Typical Dishes of Ghent: What to Eat and Where to Look

The dish the city is named for, more or less. Waterzooi is a stew in a broth thickened with cream and egg yolk, with root vegetables and either chicken or, in the older version, freshwater fish. It is mild, rich and completely unlike the beer-and-beef cooking of the rest of Flanders.

Order the chicken version unless a place makes a point of doing the fish one, in which case order that. It arrives in a bowl and needs bread.

Beef stewed slowly in dark Belgian beer with onions, and traditionally a slice of bread spread thickly with mustard laid on top to dissolve into the sauce and thicken it. It comes with fries. This is the dish to order when it is cold and you have been walking all day, and every brown café in the city does a version.

Small purple cones, raspberry-flavoured, with a hard shell and a syrupy liquid centre. Locals call them neuzekes, little noses. They are sold from carts on the Groentenmarkt and they do not keep, a cuberdon more than a couple of weeks old has crystallised all the way through, which is why you should buy them here rather than take a box home.

The two rival sellers on that square spent years in a public and much-reported feud over the pitch. Ask about it if you want a story with your sweets.

On the Groentenmarkt there is a small mustard shop that has been making mustard on the premises since the early nineteenth century, scooped from a stoneware crock into a pot you take away. It is sharp, it is not smooth, and it goes on everything. This is the single best edible souvenir in the city.

Ganda is the old name for Ghent, and Ganda ham is a dry-cured ham from this region, salted, air-dried for months and sliced thin. You will find it on charcuterie boards everywhere. Eat it on its own before you put it on bread.

Ghent has an unusual number of vegetarian and vegan restaurants for a city its size, and it is deliberate: in 2009 the city backed a weekly veggie day, and the restaurant scene grew around it. If you are vegetarian and have been struggling elsewhere in Belgium, this is the city where that stops being a problem.

Belgian beer, obviously, and Ghent has a working brewery in the middle of town. But look for jenever too, the juniper spirit that gin came from, drunk cold in small glasses, with dozens of flavours behind the bar in the specialist places.

One Ghent institution worth knowing: at a certain bar on the Vrijdagmarkt, ordering the beer that comes in the very large glass means handing over one of your shoes as a deposit, which is then hoisted to the ceiling in a basket. It is not a tourist gimmick invented recently; they have been doing it a long time.

Many kitchens close between lunch and dinner, roughly two until six, so a late lunch needs planning. The Patershol, the old lanes north of the castle, is where a lot of the good restaurants are, and it is worth booking at weekends. And the fries stand is a serious institution: order them with a sauce, eat them standing up, and do not call them French.

Ghent is compact and best seen on foot between meals, the three towers in a row, the Graslei quays, the castle in the middle of the city. A city game gives you a route of puzzles through it and explains each stop as you reach it, which is a good way to fill the gap between a large lunch and dinner.

Not sure how it works? Read how to play first.

Waterzooi at lunch, a walk through the old centre, cuberdons on the way, stoverij at night. Want help planning a day for a group? Get in touch. Going on to the coast? Our guide to the quiet corners of Bruges is half an hour by train.