Where did Vincent De Laloy train?

The CERIA is short for « Centre d'enseignement et de recherche des industries alimentaires, chimiques et bio-industrielles », an unwieldy name for what is, in practice, one of the most respected hospitality and culinary schools in Belgium. Based in the south of Brussels, in Anderlecht, it has formed generations of cooks, pastry chefs and hospitality professionals who today populate the kitchens of the country. To say a Belgian chef “is from the CERIA” is, for an industry insider, a useful shorthand for a particular kind of classical grounding.

Vincent's training there gave him the foundations on which his later career was built. Belgian culinary education traditionally emphasises classical French technique, stocks, mother sauces, butchery, charcuterie, pastry, alongside service organisation and food-cost discipline. It is the kind of training that prepares a young cook for almost any setting: a high-end gastronomic kitchen, a city brasserie, a hotel restaurant, an event caterer. Vincent would later draw on each of these registers across his pre-Chez-Clément career.

Coming from a family with a Michelin-starred grandfather (Chez Grégoire, in the 1960s), Vincent's choice of the CERIA was both a continuation and a personal statement. He could have leant entirely on family contacts to enter the industry; instead, he followed the formal classical route. That decision matters because it gave him an institutional CV that travels, the CERIA diploma is recognised across the Belgian and broader European hospitality industry, opening doors to the houses he then worked in: Étangs Mellaerts, Thoumieux, Le Méridien and Le Trèfle à 4.

For a curious British visitor wondering whether the Belgian system shaped the cooking they are about to taste at Chez Clément: yes, very directly. The classical fundamentals taught at the CERIA are visible in the way Vincent builds his brasserie carte, the structure of his stocks, the patience on long-cooked Belgian classics such as carbonnade flamande, the consistency of the cabillaud florentine signature, the rigour on seasonal pivots like spring asparagus and autumn game.