Moretti

The neighbourhood restaurant, done seriously

In Hasselt, a mid-sized Flemish city that punches above its weight in restaurants per capita, the most interesting addresses tend to resist easy categorisation. Moretti, at Havermarkt 23, is one of them. It describes itself as a restaurant and wine bar, but the day-to-night format it operates — snacks and pasta at lunch, antipasti through the afternoon, a vegetable-led Belgian menu in the evening — places it closer to the trattoria tradition than to the formatted tasting-menu houses that populate the €€€ tier elsewhere in the city. The philosophy is one of continuous hospitality rather than a single, defined sitting.

That approach is relatively rare at this price point. Most restaurants in the €€€ bracket in Hasselt, including contemporaries like JER, Ogst, and De Kwizien, operate around a more structured evening service. Moretti's willingness to serve focaccia at noon and a composed ravioli dish at night within the same room signals something about how the owners understand hospitality: as a continuum, not a performance reserved for dinner guests.

Italian inflection, Belgian kitchen

The cuisine at Moretti carries Italian reference points , pasta, focaccia, antipasti, pecorino , but the evening menu is built around Belgian produce and Belgian seasonal logic. Dishes documented in the venue's record include open ravioli with radicchio, chanterelles and cream of pecorino, and smoked Oosterschelde eel with kohlrabi and vichyssoise. These are not Italian dishes with Belgian garnishes; they are Belgian dishes assembled with Italian fluency. The chanterelles and the Oosterschelde eel are both markers of serious local sourcing, and the kohlrabi-vichyssoise pairing suggests a kitchen that thinks in terms of texture and temperature as much as flavour.

This hybrid approach has a precedent in Belgian fine dining more broadly. The country's strongest restaurants, from Hof van Cleve in Kruishoutem to Boury in Roeselare, have long drawn on French technique and Northern European produce without aligning exclusively with either tradition. Moretti operates on a smaller, less formal scale than those addresses, but the instinct is recognisable: use what the region offers, organise it with craft, and resist the pull of a single national identity.

Vegetables occupy a structural role in the evening menu, not a supporting one. In a country where meat and fish have historically anchored the premium restaurant plate, that emphasis is worth noting. It aligns Moretti with a broader shift visible across Belgian restaurants where chefs trained in classical kitchens are reorienting menus around plant produce without converting to a strictly vegetarian format. Brasserie Rongese represents the more traditional pole of the local scene; Moretti sits at the other end of that axis.

The wine bar dimension

The Star Wine List recognition , ranked number one in Hasselt for both 2024 and 2025 , is the detail that sharpens Moretti's position in the competitive set. A White Star from Star Wine List indicates a wine program of meaningful depth and curation, assessed against a specific set of criteria around list quality and sommelier expertise. For a restaurant operating the trattoria format, where informality is part of the offer, carrying that level of wine recognition is unusual. It suggests the wine side of the operation is taken as seriously as the kitchen, and that the afternoon antipasti hour is probably as much about wine as it is about food.

For context, the Italian fine dining tradition has always treated wine and food as parallel tracks rather than a hierarchy. At formal Italian addresses like 8½ Otto e Mezzo Bombana in Hong Kong and cenci in Kyoto, wine programs are central to the experience rather than ancillary. Moretti operates at a different scale and in a different register, but the dual recognition from Michelin and Star Wine List suggests a similar seriousness about both sides of the table.

Credentials behind the counter

Both the chef, Alexander, and his wife Tiana , who works as pâtissière , trained in Belgium's leading restaurant kitchens before opening Moretti. That background is relevant less as biography and more as context for the kitchen's technical confidence. The Flemish restaurant circuit, which includes addresses at the level of Zilte in Antwerp and Willem Hiele in Oudenburg, is demanding training ground. Chefs who complete serious runs in those kitchens carry a specific set of skills: precision in classical technique, fluency with Belgian produce, and an understanding of how to manage a menu at a pace that serves the dining room rather than the chef's agenda.

That the couple chose to open a neighbourhood restaurant with a wine bar component rather than a tasting-menu destination is a decision with implications for the dining experience. The warmth of the trattoria format depends on the room feeling accessible and continuous , not curated for a particular type of guest. The Michelin Plate, awarded in both 2024 and 2025, confirms consistent kitchen quality without positioning Moretti in the starred tier, which is probably accurate to what the restaurant is trying to be. Comparable local options in the modern French and creative French space, including Leeuw, sit in the same price bracket but within a more conventional dinner-service format.

Planning a visit

Moretti is located at Havermarkt 23, 3500 Hasselt, in the centre of the city. The address sits on one of Hasselt's more characterful squares, accessible on foot from the main shopping streets and from the train station within a short walk. The €€€ price range places it in the same tier as most of Hasselt's serious restaurant options, though the wine bar dimension means a shorter visit , an afternoon antipasti stop, for instance , is a lower-commitment entry point than a full evening sitting.

The combination of Michelin Plate recognition and the leading Star Wine List ranking for two consecutive years means that bookings for evening service should be treated as time-sensitive. Hasselt's restaurant scene is active and the city draws visitors from across Limburg and beyond; tables at recognised addresses fill reliably. The afternoon format, if the kitchen's hours accommodate it, may offer a more spontaneous option. For a broader picture of where Moretti sits within the city's eating and drinking scene, see our full Hasselt restaurants guide, our full Hasselt bars guide, our full Hasselt hotels guide, our full Hasselt wineries guide, and our full Hasselt experiences guide. For high-end Belgian dining beyond Hasselt, Bozar Restaurant in Brussels and Bartholomeus in Heist offer instructive points of comparison. Google reviewers currently rate Moretti 4.5 from 316 responses, a figure that holds consistently across the trattoria and evening dining formats the kitchen runs in a single day.