The Best of Brussels When the Season Turns

There is a version of Brussels that most summer visitors never find. It arrives when the school year starts, when the terraces empty slightly, when the galleries reopen after August closures and the city remembers what it is when it is not performing for tourists. The temperature drops just enough to make walking comfortable. The evenings are longer than they feel. The restaurants fill with people who actually live here.

It is, by most measures, the best time to be in Brussels. And the Sainte-Catherine quarter is where it tends to be most apparent.

The Beer — A Festival on the Doorstep

The Wanderlust Beer Festival takes over the Place du Marché aux Poissons a two-minute walk from Made in Catherine on 12 and 13 September. It is organised by the Brussels Beer Project and brings together thirteen breweries from nine different countries for two days of tasting, conversation and the kind of drinking that is about paying attention rather than volume.

Belgian craft beer has been one of the more serious stories in European brewing over the past decade. What began as a handful of breweries experimenting beyond the traditional styles has grown into a scene with genuine international standing. The Wanderlust is a good place to understand why, the range across nine countries makes the comparisons instructive, and the setting on the old fish market square, with the canal a short walk away, is one of the more pleasant outdoor venues the city offers.

The Brussels Beer Project itself is five minutes from the hotel along the canal. It is worth visiting separately from the festival, the permanent bar gives a clearer picture of what the brewery does on its own terms, with a rotating selection of styles that tends toward the experimental.

The Art — Eighty Venues, Four Days

Brussels Art Week runs from 10 to 13 September across eighty venues galleries, foundations, public institutions and artist studios spread across the Brussels region. Many are free to enter. The ones that are not are generally worth paying for.

What makes the event worth knowing about is not its scale but its geography. Brussels has a contemporary art scene that is larger and more serious than its international reputation suggests partly because the city has never been particularly good at promoting itself, and partly because the institutions here operate quietly and well without requiring much attention. Brussels Art Week is one of the few moments when the whole thing becomes visible at once.

The programme is organised by neighbourhood across the four days. The centre of Brussels, the area within reach of Sainte-Catherine, is the focus of Saturday 12 September. It is the day to build an itinerary around the quarter, moving between spaces that are normally visited separately, covering ground on foot through streets that are worth taking slowly.

The Sablon — Sound, Light and Gothic Stone

From 12 September through to 25 October, the Church of Notre-Dame du Sablon hosts Genesis, a new immersive sound and light show produced by Eonarium Experiences. The show works with the architecture of a Gothic church whose origins date to 1308, using the nave, the vaulted ceilings and the stained glass as the surface for a composition telling the story of Creation across seven chapters.

The Sablon is twenty minutes from Made in Catherine on foot, through the Dansaert quarter, past the Bourse, up through the Marolles. The walk is as good as the destination. The neighbourhood itself, with its antique dealers, chocolatiers and wine bars on streets that have not changed much in several decades, is one of the more rewarding in Brussels for an afternoon without a fixed plan.

The Sablon Design Market runs on the same weekend as Brussels Art Week, 13 to 15 September on the Place du Grand Sablon with exhibitors from Belgium and France bringing vintage leather goods, mid-century furniture and luxury accessories to a square that already does this kind of thing well.

The Neighbourhood — Chez Jacques and the Long Lunch

Chez Jacques has been on the same corner near Made in Catherine since 1936. It is the kind of restaurant that does not need to explain itself, Belgian-French cooking, a fish and seafood menu that changes with what is available, meat dishes that belong to a tradition of doing simple things properly, all of it served in the atmosphere of a vieux estaminet bruxellois that has survived every wave of renovation around it.

It is the right place for a long lunch after a morning at Brussels Art Week, or for a dinner at the end of a day that started at the Wanderlust. The kind of address that exists in every good city but is harder to find than it should be.

For the full programme of events and our neighbourhood recommendations this month, download our Made in Gazette September 2026