SPEK & BOONEN

Rue Blaes / Blaesstraat 155, 1000 Bruxelles / Brussel

Plein-air certified butcher · House-made charcuterie

Meat you can trace. It comes from a farm or a nature reserve we can name, and we butcher and prepare it here in the shop, every day.

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Spek & Boonen shopfront on Rue Blaes, the Marolles

Whole animal

We buy full carcasses. Every cut, nose to tail.

Free-range

Exclusively free-range, from family farms and nature reserves.

Handmade

Charcuterie, sausages, pâté: made fresh daily in our shop.

What we offer

BeefFancy butchers sell beef bred for the plate. Ours is grazed for the land.
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PorkOutdoor pigs, and everything we make from them.
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LambOne co-operative, lamb all year round. Ours get more time than the trade gives them.
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Poultry & GamePoultry all year. Game for as long as the season runs.
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CharcuterieWe are not reinventing charcuterie, just making it without the tricks.
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CheeseOne farm in the Kempen, a hundred and forty cheeses. Made by the other Boonens. No relation, we checked.
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The farmer knows the animal. We know the farmer.

Laying kilishi by hand on the drying racks

Bjorn Boonen (born 1977) grew up in the Limburg countryside. As a child he already joined his parents when they drove to Ciney to buy beef. Dissatisfied with the ubiquitous Belgian Blue breed and equally bland pork, he began experimenting with alternative breeds and charcuterie preparations during his career as a chef. Spek & Boonen is what came of that.

Bjorn

Frequently asked

Why is the meat more expensive than at the supermarket?
For the kind of meat we sell, whole-carcass, certified, farm-direct, we're actually among the cheapest. We don't compete with the supermarket: that meat is industrial, ours isn't. The farmer raises around 200 pigs a year, not 20,000, and we pay him roughly double per kilo what an industrial buyer does. At our price, the farmer makes a living. The supermarket's price is lower because the farmer gets less. That's the whole difference.
Where does the meat actually come from?
Pork from the Porc Plein Air scheme in the Walloon Ardennes, with Porc Fermier topping up popular cuts. Beef from Galloway cattle grazing in Natuurpunt nature reserves in Flanders. Lamb, certified organic, from one co-operative of farmers around Virton, in the Gaume, where it is also slaughtered. Poultry from Label Rouge producers in the Landes forest, in the south-west of France. Each one has a cert page on this site that walks through the conditions and the auditor.
Do you have a webshop?
Not yet. You can order ahead for pickup: use the enquiry form, and we'll tell you when it's ready. A webshop is coming, but slower than we'd like, for an honest reason: we buy whole animals, so there are only so many entrecôtes on any given week's animal, and an online shop has to know that before you click order. We'd rather open it late than promise a cut we don't have.

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What we hear

Super good butchery with the best possible location. The butcher understands meat and is passionate about it. Extremely difficult to find something like that in Brussels where most meat is covered in sauce or pre marinated to cover the real quality of it. She’s also super friendly.
Carlos · August 2025
Occasional customer when passing through Brussels, the meat is superb! Tasty cuts and super friendly butchers with very good advice. The prices per kilo match the quality, but they are worth it: better 150 g here than 200 g at the same price elsewhere, for the taste alone.
Paul · July 2025 · translated from French
The best butcher shop in the capital. The meat is sublime, the staff kind, attentive and always ready to give very useful advice. Special mention for the Angus beef, the cordon bleus and the house-made sausages, simply the best in the world. Prices are very fair for the quality on offer. The only problem: now I struggle to buy meat when I go home to Tuscany!
Giulia · June 2025 · translated from French

Checked · third party

What you can check

What the press writes

“Bjorn Boonen makes everything from scratch, including the most wonderful sausages in Belgium.”

Christine Doublet (Le Fooding), Sabato · 2024 · translated from Dutch

“A plein-air certified butcher's shop, to our knowledge the only one in Belgium.”

Le Vif Weekend · 2022 · translated from French

What you can check→

Visit us

Closed

opens today at 10:00

MondayClosed
TuesdayClosed
Wednesday10:00 - 19:00
Thursday10:00 - 19:00
Friday10:00 - 19:00
Saturday10:00 - 18:00
Sunday10:00 - 16:00

Sun 1 Nov: All Saints

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Order ahead. We cut fresh.