Sans Cravate

Sans Cravate — the name is Flemish self-deprecation, 'no tie', the kind of restaurant where the patron would rather you didn't feel you had to dress up — sits on Langestraat a twenty-minute walk from the centre. Henk and Veronique Van Oudenhove-Bogaert opened it in 2010; the first Michelin star arrived in 2011, and they have held it for thirteen consecutive years — one of the most consistent single-star records in Belgium.

The cooking is modern Belgian-French — a classical technique spine with careful seasonal ingredient pressure. The menu is short (four starters, four mains, three desserts, plus the tasting menu) and changes roughly every two months. Signatures include a scallop preparation with brown-butter and capers, a pigeon course served table-side, and a chocolate dessert that Henk has been refining for a decade.

The wine list is French-classical with a meaningful Belgian-beer pairing option — Veronique runs the floor and is an accomplished beer sommelier as well as a wine sommelier. The beer-pairing option is one of the more interesting things happening in European fine dining and is genuinely worth choosing over the wine route for a Belgian-themed evening.

The dining room seats thirty across a single ground-floor hall, plus a small private room that holds eight. The setting is understated — white walls, quality tableware, careful low lighting — and the atmosphere is the 'no tie' the restaurant's name implies. Reservations for weekend dinner are currently running one to two weeks; lunch on weekdays is frequently walk-in available.

Thirteen years of a one-Michelin-star rating held without interruption, a husband-and-wife team who run the room personally, a beer-pairing option that no other starred room in Belgium offers — Sans Cravate is the First Date room in Bruges. Book the corner two-top, order the six-course tasting with the beer pairing, and let the evening unfold across two and a half hours.