Fin de Siècle

Fin de Siècle serves the Belgian dishes people come to Brussels for and rarely find outside a tourist menu: carbonnade flamande cooked in beer, stoemp with sausage, lapin à la kriek rabbit in cherry beer, chicons au gratin, and mussels in season. The daily menu is chalked on the wall rather than printed, and the portions are the kind that make a starter a mistake.

The beer list is long and the staff will pair it with what you have ordered if you ask, which is worth doing: most of these dishes are cooked with beer, and drinking the same one alongside is the point. Leave room for the waffles or the speculoos cheesecake.

The room is dark, crowded and genuinely loud. That is the character of the place rather than a fault, but it is not where you go for a quiet conversation or an early night with small children.

The timing problem

They take no reservations. At lunch and from about half past seven the place is full, and the queue on the pavement is normal rather than a bad sign.

Our advice to guests is to arrive around 18:00. You will usually walk straight in, the kitchen is unhurried, and the room fills up around you over the next hour, which is the better half of the experience anyway.

Worth checking when you arrive: the house has a long-standing reputation for being cash only. Their own site does not state a payment policy, so bring notes rather than assume the card will work.

Getting there

It is a walk of about a quarter of an hour from the apartment, west past the Bourse and towards Sainte-Catherine. The route through the Galeries and along Rue Antoine Dansaert is the pleasant one.