Belgium, hand-verified: how 160 "100% vegan" listings turned into 79 we can stand behind

Belgium is the first country I have manually walked through end to end on PlantsPack. Every listing tagged "100% vegan" got opened, checked against the venue's own website, cross-referenced against The Bruges Vegan, HappyCow, Visit Brussels, Resto.be and Greenplace, and either kept, demoted, or archived. This post is a record of what I actually found, the parts of the database that were wrong before, and where the directory ended up after the work.

Update — 11 May 2026: Since this post went live on 9 May, the Belgium fully-vegan count has grown from 79 to 94 — almost entirely thanks to readers on Facebook and Reddit flagging venues I had missed. Every suggestion went through the same hand-verification bar (venue website, secondary source, current operating status) before being added. The headline audit story below (160 → 79) is the original baseline; the 15 new additions sit on top of it.

It is also the first in what I am committing to as a country-by-country series. I am building this directory because the existing options for vegan travel discovery either inflate their counts to look bigger, or have stale entries from places that closed during covid. I want one that vegans can actually trust. Belgium is country one. I will keep posting these as I work through the rest.

What the database said before I started

On 4 May 2026, the Belgium snapshot looked like this:

600 active places
160 tagged "100% vegan"
54 tagged "mostly vegan"
268 tagged "vegan-friendly"
118 tagged "vegan options"

That 160 number is what I want to talk about. PlantsPack pulls a lot of its base data from OpenStreetMap and similar open community datasets. OSM is great for coordinates, addresses and basic categories, but the diet:vegan=yes tag is set by individual contributors over a span of decades, often with no second pair of eyes. On top of that, an earlier classifier on our side had read OSM tags and venue descriptions and promoted around 95 places to "100% vegan" based on language signals that turned out to be hallucinated or mistranslated. None of that was malicious. It was just data that nobody had checked one place at a time.

So the 160 figure was a claim, not a verified fact. The whole point of this audit was to find out how many of those 160 venues are genuinely fully vegan, currently open, and have a real address.

How I checked each one

For every place tagged 100% vegan I did three things:

Open the venue's own website or social. If the menu lists eggs, cheese, fish, or "halloumi alternative" it is not 100% vegan. If the about page says "we are vegetarian" or "plant-based with some dairy", same answer. Demote.
Cross-check at least one secondary source. The Bruges Vegan is the most thorough Belgian vegan blog I know of and they have firsthand visits to most of the venues that matter. HappyCow is fine for confirming whether something exists, less reliable for current operating status. Visit Brussels and Visit Leuven city guides were useful for the bigger names.
Sanity-check current operating status. Several venues that still appear on every "best vegan in X" round-up have actually closed in the last two years. If two independent sources say it closed, I archive it.

Anything that survived all three was promoted to "admin reviewed" verification level. Anything that did not survive got demoted, renamed, or archived with a reason.

I want to be specific about what this work is and is not. I have not personally eaten at all 79 venues. I have personally been to a handful. The verification here is not "I had dinner there last week", it is "the venue's own website unambiguously says they serve no animal products, current sources confirm they are still open, the address geocodes to a real building". For places I had any doubt on, the level stayed lower until I could nail it down.

Where the 160 went

After the pass:

79 verified fully vegan (down from 160) — and as of 11 May 2026 the verified count has since grown to 94 through ongoing additions
The remaining 81 were split between honest demotions to mostly-vegan or vegan-friendly, places I found to be permanently closed and archived, and places I could not cleanly verify either way

A few of the more interesting demotions and removals:

Veni Vidi Vegan, Charleroi was Wallonia's only fully-vegan venue on paper. Reported permanently closed. Archived.
Organic Vision, Ostend was the city's only fully-vegan listing on multiple round-ups. Closed in 2023. Archived.
Greenway, Leuven keeps showing up on travel blogs. Closed. The Ghent location is still open and stays.
Cookiele, Antwerp was tagged 100% vegan by an earlier import. Their own website describes them as an American-style cookie shop with "some vegan options" alongside dairy and egg cookies. Honest classification is vegan-friendly, not fully vegan. Demoted.

That last one is worth pausing on. PlantsPack focuses on the vegan experience, not the vegetarian one. A venue that is 100% vegetarian but uses eggs and dairy across the menu does not belong on the platform, even though I respect what those businesses are doing in their own lane. The tier line that matters is whether a vegan walks in and can actually eat, and whether their dish was prepared in a kitchen that handles animal products in some form. The audit consistently weighted that line strictly.

