Most chocolate shops on a high street keep their kitchen out of sight. The Chocolate Line, at Meir 50, puts it in an 18th-century palace kitchen with its original stove restored and working, and lets customers watch the pralines being made. Dominique Persoone opened the shop in 2010 on the ground floor of the Paleis op de Meir, eighteen years after the first Chocolate Line in Bruges. Antwerp’s shop sells in two front rooms of the right wing, decorated with 18th-century wall paintings, and makes its chocolate in the old tiled kitchen behind them.

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A palace on the Meir

The building is older than the business by 265 years. The merchant Johan-Alexander van Susteren had three houses on the Meir demolished to make room for it in 1745, and the architect Jan Pieter van Baurscheit the Younger designed it. Van Susteren died childless in 1764, before it was finished. Napoleon bought it for 170,000 francs and had it turned into four apartments in the Empire style, then never slept there: by the time they were ready he had been sent to Elba. Under the Belgian kings it became a royal residence in the city. Leopold I received Queen Victoria there twice, and Leopold II added the Hall of Mirrors. The palace had no toilet until his reign. “Modern sanitation was only installed in the period of Leopold II,” Helena ten Berge of the heritage body Herita told VRT in 2021, when the upper floors opened to visitors with their Empire furniture, bidet chair included.

King Baudouin gave the palace up in 1969. Restoration began in 2001, and Herita, which manages it, reopened the state rooms for a few weeks in 2013 and again in 2021. In March 2025 it relaunched the first floor as a venue for receptions and weddings; Jeroen Bryon of Herita called the building a “mini-Versailles in the middle of the city”. Through all of it the chocolate shop has stayed where it is, on the ground floor, which in 2025 it shared with a coffee and tea house.

The shock-o-latier

Persoone, born in 1968, learnt to cook at the Ter Groene Poorte catering school in Bruges, not in Paris, as an earlier version of this page claimed. Paris came later, on a trip in search of the perfect pain au chocolat, and it left him with a question: “Why do artisans from Bruges only create the classic gift-boxes for grannies?” In 1992 he and his wife, Fabienne De Staercke, opened The Chocolate Line on the Simon Stevinplein in Bruges; the company’s own website covers both shops, in Bruges and on the Meir. His answer to the gift box is in the counter at Meir 50. In 2014 the French critic Gilles Pudlowski found a ganache called Miss Piggy, with crisp bacon and quinoa, beside one of beetroot and hazelnut and one called Marrakech, with mint leaf. Locals were initially shocked by the smoked eel and the cauliflower, the Brussels Times reported in 2022; opinions changed after Mick Jagger came in.

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The Rolling Stones came to him too. Ronnie Wood and Charlie Watts asked Persoone to mark an anniversary of the band in a different way, and his answer was the chocolate shooter, which the American travel site Gadling found on the counter in Antwerp in 2011 and described as “a plastic catapult that launches little piles of powdered chocolate into both your nostrils”. The powder is cocoa from Dominica with ginger and mint. Persoone has also made a chocolate dress for Miss Belgium, has sat on the creative think tank of The Fat Duck, and wrote Cocoa, the roots of chocolate, named best book of 2009 by the Gourmand Cookbook Awards.

Nine times no

The showman has a partner who runs the numbers. De Staercke is the company’s co-managing director, and in 2017 she explained the arrangement to the West Flanders business magazine W-Vl Werkt. “When Dominique comes up with ten new and spectacular ideas, I say no nine times,” she said. Persoone, for his part, calls himself a craftsman who may be the worst businessman in the world. In 2016 the company processed about 65 tonnes of chocolate with 36 staff and two shops of its own, in Bruges and Antwerp; by 2022 it was about 70 tonnes and some 40 people, and their son Julius Persoone, then 22, had joined the production side. “Developing new products is almost chemistry and physics together,” he told the Voka members’ magazine Ondernemers.

Keeping the kitchen in view is the best decision in the building. A palace on Antwerp’s main shopping street could easily have become a souvenir counter; with the stove in use and the pralines made a few metres from the till, the ground floor of the Paleis op de Meir is still doing what a palace kitchen was built for.

A chocolate city

Persoone has an opinion about Antwerp, too. In August 2017, when plans for a chocolate experience next to Centraal station were announced, he told Gazet van Antwerpen that the city had every right to call itself a chocolate city. “But they don’t make enough of it. They hang on to the idea of the biscuit city,” he said. “While the port has the biggest cocoa warehouses in the world.” He gave the newcomers the benefit of the doubt. The project opened in 2019 as Chocolate Nation, the chocolate museum opposite Centraal station, and counted its millionth visitor in October 2025. The two make a fair pair: the museum tells the story of the bean from the plantation to the port, and the palace kitchen on the Meir shows what one chocolatier does with it afterwards.

Thousands of people walk past the palace on a busy day, VRT reported in 2021, and few know what is behind the façade. The rest of the street is covered in our guide to shopping on the Meir, Antwerp’s main shopping street. Number 50 has walls painted in the 18th century, a stove restored to work and a ganache with bacon in it. It opens seven days a week, which is more time than Napoleon ever spent there.