Chocolate Museum Visit with Chocolate-Making Workshop Brussels

The chocolate-making workshop

The visit starts in the workshop room, where a chocolatier welcomes a group of no more than ten people and hands out the tools: tempered chocolate, moulds, sticks, piping bags and bowls of toppings such as nuts, dried fruit, crispy pearls and coloured sprinkles. First you learn how to fill and hold a piping bag and how to control the flow of chocolate, the basic skill behind every decorated praline. Then you pour and decorate chocolate tablets, make lollies on sticks and draw shapes and messages in chocolate on sheets, which set while you continue.

The workshop is designed for adults and for children from age seven, who manage the piping with a little help, and lasts roughly an hour. All your creations are packed to take with you, so this is a popular choice for families and for anyone who wants a souvenir of Brussels they made themselves rather than bought. Sessions start at 10:30 and 15:30 and are held in English, Dutch or French.

The chocolate museum and the story of cocoa

After the workshop you collect an audio guide, available in English, French, Dutch, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian and Chinese, and walk through the museum at your own pace. The exhibition traces about five thousand years of cocoa: the first use of the cacao tree by the Olmec and Maya, the bitter spiced drink of the Aztec court, the arrival of cocoa in Spain in the sixteenth century, its spread through the royal courts of Europe and the industrial inventions that turned it into solid chocolate. A section explains how cacao is grown, fermented and dried on the plantations today.

The final galleries tell the Belgian story: how Brussels became a chocolate capital, the invention of the praline in the Saint-Hubert Royal Galleries in 1912 and the ballotin box created to carry it. Visitors who wonder whether the Brussels chocolate museum is worth visiting usually find this part the most surprising, as it links the shops they pass outside to a precise history. Allow about an hour for the museum.

Tastings and the praline demonstration

Tasting is built into the visit. At several points in the museum you sample chocolate of different cocoa percentages and origins, learning to notice the difference between a milk chocolate, a dark single-origin and a white chocolate, and you see the raw ingredients, cocoa beans, nibs and cocoa butter, that go into them. The highlight is the live demonstration in the museum's own workshop, where a chocolatier makes artisan pralines in front of you, filling moulded shells with ganache and sealing them, and explains how to recognise a well-tempered chocolate by its shine and snap.

The demonstration runs regularly through the day and ends with a taste of the fresh pralines. A short virtual-reality film about cocoa is available on site at extra cost if you want to extend the visit, and the museum shop sells the chocolates made in the demonstration. Tell the staff about allergies before tasting; the chocolates contain milk and may contain nuts.

Rue de l'Étuve, Manneken Pis and the Grand-Place

The museum stands at Rue de l'Étuve 41, the narrow street that runs from the Grand-Place to the Manneken Pis fountain, so it sits in the middle of the most visited corner of Brussels. The Grand-Place, with the Gothic City Hall and the gilded guild houses, is two minutes away, Manneken Pis is just down the street and the historic chocolate shops around the square and in the Saint-Hubert Royal Galleries are all within a five-minute walk, which makes the museum an easy addition to any day in the old town.

How to get to the chocolate museum in Brussels is simple: Central Station is a seven-minute walk, and the Bourse and Anneessens metro and tram stops are about five minutes away. The best time to visit is the 10:30 session, which leaves the afternoon free for the Grand-Place and the galleries, while the 15:30 session suits a morning at the museums on Mont des Arts. The building has stairs and is not recommended for visitors with limited mobility.