Walvis, Dutch for whale, takes up the corner at Walvisstraat 1 in Zurenborg, a few steps from the Dageraadplaats. It opened in 2016 as the second café from the owners of Vitrin, the bar Michiel Thys and Kenny Aernouts started on Marnixplaats in 2011, and it serves breakfast, brunch, lunch, an apéritif and dinner from a bar in the middle of the room.

The building does most of the work. It stands on a wedge-shaped corner plot, and the practice i.s.m. architecten, which fitted it out in 2016, put windows along both sides for the full depth of the building. The bar sits at the centre with the kitchen beside it. The architects described their method as strengthening what the building already did well and throwing out the rest, and the result is a café that is lit from two streets at once.

A sister for Vitrin

The family resemblance is deliberate. The design, developed with the owners, borrows the shapes of Vitrin and changes the materials: the counter and the benches are new versions of the Marnixplaats pieces, made this time in lacquered wood and marble. The architects published the project with photographs by Luis Diaz Diaz. Visitors who have recommended it on Airbnb’s guide mention the design furniture and the light, and one admits to using it as a second office.

The menu is a day’s worth of eating. Current listings name eggs Benedict, a vegan avocado toast, shakshuka and flatbreads, with vegetarian and vegan options throughout, and one local’s advice is to order the Italian sausage with a drink. A listing puts the average spend at about €15. The café is dog-friendly, accessible by wheelchair and has high chairs, a spacious terrace and table reservations through Zenchef.

A corner with windows down both sides is the best seat a café can be given, and i.s.m. architecten were right to spend nothing on decoration that would compete with it. Vitrin lives off the view of a round square; Walvis lives off its light, and a bench in lacquered wood is all it needs to make the point.

The square and the district

Zurenborg was built quickly, and to a plan. Most of it went up between 1894 and 1906 on farmland that had belonged to an estate of the Osy family, developed by the building company Engetrim, with houses by Joseph Bascourt, who designed 25 of them, Jules Hofman and Frans Smet-Verhas. Art nouveau dominates, with neoclassical, Gothic Revival, neo-Renaissance and a cottage style borrowed from Tudor England in between. The southern half, around the Cogels-Osylei, was built for the wealthy. The northern half, around the Dageraadplaats, was built for the middle class, and that is where Walvis stands.

The district was nearly turned into something else. As car ownership grew and families moved to the suburbs, a plan in the 1960s proposed turning Zurenborg into offices. It was listed as protected urban landscape instead, many of its houses became protected monuments and subsidies helped owners restore them. The Dageraadplaats changed with it, from a neighbourhood shopping square into one of the most popular places to eat in Antwerp. Bascourt’s best-known building nearby, the 1893 rotunda at Grotehondstraat 2, now holds Dôme, the brasserie under the dome.

What comes next door

The eastern corner of Zurenborg was given to industry from the start: a bus yard, a power station, a gas works and the terminus of a regional tram line. The tram depot on the Draakplaats, built in 1890 and covering about 3,600 square metres, is now looking for a new life. AG Vespa, the city’s property company, offered it on a 36-year lease with a minimum rent of €50,000 a year, bids closing on 30 June 2026 and work possible from 1 September 2026; housing is excluded. The hall and its 200-square-metre office building are in the heritage inventory and part of a protected townscape, so whoever takes them on must renovate under the eye of the heritage and fire-safety services, keep the noise down for the neighbours and pay a property tax that recently ran to about €16,351 a year. Beside it the city is planning the Spoorpark, a linear park that is to join Zurenborg to Borgerhout by 2028.

An earlier version of this page promised book clubs, live music, Flemish stews and a café with roots as a humble neighbourhood bar. None of it could be confirmed, and the café is barely ten years old.

The only large thing about Walvis is its name, and that came with the address.