century.
But beyond all this there is plenty for the food lover. Amid the contemporary coffee shops and bakeries and charmingly old-school brasseries such as Bitterpeeen and Ciro's (where, yes, the Black Beauty steak is just what you fear it is) lies one of the densest concentrations of Michelin-starred restaurants anywhere in the world. There are 16 of them, all within a 20-minute walk.
Top of the tree is the three-star Zilte, on the ninth floor of the MAS museum, where you dine with the city as your backdrop. But if you want to spare your legs, base yourself at Antwerp's first five-star hotel, Botanic Sanctuary, an oasis of calm set alongside a public garden in a converted 17th-century monastery. It sits on the foodiest street in the city, with five restaurants within the grounds alone, three of them Michelin-starred.
It's worth timing a trip to grab one of the 24 seats at the two-star Hertog Jan, which is open only two weeks of the month, such is the head chef Gert De Mangeleer's uncompromising quest for perfection. Some restaurants are worth clearing the calendar for. 'Simplicity isn't simple' is De Mangeleer's mantra, and his Asian-influenced €375 omakase (Japanese for 'let the chef decide') deluxe menu takes you on a 13-course, sight-unseen voyage of culinary theatre.
To start, a potato sushi — where caviar is delicately tweezered onto a soft confit quail's egg yolk balanced on discs of blanched and crisped potato and a smoked sturgeon cream — looks like the bacon and eggs of my dreams. Next, 'toro no toro', his creation of the endangered bluefin tuna's prized belly cut, made instead from amberjack fish that is ground to a paste with aged beef fat and ponzu to replicate the fattiness of toro. It is then served with fermented watermelon for pops of salty sweetness, and champagne and thyme oyster sauce.
The food is hypnotising. There's more caviar, this time unsalted — the better to taste its delicate flavour — in a saké beurre blanc with dry-aged beetroot with the same chew as nuggets of beef. At one stage we decamp to the kitchen for bowls of poached egg and shrimp in a beer sauce with hop shoots (a seasonal delicacy in this beer-loving country); a laminated brioche roll with vivid green 'plankton' butter; curls of squid with red mullet singed at the table with binchotan charcoal. One dish of asparagus, fermented tomato sauce, spring lamb and herb-flecked oyster and seaweed butter sauce had me almost licking the plate such was the perfect harmony of sweetness, salt and acidity.
Where do you go after that? To the one-star Het Gebaar, a light, airy, weekdays and daytime-only spot in a Hansel and Gretel cottage within the botanical gardens. Roger van Damme is a celebrated pastry chef and his afternoon high tea is a showcase for his creativity — although he is no slouch at savoury either. Pad thai followed by steak tartare hardly sounds groundbreaking, but both were reimagined to startling effect, the latter adorned with trompe l'oeil fruit that burst open to reveal foie-gras mousse and tomato and basil creams.
Or head to the one-star Fine Fleur, where it's back to more familiar fine-dining terrain with salmon mousses, cappuccinos of truffle and celeriac with the crunch of macadamia nuts, and perfectly cooked langoustine tails with salsify, chicory and pomelo. Each course, as I had come to expect in Antwerp, a gem.
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B&B doubles at Botanic Sanctuary Antwerp from €450, botanicantwerp.be