HI Brussels Jacques Brel

Jacques Brel — the other HI-Brussels hostel, named for the Belgian singer — sits on Rue de la Sablonnière, a residential street halfway between Madou metro (line 2 + 6, four minutes) and the northern edge of the Pentagon. Ten minutes to Grand Place on foot via Rue de la Loi and the Parc de Bruxelles. The building is a 1960s block that was fully renovated in 2022, so the dorm rooms and bathrooms are newer than the Generation Europe building across the canal, despite the 7.9-vs-8.1 rating gap.

The format is HI-standard: breakfast included on every rate (same spread as Generation Europe — Belgian bread, cheese, eggs, coffee), a shared kitchen available 08:00 to 22:00, a dining hall that doubles as a common room, a lounge with board games and a small piano, and a ground-floor reception that runs 24 hours. What's different: Jacques Brel has a noticeably larger library/reading lounge than most Brussels hostels, and the hostel occasionally hosts live music evenings — a tribute to the namesake, sometimes staff-driven, sometimes small local acts. Don't plan your trip around them, but if one's on, it's worth showing up for.

The location is slightly underrated. You're not on the Grand Place doorstep like BX Downtown, but the walk in via Parc de Bruxelles and the Royal Palace is one of the prettiest in the Pentagon — and heading back at 23:00 from Delirium, the park is lit and quiet. The northeastern fringe (Madou, Sint-Joost) is more diverse and working-class than the Pentagon centre, which reviewers from France and UK read as 'real' and first-time solo travelers sometimes read as 'worth knowing about after dark'. Staff are multilingual, cheerful, and genuinely helpful.