Restaurants

Anata is a Japanese restaurant on Boulevard Anspach, a few minutes from the Bourse. It does sushi, noodle dishes, donburi rice bowls and yakitori, the full range of a casual Japanese lunch spot. For keto purposes, about half the menu is immediately useful and the other half can be adapted or ignored. The sashimi is the obvious starting point. Raw fish sliced and served without rice is keto by definition, whether salmon, tuna, yellowtail or whatever is on offer.

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Finding a decent keto lunch in central Brussels, the area around the Royal Palace, the Coudenberg, the Mont des Arts, is harder than it should be. The default is sandwiches, and the sandwich shops in that neighbourhood cater to the office lunch crowd with baguettes and wraps and very little else. SuperBowl on Coudenberg is the exception worth knowing about. The format is a composed salad bar: you pick a base, choose your proteins and toppings, pick a dressing.

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Le Passage is on Avenue Jean et Pierre Carsoel in Uccle, in one of the quieter and more residential corners of Brussels. Chef Rocky Renaud has been cooking there for years, joined more recently by his son Kevin: a family restaurant in the proper sense, with the consistency that implies. It holds a Michelin recognition and features in the Gault&Millau guides, which in practice means the cooking is at the level where technique and sourcing are taken seriously.

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Terborght is in Huizingen, a village in the green belt south of Brussels near the provincial domain of the same name. It’s not a casual restaurant: a 7-course tasting menu at €159 per person, advance reservation required, the kind of place you go for a proper occasion. It’s also genuinely excellent, and the tasting menu format turns out to be more keto-compatible than most restaurant formats, at least through the first half of the meal.

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Finding authentic Mexican food in Europe is genuinely difficult. Most of what presents itself as Mexican in European cities is TexMex, all hard-shell tacos, fajita platters and nachos with orange cheese sauce, which is its own thing and not the same as Mexican cooking. El Mexicanito on Rue Saint-Boniface in Ixelles is an exception, and a notable one. The food is the real thing: proper mole, slow-cooked meats, the salsas and flavour profiles that actually come from Mexico rather than from a casual-dining franchise manual.

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The friterie, the Belgian chip shop, is a cultural institution. They’re on street corners, in converted trailers, in small rooms with a counter and a deep fryer and a laminated menu of sauces. Brussels has hundreds of them. The frites they produce are genuinely good, cooked twice in beef fat or oil, and the smell is designed to make you forget what you were trying to do. You are not there for the frites.

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A month is long enough to know whether something is working and short enough that you haven’t adjusted your life completely around it. Here’s what I actually found out. What was harder than expected The bread. I knew intellectually that Belgium is a bread culture and that every meal would involve bread somewhere nearby, but knowing it and living it are different things. The basket of bread that appears automatically at Belgian restaurants before you’ve looked at the menu.

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The Marché du Midi runs every Sunday morning under and around the elevated railway at Gare du Midi. It’s one of the largest markets in Belgium, it covers several city blocks, and it sells an enormous range of food, a lot of which is excellent for keto and costs significantly less than the supermarket equivalent. It’s also loud, crowded, and parking anywhere near it on a Sunday morning is a genuine ordeal.

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Sticking to keto and still wanting a drink are not mutually exclusive, but they do require a bit of planning. Some drinks barely register on your carb count, while others will spend your entire day’s budget in a single glass. And beyond the carbs themselves, alcohol does a few things to a fat-adapted body that are worth understanding before you order. Living in a place like Brussels, where beer is practically a civic institution, sharpens the question further.

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Brussels is a surprisingly good city for eating keto, with one obvious problem: frites come with everything. Once you make peace with asking for a salad instead, you’re mostly fine. Brasseries are your friend The classic Brussels brasserie is built for keto without knowing it. Steak, grilled fish, mussels, salads with proper toppings: the protein options are solid and portions are generous. The trick is the side dish. Frites are the default answer to everything here, but almost every brasserie will swap them for a salad or vegetables if you ask.

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