Sainte-Catherine & Fish Market

Place Sainte-Catherine is Brussels' seafood quarter — a long rectangular square that was originally a dock on the now-covered Senne River, where fishing boats unloaded their North Sea catch for the city's markets. The dock is long gone (buried under the square in the 19th century), but the seafood tradition survives in the restaurants that line both sides and serve some of the best fish and shellfish in a landlocked city that somehow eats like a port town.

The seafood stands on the square — particularly the legendary Noordzee/Mer du Nord, a standing-room-only fish bar where you eat raw oysters, shrimp croquettes, and fried calamari from paper plates while standing on the sidewalk — are Brussels at its most democratically delicious. The restaurant prices around Sainte-Catherine are higher than the city average, but the quality of the seafood — much of it arriving daily from the Belgian coast and Dutch auctions — justifies the premium.

The square is anchored by the Sainte-Catherine Church (a 19th-century replacement of a medieval church) and bordered by the Tour Noire (Black Tower), a rare surviving fragment of Brussels' 13th-century city wall that looks utterly incongruous next to the surrounding modern buildings. The neighbourhood surrounding the square — narrow streets of Art Nouveau and Art Deco buildings, Belgian pubs, and the increasingly trendy Dansaert quarter — is the most walkable and liveable part of central Brussels, and an evening of seafood, beer, and canal-side wandering is one of the city's great pleasures.