Where to dine after a walk around Lac de Genval?

There is a small Sunday-morning choreography in Walloon Brabant that has not changed for decades: walk the 3.5 km loop around Lac de Genval, watch the swans circle the boathouse, and then drive five minutes inland for lunch in a proper Belgian brasserie. Chez Clément, founded in 1858 by Henri and Sidonie Clément, is the most obvious anchor of that ritual. Five generations later, the house still serves more than 1,400 covers a week and remains open seven days, which keeps it usable on the days when other addresses go dark.

For a British visitor, the brasserie reads as a familiar but distinctly Belgian creature: a noisy, generous, all-day room, with a 230-seat main hall, a glass conservatory, a separate bar that stays open from noon to 1 a.m. and a brigade of thirty-two led by chef Vincent Frédéric De Laloy, in the kitchen since 1996 and trained at the CERIA school in Brussels. The menu is fully house-made; the porter has been washing dishes here for twenty years; the conservatory hosted Marie and Gilles Verleyen's own wedding.

Practically, the timing works in your favour. A morning walk that ends around 12:30 p.m. lines up perfectly with the lunch service (noon to 2:30 p.m.); an evening walk lines up with dinner service (7 p.m. to 10:30 p.m.). The bar runs continuously between services, so an aperitif while waiting for friends, or a digestif before the drive back to Brussels, is always possible. The large free car park sits ten metres from the door, which spares you the search for street parking after a stroll.

A small editorial note: the brasserie is not at the water's edge, so the “dine with the lake in your eyes” angle is not its play. What it offers instead is the Belgian institutional version, cooking, service, and a five-generation memory of feeding Brussels and Walloon Brabant visitors after their Sunday walks.