Brussels Keto

Kabuki is a Japanese buffet restaurant in Brussels with a model train. A small locomotive runs a circuit through the dining room on a track above table height, pulling cars loaded with plates of food, and you take what you want as it passes. There are also normal tables with standard buffet service if you prefer not to eat by rail. Both options are available and the food is the same either way, but the train is clearly the right choice.

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Noordzee, or Mer du Nord in French, is a small seafood counter on Place Sainte-Catherine, in the fish market neighbourhood that used to supply the city before the canals were filled in. You order at the counter, you eat standing outside at a high table or on the square, and what you’re eating is as fresh as anything available in central Brussels. It’s one of those places that has no pretensions and doesn’t need any.

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Brussels has a lot of restaurants and most of them are manageable on keto if you know what to look for. The challenge isn’t finding food. It’s the pattern recognition: which types of places work well, which are harder, and where the hidden traps are. Brasseries The Brussels brasserie is probably the single best category for keto eating. The menu format (starters, grills, fish, classic Belgian dishes) gives you real options.

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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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You don’t need a specialty health food shop to do keto in Belgium. Everything essential is available at a standard Belgian supermarket: Delhaize, Colruyt, Carrefour, Lidl, Aldi. This is genuinely useful information because there’s a tendency in keto circles to make the shopping sound complicated, and it isn’t. What every Belgian supermarket does well Eggs are the foundation and they’re everywhere. The standard eggs at Colruyt or Aldi are fine. Delhaize carries a better range including free-range and organic options at reasonable prices.

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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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Paling in ’t groen, eel in green sauce, is one of the oldest dishes in Belgian cuisine and one of the least known outside of it. It originated along the rivers and waterways of the Scheldt basin, particularly around Mechelen and the towns between Ghent and Antwerp, where freshwater eel was abundant. The green sauce is made from a mixture of fresh herbs (sorrel, parsley, chervil, watercress, sometimes spinach or nettle) cooked briefly in butter with the eel and finished with a little lemon juice or white wine vinegar.

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Steak tartare is raw minced beef mixed with egg yolk, mustard, capers, shallots, Worcestershire sauce, Tabasco, and parsley, served with toast or frites on the side. Remove the toast and the frites and what you have is a dish that is almost entirely fat and protein with negligible carbs. It’s one of the best things on a Brussels brasserie menu and it requires no modification whatsoever, just the standard request to swap the side for a salad.

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