New Holy Cow

New Holy Cow holds down its corner of Leuven as a local cafe, the everyday kind worth knowing. The appeal is not complicated: a drink made with some care, somewhere you can stand still for a few minutes. It does the unglamorous work of being open and being good, day after day, without asking for credit. Across Belgium, places like this form the everyday backbone of how people take their coffee.

Expect the easy, unforced character of an independent spot: coffee made without ceremony and a room that fills with regulars. It is the kind of place where you can sit a while, and nobody rushes you toward the door. What it lacks in polish it tends to make up for in character, which is what keeps regulars coming back.

New Holy Cow anchors its small patch of Leuven, Belgium, well within reach of anyone exploring the area on foot. Its setting means it catches both the deliberate visit and the happy accident of walking past. It is the sort of place worth a small detour and an easy one to return to. Coffee, in the end, is mostly the small habit of showing up, and rooms like this make that habit easy to keep. What lingers about spots like this is rarely one drink so much as the run of ordinary good ones.