Wine in the City

The bottle reaches the pass first

A bottle comes off the shelf before the plate is fixed. Eddy Münster, chef and owner at Wine in the City in Jette, built the restaurant from that order of work: wine first, then the cooking that can stand beside it. His route to this station did not run in a straight professional line. Ceria hotel school gave him the technical base, but the house in Jette grew from a pause at home and a return to hospitality by another door. He has said that he had stopped cooking and sold his things for the birth of his second child. What followed began as a sommelier’s business and wine shop, then widened into a restaurant.

That sequence still matters in the room. Münster works as chef and owner, but the cellar is not background stock for a menu already written. It sets the terms of the kitchen. The food is shaped for the bottle, not corrected by it after service begins. His Mastercook of Belgium title sits beside a practice that is less about display than about the exchange between plate, glass, and table. The signature burrata marbrée à l’huile fumée belongs to that logic: a dish with enough shape to hold attention, and enough openness to let the wine speak back.

A shop shelf used as the list

The wine program is the working method here. Wine in the City operates as restaurant, wine bar, and wine shop, with guests choosing bottles directly from the shelves rather than through a conventional list. That turns the act of pairing into a bench-side conversation. The bottle is handled, read, carried to the table; the kitchen then answers with plates built for sharing, international in reference and direct in construction.

Michelin has noted the house for shareable tapas with a creative, international edge, including slow-baked cod in sea lavender. The technique is quiet but exacting: fish cooked slowly enough to keep its line, seasoning drawn toward an aromatic herb rather than pushed into weight. The broader menu follows the same discipline. Münster’s cooking is described by the house as creative, fresh, and lively, and the room’s best rhythm comes when that freshness meets the cellar’s range. There is no need to turn the wine into ceremony. The shelves do part of the teaching.

The counter below the shop

The dining space sits inside the wine shop’s compact base, so the room keeps the feel of a working cellar brought close to the table. Bottles remain within reach. Labels catch the eye from the wall while plates move through the pass, and the counter carries the mixed pace of retail and service: a bottle selected to drink now, another set aside to take home, a dish landing between the two gestures.

Place Reine Astrid gives the house a neighborhood scale rather than a grand one. That suits Münster’s method. The room does not separate the buyer from the diner, or the sommelier’s question from the chef’s answer. A guest can read the shelves and then taste the consequences of that choice a few minutes later. The craft here is in the joinery, in making shop, bar, and kitchen share one pulse without flattening any of them.

The pairing remains the point

Münster’s own language for the table is plain: “For us, shared cuisine is not just a way of sitting at the table. It is a philosophy, a way of life.” The line explains why the place resists a neat separation between commerce and cooking. Wine selling brought him back toward the stove, and the stove now gives the cellar its daily test.

There is no announced handover or next opening attached to the house. At Wine in the City, a bottle is taken from the shelf, a plate is shaped to meet it, and burrata marbrée à l’huile fumée crosses the room.