Mer du Nord

Top choice in Brussels


Well-reputed fishmonger’s window catering to a wide cross-section of Brussels folk plus assorted visitors – place your order and when it’s ready your name is called by staff with a brass megaphone. Eat standing up at tables on the cobbled square opposite. The scampi (not deep fried but soaked in herb dressing) is sublime.


Lonely Planet's must-see attractions

Nearby Brussels attractions

1. Église Ste-Catherine

0.05 MILES

Église Ste-Catherine must be one of the only religious buildings that positively encourages folks to urinate on its walls (there’s a ‘pissoir’ on its…

2. Tour Noire

0.1 MILES

Boxed in on three sides and incongruously dwarfed by the back of a Novotel Hotel, this tower is an ivy-draped remnant of Brussels’ original city wall.

3. Zinneke

0.14 MILES

In the old Bruxellois dialect, zinneke means ‘a person of mixed origins’, which sums up the city’s inhabitants to this day. Hence Flemish sculptor Tom…

4. Halles St-Géry

0.16 MILES

In 1881 this superb neo-Renaissance brick-and-wrought-iron meat market was built around a curious pyramidal monument-fountain (itself built to replace a…

5. Bruxella 1238

0.18 MILES

Bruxella 1238 is the scanty remains of a Franciscan convent that was bombarded into ruins in 1695. Most of the site is visible by peeping through the…

6. Au Lion d'Or

0.2 MILES

The vaulted 1811 brick, neo-Gothic Au Lion d’Or building bridges a branch of the Senne River.

7. Cubitus

0.21 MILES

In this mural a tetchy-looking Manneken Pis gazes up at his pediment, from which he has been displaced by a grinning, peeing bear.

8. Bourse

0.21 MILES

The Bourse is Belgium’s 1873 stock-exchange building. It's closed to visitors, but you can enjoy its grandiose neoclassical facade, which is brilliantly…