Esco*Bar, at Quellinstraat 32, takes its name from the second surname of Vicky Calderon Escobar, who runs it. Her father is from Chile, and his country supplies the décor. When the travel magazine June wrote about it in June 2017, it had been open for about six and a half years, which puts the first coffee at the end of 2010 or the start of 2011. It still opens six days a week and closes on Sundays, and reviews dated August 2026 show it still trading.
The address is a short walk from Antwerp Central Station, the railway cathedral. Louis Delacenserie’s terminal went up between 1895 and 1905; its dome earned it the nickname spoorwegkathedraal. A rebuilding that began in 1998 dug two levels of platforms beneath it, 7 and 18 metres below the street, and the first through trains ran on 25 March 2007, at a cost of €765 million for the works and tunnels. Esco*Bar opened a few years later, on the Quellinstraat, with a garden behind it.
The living room
The Boho Guide, which visited around 2018, described the interior as one big living room: Spanish signs, family photographs and traditional Chilean mate pots on the shelves. The writer could not find mate on the menu. That is a missed opportunity, if a small one. Mate is the national drink of Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay, and in Chile it is drunk mainly in the central and southern regions, by many rural Chileans and especially in Magallanes, Aysén and Chiloé. It is served in a gourd and drunk through a bombilla, a metal straw that doubles as a sieve, and it is a rich source of caffeine, so it would not even be off-topic in a coffee house.
Behind the room is a garden, and when the weather is good, the doors to it are opened; locals recommending the café on Airbnb, 35 of them at the last count, describe a small garden out back, a cosy room, South American-style food and very nice owners.
What is served
Breakfast and lunch, from morning until the doors close. In 2017 June listed composed brunches from €4 to €15, or a menu you assemble yourself, and noted that lunch is served too. The Boho Guide singled out the pies, the white hot chocolate and the number of vegetarian dishes. Reviews on Tripadvisor name the smoked salmon with scrambled eggs, a salmon and avocado sandwich, bacon with scrambled eggs and avocado, granola with fruit and yoghurt, a salad with scampi, vegetarian burgers and the homemade lemonade, which one reviewer recommends highly.
Esco*Bar should be judged as a lunch room rather than a coffee bar, and it does well by that measure: what reviewers remember, years apart, is the salmon, the lemonade and the pies, not the espresso. There is one complaint worth passing on. A reviewer was charged €0.50 for a spoonful of honey and another €0.50 for milk in a coffee, which is the sort of line on a bill that people remember longer than the food. One couple’s bill for two, flat white included, came to €31.40.
Fifteen years on the Quellinstraat
Esco*Bar does not answer its online critics. Its Tripadvisor listing is unclaimed, so nobody from the café replies to the reviews, though it keeps its own website for coffee and lunch on the Quellinstraat. The press has found it anyway. June put it on a list of six favourite brunch addresses in 2017, and a Flemish guest blog for the holiday-rental site Belvilla repeated the recommendation in 2022. Tripadvisor gives the hours as 8:30 to 18:00 from Monday to Saturday; in 2017 June had it opening at nine. Either way it is a daytime business.
An earlier version of this page promised a brunch with champagne and a garden with ten tables. Neither could be confirmed, and both have been left out. The garden exists; the number of tables in it is for the reader to count.
Sunday is the one day the living room is closed.
Esco*Bar
- Address: Quellinstraat 32, 2018 Antwerp
- Opened: end of 2010 or early 2011
- Who runs it: Vicky Calderon Escobar
- Hours: Monday to Saturday, 8:30 to 18:00; closed on Sundays
- Price: Brunches listed at €4 to €15 in 2017
- Getting there: a short walk from Antwerpen-Centraal station
- Why it works: a lunch room with a garden, a short walk from the station
