Why go
Pralines at the Burgstraat bench
The pralines set the pace for Marijn Coertjens, Pastry Chef at Marijn Coertjens in Ghent, where his Burgstraat shop works in chocolate and patisserie rather than bread. The address sits at Burgstraat 151, close to Gravensteen and the Oud Begijnhof, but the useful orientation is the bench: moulds, fillings, pastry finishes, and the small decisions that make a retail box carry the weight of a trained hand. Coertjens opened his Ghent business in 2016 and opened this shop on February 16, 2017, returning after a career that had already moved through Belgium, Japan, France, and Hong Kong. His formation began early, with internships in Japan shaping the way he thinks about line, restraint, and surface. In Waterloo, he trained at Ducobu under Marc Ducobu, whose Relais Desserts house gave him a disciplined Belgian frame for pastry and chocolate. Coertjens later led the chocolate department at The Peninsula Hong Kong for 5 years, an experience that sharpened the cosmopolitan register now visible in Ghent. The titles belong to the maker, not to the room: Belgian Champion Chocolatier in 2007, bronze at the World Pastry Championship in Lyon in 2011, then Belgian Champion Chocolatier again in 2015, followed by bronze at the World Chocolate Masters in Paris the same year.
Chocolate as the main method
The program here is explicit about its center. This is a chocolatier and patissier, with signature pralines, refined pastries, and chocolate sculptures carrying the house identity. Bread, milling, sourdough, and viennoiserie are not part of the published language of the shop, so the craft is better read through chocolate: filled shells, boxed assortments, polished surfaces, and the calibrated sweetness of Belgian praline work after travel. Coertjens describes the pralines as shaped by encounters with international entrepreneurs, artists, and artistic minds, which explains the tone without turning the counter into theatre. The method is not nostalgia left untouched. Classic recipes pass through a more exacting finish, with flavour combinations made to feel familiar first, then slightly shifted. His time in Hong Kong also left a larger scale in the hands. At The Peninsula, he made chocolate sculptures for luxury houses and public figures; in Ghent, that capability narrows into a single-branch shop where sculpture and praline share the same grammar of tempering, casting, filling, setting, and release. The house also draws interns from abroad, including cooks formed in Michelin-starred environments, a quiet sign that the bench is treated as a place of apprenticeship as well as sale.
A quiet counter near Gravensteen
The room is small in the way a serious chocolate shop can be small: the counter carries the work forward, the boxes make the edit, and the city falls away quickly once the glass is in front of you. Burgstraat places the shop on the corner of Brugstraat and Peperstraat, near stone walls, old routes, and the traffic of visitors moving between Ghent’s landmarks. Inside the experience is retail, not cafe ritual. The known offer points toward taking the work away, held in a box rather than stretched across a table. That suits Coertjens’ material. Pralines ask for sequence and proportion, for a casing thin enough to yield cleanly and a filling that does not spend all its force at once. In a quiet shop, those things have room to register. The place does not need much noise around it.
One branch, one hand
The important constraint is also the strength: this is a single Ghent branch tied directly to Coertjens’ name and practice. Guide attention has followed, including a place in Gault & Millau’s chocolatiers category and local recognition as a chocolate and pastry destination, with continuity at the bench. The shop opened on February 16, 2017, and its clearest future remains the same disciplined exchange between Coertjens, the interns who come to learn, and the pralines at Burgstraat 151.