What's actually here, by city

The 79 verified fully-vegan venues cluster heavily in Flanders. Wallonia outside Liège currently has zero. The full Flemish/Brussels density:

Ghent - 19 venues. The clear leader. Heavy presence from WAY Plantbased Bakehouse (4 branches), plus Le Botaniste, Plant A Pizza, Soul Kitchen, Lekker GEC and the DreamCATchers cat-rescue café. If you only have one Belgian city to visit, this is the easy answer.
Antwerp - 11 venues. Spritz is the city's first fully-vegan Italian. Hart, HUMM, Pura Vida Tacos, and IceLab NiceCream Creations, the Benelux's first fully plant-based gelateria.
Brussels - 11 venues. Verdō is the capital's first fully-vegan brasserie. Both Lil Bao locations, Kitsune Burgers, Le Botaniste, and Lucifer Lives round out the cluster.
Leuven - 6 venues. Punching above its weight for a 100K-population city: Het Strand, Life Bar, Tabi Loo, and Pepas, which describes itself as Belgium's first fully vegan frituur. Friet culture, fully plant-based.
Bruges - 4 venues.
Mechelen - 4 venues.
Saint-Gilles (Brussels commune) - 4 venues. L'Alchimiste, TerTer, Mo Mo, and the Archie wine bar.
Liège - 3 venues, including Bastille La Pâtisserie Vegan.
One or two each in Genk, Ixelles, Hasselt, Kortrijk, Wijnegem, Diest, Wetteren and a handful more.

Single full list and map: plantspack.com/vegan-places/belgium.

A few things that surprised me

The Flanders / Wallonia split is sharper than I expected. The Flemish part of Belgium has roughly 60% of the country's population but holds north of 90% of the verified fully-vegan venues. Mons (~95K pop), Tournai (~70K), Charleroi (~200K) and Namur all have zero. This is not a missing-data problem on my side. I went looking for fully-vegan venues in those cities specifically. They genuinely do not seem to exist yet.

"Best vegan in X" lists rot fast. Several Belgian round-ups from 2024 and 2025 still feature venues that closed in 2023. If you are using one of those guides on a trip this year, double-check the venue is still open before you walk over.

Belgium has a fully-vegan frituur. I did not know this. Pepas in Leuven serves the full Belgian friet menu, plant-based, and they are completely upfront on their site about being the country's first.

Belgium has two fully-vegan restaurants in the Michelin Guide. Worth being precise about which is which:

Humus x Hortense in Ixelles holds a Michelin Star plus a Michelin Green Star. Chefs Nicolas Decloedt and Caroline Baerten have been doing what Michelin calls "botanical fine dining" since long before plant-based fine dining was a category anywhere else.
And/or in Antwerp is a Michelin Selected listing (in the guide, no Star yet). Chef Karen Shu, NYC-trained with Filipino roots, has won "best vegan restaurant in Belgium" three years running, and the kitchen leans on local foraging and a no-/low-waste philosophy.

I cover Humus x Hortense alongside the global fully-vegan Michelin set in this writeup on Michelin's vegan-classified restaurants; the And/or addition is recent enough that the Belgian fully-vegan Michelin pair is now the most up-to-date snapshot anywhere I have seen.

The fine-dining tier outside the Michelin Guide is real too. Camionette in the Groen Kwartier of Antwerp runs a fully-vegan natural-wine and small-plates kitchen out of the Poortgebouw of the old military hospital. Verdō is the capital's first fully plant-based brasserie. Neither has a Michelin entry yet but both are clearly playing in that bracket, and they exist quietly enough that several Belgium round-up lists still miss them.

Where the directory still falls short for Belgium

Saying we are at 79 verified is also implicitly saying we are not done. Specifically:

Wallonia coverage outside Liège is genuinely thin because the venues are not there, but it could also be that I am missing small towns or specific stores. If you know one I should check, the contact form goes to me directly.
Image coverage on the verified fully-vegan tier is around 65%. A handful of venues look like placeholders because the venue's own website does not expose an OG image. Still working through these.
Reviews on Belgium pages are basically zero. Not a data-quality problem, an audience problem. The directory is small.

I would rather be honest about those gaps than pretend the country page is finished.

Why this took so long, and what is next

A country audit takes me about a week of evenings if it is a country I have not touched before. Most of that is per-venue verification: opening a website, reading their menu, checking three sources, recording the result, deciding whether to demote, archive, or keep. Belgium had 160 candidates so call it 160 small decisions plus the cleanup work around dupes, region mappings, closed places, casing inconsistencies, and 50+ new venues that other audits had missed.

Next country is up to you. I have not picked one yet. If there is a country where the existing vegan-discovery options have left you frustrated, where round-up lists are clearly stale, or where you suspect the real fully-vegan count is being either inflated or undersold, drop it in the comments and tell me why. I will read every suggestion and pick the next audit based on what comes back. The only thing I would ask is some specifics, even one or two named venues you think a directory should have, so I have a starting point.

If you want to follow these as I post them, the home page shows the most recent country writeups in the activity feed. Or just check back on the Belgium country page periodically as I add things.

If you spot a fully vegan venue I missed, an entry that looks closed, or a vegan-level that you think is wrong, the Suggest Correction button on every place page comes to me. Every correction I get back makes the next country a little easier.