Disappointingly, I can only give this one star simply down to how we were treated. I will explain that.

We sat down and ordered 2 beers. The pleasant member of staff duly brought our beers which we enjoyed. We perused the menu and noticed on their website that it said 'cash only' so we wanted to check with the staff if that was still the case as we saw a card machine and people on an adjacent table paying by card. We waited until the member of staff asked us what we would like next, and this was a different member of staff. We asked if we could pay with a card he said yes and thought we wanted to pay now. We explained we didn't want to pay now, we were just asking to know if we could pay with a card. He said we could pay with a card. We then placed our order for the next drinks. He then said that it was a shift change and therefore we needed to pay him for these drinks, and pay his colleague for the previous drinks. We thought this strange but we said this was fine. He brought our beers over and we paid for them, although nobody else was paying for each drink- we couldn't help people watching to notice this, and this isn't Belgian culture. We then saw the previous member of staff a while later (hold on, we thought it was a shift change so surely he would be gone by now?) do flagged him down to pay him, which we duly did. A while later after we finished our beers, we headed out and said goodbye to both members of staff who were both still working (hold on, I thought there was a shift change so why was the first still there - hmmmm?????). We walked out the door and the second member of staff chased after us and hassled me about paying for drinks. I told him we had paid (as instructed). He was very agitated but then dashed back in the bar probably to check if we did.

Nobody else (i.e. the local Belgians) were being asked to pay for each drink, so why were we? The nonsense about needing to pay as it was a 'shift change' was clearly a lie as both staff were still there and still clearly working when we left some time after him making thet claim.

I can only assume that they have had problems with English people not paying before so he treated us badly because of it.

if that is the case, that was racist. Racist towards English. Racism is treating others differently because of their race. This was that.

If you're English, avoid this racist bar.

1 star. I would give 0 if I could.

This was a huge disappointment for us. We have been looking forward to coming to Belgium for a few years now, we had a trip to Bruges booked but lockdown cancelled it and not been able to rearrange another trip until now. We researched bars and decided to come to Gent partly because of the range of good bars here, and this bar was one we identified as a must go to place. Shame. We won't be going back. They probably won't care. That is up to them.