Menssa is on Avenue de Tervueren in Woluwe-Saint-Pierre, in a neighbourhood that’s more embassy than restaurant district — residential, quiet, the kind of address that means you’re going specifically rather than stumbling in. Chef Christophe Hardiquest ran this address for years as Bon Bon, with two Michelin stars, before rebranding to Menssa with a sharpened focus on sustainable and organic cooking. It currently holds one star. The rebrand wasn’t a step down in ambition.

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Let’s be clear about what we’re dealing with. There are two Belgian waffles and they are different problems. The Liège waffle is made from a yeasted dough enriched with butter and eggs, studded with pearl sugar that melts and caramelises against the iron during cooking. The pearl sugar isn’t a topping. It’s structural. It’s what makes the outside crispy and the inside soft and the whole thing taste like it does.

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The supplement industry has made keto into a commercial opportunity. There is now a product for every stage of keto — keto-start capsules, exogenous ketone drinks, MCT oil in seventeen formats, electrolyte powders in forty flavours, and various combinations thereof. Most of it is not necessary. A few things genuinely help. Here’s the honest breakdown. What’s actually useful Magnesium is the one supplement that’s hard to argue against for people on keto.

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Belgian chocolate has a genuine claim to being the best in the world, which makes it either a comfort or a problem depending on what you’re trying to eat. The honest answer is: some of it is fine on keto, most of it isn’t, and the distinction is simple enough. Dark chocolate at 70% cacao or higher has a small enough amount of sugar that moderate consumption — a few squares, not a bar — fits within a sensible keto day.

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Most people who come to Belgium think of beer first, and fair enough. But Belgium has another drinking tradition that predates most of its famous abbeys and that is, for keto purposes, considerably more useful: jenever. Jenever — also spelled genever, and the etymological root of the English word “gin” — is a malt wine spirit flavoured with juniper and other botanicals. It originated in the Low Countries in the sixteenth century and has been made continuously ever since.

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Hochepot — also called hutspot in Dutch or pot-au-feu à la gantoise if you’re being formal about it — is one of those dishes that exists in every northern European peasant cuisine under a slightly different name. Flemish hochepot is a slow-cooked stew of mixed meats and root vegetables, traditionally made with whatever cuts were available: oxtail, pig’s ears, lamb shoulder, beef shank, pork belly. All of it goes into a pot with root vegetables and water and cooks for a long time until everything is tender and the broth has absorbed three or four different animals’ worth of flavour.

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The Plaisirs d’Hiver market spreads across Place Sainte-Catherine, the Bourse area, and several surrounding streets from late November through early January. It’s one of the larger winter markets in Belgium, it’s extremely crowded on weekends, and the food stalls are primarily selling things you cannot eat on keto: Liège waffles with Nutella, hot chocolate, churros, crêpes with sugar, speculoos everything, and at least three stalls selling nothing but variations on waffles with fruit and cream.

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FOX Food Market in Watermael-Boitsfort operates on the same principle as Wolf in the centre — multiple food stalls under one roof, different cuisines, eat in a shared space. The neighbourhood is different: Watermael-Boitsfort is in the southeast of Brussels on the edge of the Sonian Forest, quieter and more residential than the centre, and the market has a slightly different character as a result. Less tourist traffic, more locals, arguably a bit easier to navigate.

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Wolf is a covered food market in central Brussels with a large number of stalls serving food from different cuisines. It’s also very crowded, particularly at lunchtime and on weekends, and the layout is dense enough that getting an overview of what’s available before committing to a queue takes more effort than it should. The honest experience of going to Wolf for the first time — and sometimes the fifth time — is mild sensory overwhelm followed by standing in a queue before you’ve properly evaluated your options.

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Amadeus has been serving ribs in Brussels since the 1980s and shows no signs of stopping. There are several locations around the city — the Ixelles one on Rue Veydt is probably the best known — and they all follow the same format: dark room, candlelight, checked tablecloths, all-you-can-eat spare ribs with various sides. It’s a dinner spot rather than a lunch place, it’s been a reliable Brussels night out for decades, and it has a specific problem for keto purposes.

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