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Location: Rue des Alexiens 55, 1000 Bruxelles
Venue Type: Belgian Café / Historic Venue
Year of Inscription: 2017 (Founder Member)
Top 100 Bar In Europe: 2019 / 2020 / 2021 / 2025
2025 WINNER
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| EBG Rating: | 9.7/10 |
| Choice/ Quality of Drinks | ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ Revamped beers from Verschueren and Brasserie De La Senne. Back bar is reasonably stocked for mixers, shots, and non-beer alternatives. |
| Style/ Décor | ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ Medieval / Arty, with wrought iron window guards, chunky furniture and faded artwork and nik naks on the wall. Lots of browns, golds and blacks. |
| Atmosphere/ Character | ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ Very characterful and distinctive venue, as the net curtains block the outside and make the place feel clandestine and bunker like. The pantry-style backroom adds a further aspect. Bar area also unusual. Hugely atmospheric whether quiet or busy. |
| Amenities/ Events | ❤️❤️❤️ Small selection of cold food, snacks, deli options, etc. |
| Value For Money | ❤️❤️❤️ Although still central prices, they are fairer now and in line with the superior products on offer. |
| Description | Brussels centre is so heaving with tourists that it can be difficult to find the little nooks and crannies locals know about and still flock to. There is always a lively internationalism about Brussels nevertheless, but it is still vital the city expresses its own traditions at the same time, otherwise why invite people there? You don’t have to venture too far out of the old town until a few of these pubs and bars start to appear. La Fleur en Papier Dore combines several crucial constituents that make a great pub. The style and décor goes for a vintage aesthetic, the wall covered in antiquey framed artwork, leaning towards medievalism and floral romanticism overall. Not always comfortable bed fellows and yet it is all tied together cohesively, and it feels permanent rather than thrown together on a whim over a weekend. The place is one man’s labour of love, Gérard van Bruaene who curated a pub so magnificent it was the meeting place for Magritte and the surrealist set. After his death the place slowly became threadless and eventually ended in bankruptcy in 2006. After a few attempts to revive the pub, Covid struck and there were serious concerns it would ever re-open. Mercifully, the guys that run Brasserie Verschueren stepped in and revived the place! Plonk yourself down on one of the bench seats, get warm and cosy and enjoy the atmospheric surroundings. The pub is at once decorous and fussy while at the same time really down-to-earth. If you look at anything below hip height, it’s simple tables, an old tiled floor and plenty of wood. It has a very homely living room area, precisely the sort that always scores highly with me. Once the front door closes the place is contained, the front windows frosted and stained glass so while it lets plenty of light in, you feel detached from the world outside. If you weren’t on holiday and simply needed a place to slowly recline and dissolve into, you could hardly make a better choice than this pub. As referenced above, this is not as touristy a place, although it does receive a few keen travellers such as myself, and there appears to be a couple of hostels nearby so the crowd is a healthy mixture of both locals and people enjoying it for their first time. Due to the new association with Verschueren, the beers have been revamped, a genuinely excellent selection at perfectly reasonable prices, elevating the place to a near mythical level. |
