Why Antwerp should be your next city break

In a sleepy side street around the corner from Centraal Station, there’s a restaurant I return to whenever I’m in Antwerp. From the outside it doesn’t look like much – a perfunctory shopfront, more like a takeaway café – but inside it’s charming, like eating in someone’s home. Welcome to Hoffy’s, a cosy Yiddish enclave renowned for comforting, nourishing cuisine in the centre of this flamboyant, unruly city.

For me, this kosher restaurant sums up the spirit of Antwerp, a cultural crossroads since the Middle Ages, a refuge for outsiders of every sort. It’s run by the Hoffman brothers, three big amiable men with long grey beards, and it was founded by their parents, who came here in 1945 to make a fresh start after the Holocaust. They opened a fish shop on Lange Kievistraat and then this restaurant. The fish shop is still there, right across the street, still going strong.