"In 1972, La Villa Lorraine became the first restaurant outside France to hold three Michelin stars. History hangs in the air here. Yves Mattagne's reinvention — Asian-inflected, modern, lighter than what came before — doesn't pretend that didn't happen. It uses it."
A Living Piece of History
The number 1972 deserves to sit with you for a moment. In that year, while Michelin was still primarily a document of French gastronomic supremacy, La Villa Lorraine was awarded three stars — the first restaurant outside France to reach that summit. The achievement confirmed what Belgium's more honest food critics had been arguing for years: that the country's kitchen had developed something entirely its own, and that Brussels was a dining destination that Paris could no longer afford to ignore.
The address on Avenue du Vivier d'Oie in Uccle has carried that weight through decades of change. When Yves Mattagne — who also holds two Michelin stars at Sea Grill — took over the kitchen, he made the intelligent decision not to attempt a restoration of what the villa had been, but to bring it forward on its own terms. The current cooking is modern, sharing-oriented, with Asian influences that feel earned rather than decorative. The setting remains magnificent: a villa surrounded by gardens, with the sense of occasion that only a building carrying this much history can provide.
The restaurant sits near Le Chalet de la Forêt in the Uccle dining axis — both restaurants benefit from the residential calm of the southern Brussels communes and both offer something the city centre cannot: the feeling of having left the city for the evening. Budget €200–350 per person with wine.
Best Occasion: Impress Clients
Very few restaurants in the world carry their history this visibly and this gracefully. For a client dinner where the goal is not merely to eat well but to communicate something about the kind of professional you are — someone with historical knowledge, with European cultural fluency, with the confidence to choose a one-star table at a three-star address — La Villa Lorraine delivers a conversation before the first course arrives.
The villa setting provides the spatial privacy and prestige that hotel restaurants like Sea Grill cannot replicate. For a proposal, the garden terrace in warm weather is one of the city's most extraordinary outdoor dining settings. For a deal-closing dinner, the private dining options and the address's cumulative prestige provide exactly the right register.
What to Order
Mattagne's current menu at La Villa Lorraine emphasises exceptional produce prepared with gastronomic technique but served with a modern casualness — dishes designed to be shared, built around ingredients like Burgaud duck and seabass from La Cour d'Armoise farm, with crispy rice and tuna tartare preparations that carry the Asian inflections that now define the kitchen's identity. The approach represents a deliberate break from the formality that the villa's history might suggest, and the lightness is genuine rather than performative.
The wine list is serious and weighted toward France, with a particular depth in Burgundy and Bordeaux. For a dinner that honours the address's heritage, a bottle from the older vintages in the cellar is the appropriate gesture — the sommelier manages a selection of bottles that predate Mattagne's tenure and serve as a direct connection to the restaurant's historic peak.