Brussels
Stoemp: mashed potato-vegetable.
Stoemp
Brussels-style mashed potatoes with vegetables
View page →Brussels' bicultural food culture lives in the gap between French and Dutch, with influences from both. A Brussels Sunday lunch starts with Stoemp — coarse mashed potatoes with Brussels sprouts, served with smoked pork sausages and Dijon mustard. At a Marolles brasserie, Filet Américain is ordered as an aperitif — raw beef tartare-style with capers, cornichons, and egg yolk, on toasted baguette. At a tourist square, Gaufre de Bruxelles — light, square waffles dusted with sugar — are served from carts to passing visitors. For special-occasion dinners, Vol-au-Vent à la Bruxelloise (koninginnehapje) arrives in a flaky puff-pastry shell, filled with creamy chicken-mushroom-veal-meatball ragout. Brussels eats the way Brussels lives: between cultures, both refined and rustic, with one foot in each linguistic world.
Start Here
Brussels-style coarse-mashed potatoes with Brussels sprouts (or leek, or carrot), served alongside Belgian pork sausages or smoked bacon.
Why start here · Stoemp is the Brussels Sunday-lunch comfort dish — chunky on purpose, deeply buttery, intentionally rustic.
Brussels-style raw beef tartare — hand-chopped fillet with egg yolk, capers, cornichons, mustard, Worcestershire, and Tabasco, served on toast.
Why start here · Filet Américain is the most polarizing Belgian dish — raw beef is divisive — but it captures Brussels' Franco-Belgian aperitif culture.
Brussels' refined koninginnehapje — puff-pastry shell filled with cream-velouté chicken, veal meatballs, and mushrooms, lemon-bright and nutmeg-warm.
Why start here · Vol-au-Vent à la Bruxelloise is Belgian Sunday-lunch at its most refined — French technique applied to deeply Belgian filling.
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Siblings within Belgian — each its own tradition.