Europe

We ate a lot of waffles in Belgium, and the best of them, by some distance, came from Maison Dandoy. It is one of those rare places that is both a tourist name and genuinely good, a historic Brussels house that has been making biscuits and waffles since the early nineteenth century and still does…

Brussels is the de facto capital of the European Union, and yet the quarter where the EU actually lives is one of the most overlooked corners of the city. Most tourists never make it east of the old town, which is a shame, because the EU Quarter is home to a genuinely excellent, and free,…

Some of the most famous characters in the world were born in Belgium. Tintin, the Smurfs, Lucky Luke and Spirou all came from the drawing boards of Belgian artists, and Brussels wears that heritage proudly, from a grand comic museum to dozens of giant murals painted across the city’s walls. For anyone who grew up…

Brussels has a sense of humour, and nothing sums it up better than the fact that its most famous monument is a small bronze boy having a wee. Manneken Pis is the city’s unlikely mascot, and he is not alone: a squatting girl and a cocking dog complete a trio of peeing statues hidden in…

There is nothing else quite like the Atomium. A giant model of an iron crystal, magnified to the size of a building and left standing on the edge of Brussels since the 1950s, it is one of the strangest and most photogenic landmarks in Europe. Part monument, part museum, part view platform, it is the…

No country takes beer as seriously as Belgium. A small nation makes well over a thousand different beers, in more styles than anywhere else on earth, and treats the whole thing with a reverence other countries reserve for wine. Monks still brew some of the most sought-after bottles in the world, wild yeast ferments sour…

Belgian chocolate has a reputation to live up to, and in our experience it does. The quality in even an ordinary shop is remarkable, the variety is dizzying, and a box to take home is one of the best souvenirs the country offers, if it survives the journey. This is our complete guide to Belgian…

Belgium punches far above its size when it comes to food. This is the country that gave the world frites, moules-frites and some of the best chocolate and beer anywhere, and it does its everyday cooking with a seriousness that rewards an empty stomach. We ate extremely well here, often for less than in France,…

After the grandeur of Paris and the quirk of Brussels, Bruges is where our trip slowed down and turned into a fairy tale. It is a small medieval city of cobbled lanes, canals and stepped gable houses, one of the best-preserved old towns in Europe, and it makes the perfect gentle finale to a busy…

Brussels gets unfairly skipped. Travellers treat it as a stopover between Paris and Amsterdam and give it an afternoon, when it rewards a proper two days. It is a city of contrasts: a grand medieval square, a giant atom you can climb inside, the headquarters of the European Union, and some of the best food…