Independent restaurant owners in Ghent: an online menu in your own colours

The city’s survey counts 1,445 horeca venues in Ghent in 2024, against 1,954 shops. Places to eat make up 60.1% of them, while the share of bars and cafés fell from 31.8% in 2014 to 21.4% in 2024.¹

With the Province of East Flanders, the city regularly measures the horeca on offer in its districts and tells chains from independents. In the eight districts it tracks, 749 of the 814 venues were independent in 2025. Chains grew there from 24 in 2008 to 65, 29 of them in the Gent Central district.^1,2

For these surveys the city tracks eight ‘sfeergebieden’ (character areas): Linkeroever, Gent Central, Côté Culture, Overpoort, East District, Quartier Sint-Pieters, SoGo and Rond Sint-Jacobs. In Overpoort, 60% of commercial premises were horeca venues in 2025, the highest share of the eight; SoGo has the largest number, 143.^1,2

Ghent launched ‘donderdag veggiedag’: a meat-free dish every Thursday, in the city’s schools among other places. Visit Gent adds that Ghent has more vegan and vegetarian places, proportionally, than many other large cities.³

On the traditional side, Visit Gent lists waterzooi, a regional chicken or fish soup, beef stoverij, Ganda ham, dried for at least ten months, Tierenteyn mustard and cuberdons, small purple cones filled with syrup. Gruut beer is brewed with a medieval herb mix instead of hops.⁴

According to Toerisme Vlaanderen, two visitors in three to Flanders’ art cities come from abroad, and Ghent’s St Bavo’s Cathedral was the second most visited attraction in Flanders in 2025. In East Flanders, 1,588,413 of the 3,101,467 tourist nights of 2025 were spent by non-residents, led by visitors from the Netherlands, Germany, the United Kingdom, France and the United States.^5,6

Visit Gent’s page on vegetarian places comes in five versions: Dutch, English, French, German and Spanish.³

In Ghent any use of public ground needs a permit. For a terrace you first need the horeca certificate (horeca-attest), and the processing time only starts once that file is complete. You apply online. The city then allows 30 days from admissibility, meaning the site visit and the signing of the form, after which the mayor and aldermen decide.⁷

Since 16 April 2022 the city has taxed the whole terrace, with a 20% reduction on the area of the temporary terrace. The rate depends on the location, the period (annual or pop-up), the area and any patio heaters. Windbreaks, awnings and flooring fall outside the terrace permit and need an environmental permit, and several central squares and streets have their own layout plans.⁷

The team in charge, Innames Publieke Ruimte, is at Woodrow Wilsonplein 1 and answers on 09 266 79 90 and at [email protected].⁷