Brussels

Brussels is a city that takes a little time to read. The first impression — EU institutions, grey skies, a centre that empties on weekends — doesn't tell the full story. Spend a day or two moving through its neighbourhoods and a different city reveals itself: one with extraordinary architecture, a serious food culture, and a talent for producing things — beer, chocolate, comics, surrealist art — that the rest of the world has quietly adopted as its own.

The Grand-Place is the natural starting point and one of the most theatrical public squares in Europe. The gilded guild houses that ring it were rebuilt after French bombardment in 1695 and have stood largely unchanged since, their facades competing in elaborateness the way their owners once competed in commerce. Come at night when the crowds thin and the floodlights pick out the gold leaf; it is one of those rare spaces that delivers on its reputation.

The neighbourhoods around the centre are where Brussels earns its character. Saint-Gilles is the Art Nouveau quarter — Victor Horta's own house is now a museum, and the streets around it are lined with façades of wrought iron, curved glass, and organic stonework that look like nothing built anywhere else. Ixelles runs south with a more bohemian register: the Flagey square, the Matongé district, and a Saturday market at Place du Châtelain that is as good a reason to visit as any museum. Uccle, further out, has the quiet parks and tree-lined streets of a city that knows how to pace itself.

The food in Brussels is better than its reputation and worse than it should be only because the reputation is so low to begin with. Mussels steamed with white wine, shallots, and a handful of parsley; frites from a roadside friture, cooked twice in beef fat and served in a paper cone; a plate of waterzooi in a tiled brasserie that has changed its menu approximately never. The beer list in any decent café runs to dozens of options, and the difference between a well-kept gueuze and a mediocre one is reason enough to ask before ordering. For chocolate, skip the tourist-facing shops on the main boulevards and find a smaller chocolatier in one of the residential neighbourhoods — the work is often better and the prices more honest.

The Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts complex holds one of the strongest collections of Flemish painting in the world, with Bruegel and Rubens alongside a dedicated Magritte museum that traces his career from the early commercial work to the fully formed surrealism that made him famous. The Atomium, built for the 1958 World's Fair, is worth the trip to Laeken not for any deep cultural reason but because it is genuinely strange — a molecule of iron enlarged 165 billion times, still standing improbably on the edge of the city.