Café des Spores

The Singular Fungi Table

There are concept restaurants, and then there is Café des Spores — a place where the concept is so clearly defined, so intelligently executed, that it stops being a gimmick and becomes a genuine culinary identity. Everything on the menu is built around mushrooms. Not as a theme or a seasonal gesture, but as a fundamental commitment to the ingredient. The kitchen works with chanterelles, porcini, oyster mushrooms, black truffles, morels, and whatever the season has brought in from foraged and cultivated sources across Belgium and France.

The setting is modest in the best possible sense: a narrow, dark-wooded room on the Chaussée d'Alsemberg in Saint-Gilles, one of Brussels' most characterful inner-city communes. The chef cooks behind a counter at the far end of the room, giving the meal an understated theatre — you watch the transformation of fungi into something extraordinary without ceremony or performance. Upstairs, a mezzanine level offers views down into the kitchen action, which rewards the curious diner.

The menu changes with the seasons and the availability of produce, typically running two to five courses. Autumn brings the full weight of the offering — truffle preparations, wild porcini, chanterelles in sauces of astonishing depth. Spring and summer open up toward lighter treatments: mushroom dumplings with garlic, delicate oyster mushroom preparations with herbs and acidity. The dessert course is not an afterthought: tiramisu incorporating mushroom elements is a genuine surprise, and the boletus ice cream is among the more memorable sweet preparations in the city.

Prices are accessible for the quality on offer, making this one of Brussels' better value propositions for serious, creative cooking. Expect to spend €45–70 per person with wine. The evening service runs Tuesday through Saturday; the kitchen does not rush.

Best Occasion: First Date

Café des Spores works for a first date precisely because it is unusual. The menu provides an immediate topic of conversation — the novelty and ingenuity of each preparation, the question of what you expected versus what arrived. A fungi tasting menu creates shared experience, shared curiosity, and the kind of impressed-but-not-intimidated dynamic that the best first date venues engineer without making it obvious.

The scale of the room is also correct: intimate without being claustrophobic, with enough ambient warmth that silence, when it occurs, is comfortable rather than alarming. For solo dining, the counter seating positions you directly in view of the kitchen — the watching itself is part of the evening. The restaurant is not trying to be prestigious. It is simply very good at one thing, and the confidence of that focus communicates well across all occasions.

Related Brussels options worth knowing: humus x hortense for plant-based creative cooking, La Buvette for natural wine and small plates, and Tero for ingredient-led contemporary cooking in a similar spirit.

What to Order

The seasonal tasting menu is the correct approach — the kitchen builds each course around what is at peak quality that week, and the progression from starter through dessert shows the full range of the kitchen's thinking. In truffle season (November through February), request the menu specifically designed around black and white truffle preparations — this is when Café des Spores is at its most impressive, offering an ingredient that in other restaurants arrives as an expensive garnish, but here becomes the main event across multiple courses.

The wild mushroom soup — a deeply concentrated broth with whatever the season provides — is the dish that converts the unconvinced. The garlic-stuffed mushrooms are a classic of the menu, appearing in various seasonal iterations. If the mushroom-based dessert features tiramisu, order it: the combination of coffee, cream, and fungi in sweet application is one of the genuinely surprising things this kitchen does with reliable confidence.