Ghent packs an unusual amount of eating into very little ground. You can cross the historic centre on foot in roughly half an hour, which means the distance between a two-star tasting menu and a paper cone of fries eaten standing up is often three minutes and one bridge. That geography is a useful fact to hold on to when planning meals here. The city rewards choosing a quarter first and a table second.
Two things shape what ends up on the plate. One is the student population: Ghent University and the associated colleges bring tens of thousands of students into the same compact centre, which keeps prices honest and pretension in check. The other is vegetarianism. In the late 2000s the city, working with the Flemish vegetarian organisation EVA, launched Donderdag Veggiedag, or Thursday Veggie Day, asking restaurants and public canteens to lead with a meat-free dish once a week. The campaign was widely reported abroad as having made Ghent the vegetarian capital of Europe, a description the city's own tourism office is happy to repeat and one best treated as a slogan rather than a measurement. The underlying effect is real enough: by the organisers' own count, well over a hundred restaurants signed up, and a vegetarian eating here is choosing rather than negotiating.
What follows is the city quarter by quarter, with what to order in each, roughly what it costs, and how to string it together.
Patershol: the quarter built to be eaten in
The Patershol is a knot of medieval lanes behind the Gravensteen castle, and it is the closest thing Ghent has to a restaurant district. The tourist office describes it as a city within the city, and it feels that way: a few hundred metres of cobbles, doorways almost shoulder to shoulder, and residents still living above the dining rooms. Nearly everything here is an evening proposition, and nearly everything needs booking on a Friday or Saturday.
The range is wider than the medieval frontage suggests. Roots serves short, vegetable-forward tasting menus that change with the season, with a three-course lunch typically in the region of EUR 30 and a longer dinner menu around EUR 60; it is the pick if you want cooking that takes itself seriously without the formality or the bill of a starred room. Amadeus is the opposite temperament entirely, an all-you-can-eat spare rib house that has been running since the 1990s in a cluttered stained-glass interior, generally opening for dinner only, with the ribs menu usually landing somewhere around EUR 20. Gado Gado does Indonesian food in the same lanes, and there are Turkish, Spanish and Italian rooms within the same two minutes' walk.
One practical caution: the Patershol is small and popular, and walking in hopefully at eight on a Saturday evening is how people end up eating badly. Reserve, or come on a weeknight.
Groentenmarkt: the pantry of the city
If you only have an hour to understand what Ghent eats, spend it on the Groentenmarkt, the old vegetable market square on the water. Three shops on and around it carry most of the city's edible heritage.
Tierenteyn-Verlent has been grinding mustard since the end of the eighteenth century and still sells it from a stone crock into a jar, scooped to order. It contains no preservatives, is not exported, and needs refrigerating and eating within a few months, which makes it a genuinely good souvenir and a poor one to leave in a hot car. Temmerman, a few doors along, sells cuberdons, the cone-shaped raspberry sweets that Ghent calls neuzekes, or little noses. A cuberdon is hard-shelled and liquid at the centre, and it goes stale fast, so buy a small bag and eat it the same day. Bakkerij Himschoot, on the same square, is the place to try mastellen, the local ring-shaped spiced bread roll, and mattetaart, an East Flanders curd tart that holds EU protected status under the name of the town of Geraardsbergen rather than Ghent.
Across the square, the Groot Vleeshuis is the fifteenth-century butchers' hall, now a showcase for East Flanders produce; it is an easy place to taste Ganda ham and regional cheeses in one sitting, and it keeps daytime hours only. On the waterside edge of the same square sit two of Ghent's better-known drinking rooms: Het Waterhuis aan de Bierkant, with well over a hundred beers and three house labels, and next door 't Dreupelkot, a jenever bar whose owner distils a large part of the list himself. Order the jenever last, not first.
Korenmarkt and the lanes behind it
The Korenmarkt is the centre's main square and the one most geared to visitors, which is a reason to pass through it rather than sit down on it. The better addresses are in the lanes behind. Roots sits a short walk off the square. Mokabon, a roastery going since the 1930s, is described by the city's tourism office as Ghent's first coffee bar and is still one of the more serious ones. Or Coffee and Barista are the other two names the specialty-coffee crowd in Ghent consistently puts forward, both roasting or sourcing to a standard well above the terraces outside.
For waffles, Etablissement Max on the little square beside the belfry trades on a very long history and does the thick, yeasted Brussels style rather than the sugar-studded Liege style; expect to pay a few euros for a plain one and rather more once cream and fruit arrive. Balls & Glory, the meatball counter founded in Ghent by chef Wim Ballieu and since expanded across Flanders, is the reliable cheap lunch in the centre: one large stuffed meatball with mash or salad, usually in the low teens of euros.
Vrijdagmarkt and Sint-Jacobs: where the beer is the main course
East of the Korenmarkt, the Vrijdagmarkt and the streets around Sint-Jacobs church are where Ghent drinks. De Dulle Griet, on the Vrijdagmarkt, is the famous one: a very long beer list, and a house beer called Max served in a glass so awkward that the bar takes one of your shoes as a deposit. It is a good piece of theatre and an indifferent place to eat. The Trollekelder, tucked beside Sint-Jacobs, is quieter, darker and better for an actual evening, with a list that beer writers rate highly and none of the queue. Bar des Amis on the Vlasmarkt is the student-leaning option in the same few streets.
Eat before you settle in. The frituur on Bij Sint-Jacobs is the obvious solution, and fries in Belgium are a dish rather than a side: ask for them with stoofvlees sauce, the gravy from the beef-and-brown-beer stew, if you want the local answer. A cone with sauce generally costs under EUR 10.
