Chocolate & Gastronomy

From 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., come and create your own praline in the company of our chocolatiers, who will be making them before your eyes, according to your tastes!
All you have to do is go to the Belgian pavilion and you’ll be directed to our talented chocolatiers.

Louise Henriquès, a pastry chef and chocolatier from Wallonia, is the 2024 winner of a television competition broadcast on TV in Wallonia and Brussels called ‘les étoiles du chocolat’. It was this victory that enabled her to represent Belgium during our Wallonia-Brussels week. She is also the founder of  ‘Loulou Sucrée’, a boutique in Naninne, which offers made-to-measure sweet creations, pastry training courses and a range of healthy, tasty chocolates.

Tarquin Fontaine, is an artisan chocolatier who has just opened his shop in Nalinnes and who has mastered the ‘Bean to Bar’ technique to perfection, an artisanal movement that is very successful in Wallonia. He works on the chocolate bar from the selection of the cocoa beans to its creation. He roasts the beans, crushes them, grinds them and conches them, controlling each stage to obtain a pure chocolate, rich in flavour and free from superfluous additives. Tarquin has just been nominated as one of the ‘Carolos of the Year’.

Throughout Wallonia-Brussels Week, the guests will have the chance to savour Walloon gastronomy thanks to the talent of 26-year-old chef prodigy Alexandre Ciriello. At the helm of the ‘L’Horizon’ restaurant in Chaumont-Gistoux, this passionate chef combines family traditions, local Belgian produce and Asian inspiration to create a cuisine that is as inventive as it is committed.

Trained by some of the great names in Michelin-starred cuisine, he opened his own establishment at just 19 years of age. Since then, he has won one award after another: Gault&Millau’s Young Chef of the Year 2023, three Michelin stars, and a notable inclusion in the Michelin guide… His precise, poetic cuisine is particularly noteworthy for its original concept of ‘Jeu de Cartes à Manger’, a nod to his strong taste for Asia.

A rising star who came to public attention via Objectif Top Chef, Alexandre is now the embodiment of a new generation of chefs: creative, sustainable and outward-looking. In Osaka, he will be the face of a Wallonia that is gourmet, modern and generously open to the world.

The Smart Gastronomy Lab, based in Gembloux, is a genuine innovation laboratory dedicated to the food of the future. At the crossroads of science, technology and gastronomy, this unique facility supports start-ups, companies and researchers in the creation of innovative food products and services. 3D printing of food, new ingredients such as micro-algae and insects, fermentation, connected nutrition… everything is designed to meet tomorrow’s challenges, from sustainability to health.

A veritable catalyst for creativity, the Lab operates in ‘Living Lab’ mode, where you can prototype, test and co-create with designers, scientists, chefs and the general public. The aim? To reinvent the way we eat, produce and consume, with boldness and intelligence. In Wallonia, it embodies a gourmet, sustainable and high-tech vision of food, firmly rooted in its time… and already looking to the future.

Throughout Wallonia-Brussels Week, the Smart Gastronomy Lab will be presenting a unique experiment: the connected meal tray, a promising innovation for preventing undernutrition in the elderly. Fitted with sensors, the tray records movements, pressures and forces exerted during meals, enabling a precise profile of users’ eating habits to be drawn up. This detailed monitoring helps care staff to detect early signs of undernutrition, a problem that affects up to 60% of nursing home residents. Every day, around twenty people (guests or the general public) will have the opportunity to test this technology and receive personalised statistics.