Shop by craft
Best of Ghent; search or filter for all 11
Kraanlei 79
This shop on the Kraanlei has sold Ghent's purple, cone-shaped cuberdons — the raspberry-gummy 'neuzekes', or little noses — since 1904, alongside gingerbread, pralines and old-fashioned boiled sweets. Hand-labelled jars and wood panelling mark four generations of the Temmerman family's confectionery.
Best for Cuberdons and traditional Belgian sweets
Ghent & Antwerp
Ghent and Antwerp studios cutting made-to-measure suits and wedding tailoring — fittings measured in patience, two-piece suits from about €990, and official tailor to the Royal Belgian Football Association.
Best for Wedding suits and relaxed made-to-measure tailoring.
<p>Atelier ACÀN is Belgian tailoring at conversational volume — a made-to-measure house with its flagship on Kortrijksepoortstraat in Ghent and a second atelier in Antwerp, cutting suits for men who want craft without ceremony. The style is deliberately contemporary: Scandinavian minimalism with what the house calls French nonchalance — sharp shoulders, calm colors, fits that are never tight and never loose, as happy over a T-shirt as a tie.</p><p>The process is classically bespoke in structure: consultation, cloth selection from Italian and British mills — Loro Piana and Zegna sit at the top of the book — precise measurement, then fittings until the suit disappears onto the body. Wedding suits are the house's signature commission, built months ahead around fabric, cut and the day itself; business tailoring runs alongside.</p><p>ACÀN represents the register of the atlas below the great maisons: the young regional atelier doing honest bespoke work at accessible prices, where the customer is measured over coffee rather than intimidated over marble. Ghent's tailoring address, in a country whose fashion schools taught the world — the craft practiced plainly, by appointment or by walking in.</p>
Ghent / Online
Atelier Content designs shoes and handbags in Belgium and has them handmade by small family workshops in Italy's Le Marche region, selling the finished pieces through its online shop with in-store pickup available at its Antwerp and Ghent locations. The current lineup spans sandals, moccasins and the leather Fox and Reno bag styles.
Best for Belgian-designed shoes, sandals and leather handbags handmade in Italy
Ghent / Belgium
Atelier ExC is a Ghent haute couture house making custom-fitted dresses for galas, weddings and other formal occasions, with ready-to-wear pieces and couture commissions fitted by appointment at its Sint-Amandsberg studio. Custom pieces carry a minimum three-month lead time, and the atelier was recently featured in De Tijd's Sabato fashion special.
Best for Custom-fitted gala and wedding couture at Ghent's Sint-Amandsberg studio
Ghent
Boekhandel Walry is a Ghent bookshop on Zwijnaardsesteenweg with a strong local Gent section and shelves spanning fiction, poetry, non-fiction, children's books and Spanish, Italian, French and English titles. Its Shopify webshop sells and ships books, and the shop hosts events and a reading club.
Best for Fiction, poetry, children’s books and multilingual shelves
Mageleinstraat 46
Stijn and Janique Vandenbouhede make pralines, truffles and orangettes by hand in the centre of Ghent, within sight of the city's three medieval towers. The counter runs to marzipan, mendiants, speculaas and chocolate bars alongside the filled chocolates.
Best for Artisan pralines and marzipan
Nederpolder 1
A small distillery on the Nederpolder that produces organic dry gin, aged rum and vodka in the centre of Ghent, with a bar and shop attached. Bottles and cocktails are sold on site under a Dadaist house identity.
Best for Small-batch gin and spirits
Donkersteeg 35
Roasting on Ghent's Donkersteeg since 1937, Mokabon slow-roasts fresh batches weekly under Efico Foundation-certified sourcing. Its Mysore and Dessert blends took the Golden Bean Award for Best Coffee in 2024.