The Sint-Jacobs square also hosts a long-running weekend flea market, which makes a Saturday or Sunday late morning here a better bet than a Tuesday.
The Kouter on a Sunday morning
The Kouter, the grand open square south of the centre, has held a flower market since the eighteenth century, and Sunday is when it matters. From late spring through early autumn, brass and concert bands play the cast-iron bandstand for free. Beside it stands the Blue Kiosk, a hexagonal newspaper stand from the 1880s that has spent the last few decades as an open-air bar, and the local ritual is to arrive around mid-morning for oysters and a glass of cava standing up among the flower stalls. It is one of the genuinely distinctive things to do with an appetite in this city, it costs the price of a couple of drinks and a half-dozen oysters, and it is entirely weather-dependent.
The streets immediately east of the Kouter hold Vrijmoed, the kitchen of chef Michael Vrijmoed, which the Michelin guide awards two stars in its current Belgian edition. The cooking leans hard on vegetables and on fermentation, to the point that there is a full vegetarian tasting menu rather than a token one. Book weeks ahead, and expect a tasting-menu bill in the low-to-middle hundreds of euros per person once wine is counted.
Portus Ganda and the east: vegetables taken seriously
Walk east past the old bishop's quarter towards Portus Ganda, the marina where the Leie and the Scheldt meet, and you reach Publiek, the restaurant of Olly Ceulenaere, one of the group of chefs who came up together as the Flemish Foodies. It holds one Michelin star and has built its reputation on little-known vegetables and Flemish producers rather than on luxury ingredients, served in a loft-like room with an open kitchen. Lunch menus have typically started around the mid-fifties in euros and the longer dinner menu around EUR 105 before wine, which for a starred room is comparatively approachable; check current pricing when you book, because this is exactly the kind of figure that moves.
OAK, Marcelo Ballardin's roughly two-dozen-seat room, also holds a star and deals in unexpected pairings. It has relocated within Ghent before, so confirm where it currently sits before you set out on foot.
The same eastern edge holds Stadsbrouwerij Gruut, a city brewery that flavours its beers with a herb mixture instead of hops, in the medieval manner. The taproom pours the full range and makes a reasonable lunch stop on the way between the centre and Portus Ganda.
Dok Noord: warehouse Ghent
North of the centre, at the Oude Dokken, the old industrial docks have been rebuilt as the Dok Noord quarter, and this is where Ghent goes when it wants space and noise rather than cobbles and candlelight. Dok Brewing Company occupies a converted transformer hall with long shared tables and around thirty taps, brewing on site and pairing the beer with an in-house barbecue and burger operation. There is Italian cooking in the same complex, and the whole area works best on a long summer evening or a wet Sunday afternoon when the centre feels crowded.
It is about a twenty-minute walk or a short tram ride from the Korenmarkt, and it is not a detour worth making in bad weather if your time in Ghent is short. Treat it as the plan for a second or third evening.
Eating vegetarian, which is the easy option here
Thursday is still the day the campaign built, and on Thursdays a large number of kitchens across the city put a vegetarian dish at the front of the menu rather than at the bottom. But the infrastructure is there every day. Avalon, an organic vegetarian kitchen near the Gravensteen end of the centre, has been going for decades and generally runs as a lunch-only operation from Tuesday to Saturday, which catches people out; go at midday or not at all. Greenway is the long-running veggie fast-casual name, Lokaal doubles as a tea room, and Madam Bakster deals in sugar-free and vegan baking. De Frietketel is the frituur the city's own vegan listings point at, which in a country where fries are traditionally cooked in beef fat is not a small thing.
The wider point is that the ambitious end of Ghent cooking is vegetable-led anyway. Both Vrijmoed and Publiek have made vegetables the centre of the plate rather than a concession, so a vegetarian booking the best meal of the trip is not booking a lesser version of it.
What to order, and the order to do it in
The short list of things that are genuinely of this city: waterzooi, a thick cream-based stew that began as a fish dish and is now more often made with chicken; stoofvlees or carbonnade, beef braised long in dark beer and served with fries; Ganda ham; cuberdons; mastellen; Gentse mokken, the hard anise biscuits; and the local beers, of which the Gentse Strop is the one named for the city's own history of rebellion. Waterzooi and stoofvlees turn up on almost every Flemish brasserie menu in the centre and usually sit somewhere in the twenties in euros.
A workable three-day sequence: arrive and eat cheaply and well in the centre, with a meatball or a cone of fries with stew sauce, then spend the evening on the beer list at Sint-Jacobs rather than on the Vrijdagmarkt itself. Give the second day to the Groentenmarkt in the morning, mustard and cuberdons and the Great Butchers' Hall, then book the Patershol for dinner. Keep a Sunday morning free for the Kouter if the forecast allows, and put the one ambitious meal, whether that is Publiek, Vrijmoed or a tasting menu in the Patershol, on the night you are least likely to have walked fifteen kilometres first.
Budget roughly: a good casual lunch usually lands under EUR 20 a head, a solid brasserie dinner with a beer somewhere around EUR 40 to EUR 55, a mid-range tasting menu in the EUR 60 to EUR 110 range, and a starred dinner with pairings well beyond that. Almost nothing in this guide needs a taxi. Book the weekend tables at least a week out, and remember that plenty of Ghent kitchens close for one or two days early in the week, which is a common way a carefully planned evening here falls apart.