Best for Weekly slow-roasted Mysore and Dessert coffee blends
Mokabon has roasted coffee on the Donkersteeg in Ghent since 1937, putting more than 85 years behind a narrow coffee bar that still sells whole beans and grounds to take home alongside cups poured on-site. The house method is a slow-roast, small-batch approach — coffee roasted fresh weekly rather than in large runs held in inventory — worked to a medium profile under a named Master Roaster rather than an automated program. Sourcing runs through the Efico Foundation, a green-coffee importer whose certification the shop attaches to its beans as a sustainability marker, alongside single-origin offerings from Ethiopia, Peru, Costa Rica, Mexico and the Dominican Republic. The two standing house blends — Mysore and Dessert — carry the shop's highest customer ratings, and both, along with a rotating Summer Blend, are sold as whole bean or ground. External recognition backs the shop's own account of its quality: Mokabon took the Golden Bean Award for Best Coffee in 2024, a competition credential rather than a self-assigned claim. Combined with a review base above 500 and a stated customer count past 15,000, Mokabon reads as a long-running neighborhood roaster that has kept pace with competitive-grade standards rather than trading only on its 1937 founding date.
Ghent / Belgium
OR Coffee Roasters was founded in 2000 by Tom Janssen, roasting out of a small coffee shop in Aalst at a time when specialty coffee was essentially unknown in Belgium — there was no established local scene or vocabulary for what the roastery was doing, only the beginning of one.
Best for Hand-roasted, solar-powered coffee in fully recyclable packaging from one
OR Coffee Roasters was founded in 2000 by Tom Janssen, roasting out of a small coffee shop in Aalst at a time when specialty coffee was essentially unknown in Belgium — there was no established local scene or vocabulary for what the roastery was doing, only the beginning of one. The coffee is hand-roasted on Probat machines, and the operation runs on solar power, an environmental commitment built into how the beans are actually produced rather than added afterward as an offset.
That same commitment extends to packaging, which is fully recyclable or biodegradable rather than following the industry-standard foil-lined bag.
Starting in 2000, years ahead of when specialty coffee reached most of Belgium, gives OR a founding claim distinct from roasteries that entered an already-established market. The solar-powered roasting and recyclable packaging aren't recent additions layered onto an old identity — they're consistent with a roastery whose founder was already working outside the mainstream from the start. For Ghent, OR represents one of the country's earliest specialty operations still running on the same hand-roasted, solar-powered model.
Ghent / Belgium
A family-run fabric house on Ghent's Vrijdagmarkt, Stoffen Artevelde has traded since Cecile Van der Beke opened it in 1967 and is now run by three generations of the same family. Its 240-square-metre store stocks more than 2,000 clothing and furnishing fabrics and opens six days a week.
Best for Fabrics, textiles, dressmaking, family-run
Ghent (several locations)
WAY Coffee Roasters supplies five Ghent locations from its own in-house roastery, selling single-origin and blended beans plus Hario, Sage and Kinto brewing gear. Workshops cover espresso, latte art, pour-over and cupping.
Best for Single-origin coffee and Hario, Sage and Kinto gear
WAY Coffee Roasters runs its own roastery behind five locations spread across Ghent — Keizerpoort, Jakobijn, Volder, Dok Noord and the book-shop pairing Volder Books — putting a specialty bar within reach of several different parts of the city rather than concentrating around one flagship. The bean side covers both single-origin and blended lots in espresso and filter grinds, with current offerings drawing on origins including Colombia and Indonesia. Equipment sits alongside the coffee as a genuine second business line: brewing gear from Hario, Sage, Kinto and Aeropress, plus Nespresso-compatible capsules for customers who want the origin without the ritual. WAY backs its retail side with an education program — workshops in espresso technique, latte art, pour-over and cupping — and a membership scheme, the Way Coffee Club, that turns repeat customers into a standing subscriber base. The five-site footprint, rather than a single destination cafe, is the clearest distinguishing shape of the business: it behaves more like a specialty-coffee chain built around one roastery than a single-shop operation, with the gear and workshop program giving each location a reason to be a stop beyond a coffee sale.
Neighbourhood walks
Area names come from each shop’s published address record; ORBIS does not invent neighbourhoods.
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