What is Vincent De Laloy's culinary philosophy?

Question

Lorenzo Eeman · Accepted Answer

Vincent De Laloy's culinary philosophy is summed up in three words: everything made in-house. Stocks, sauces, pastry, breads, finishing, nothing arrives ready-made in his kitchen. It is a rare standard for a brasserie of this volume.

If you ask any cook or front-of-house staff at Chez Clément what defines Vincent's culinary approach, the answer comes in a single phrase: everything made in-house. This is not branding language. It is an operational reality, the structural choice that organises the work of the brigade, the schedule of the kitchen, the cost of the carte and the depth of the result on the plate. In a 200-to-300-cover-per-service brasserie, more than 1,400 covers a week, this kind of standard is a serious decision.

Concretely, that means: stocks built from real bones over hours of reduction; mother sauces produced from scratch; pastry, breads and dessert components prepared on site; finishing touches done in service. Vincent inherited this rigour from his grandfather, who held a Michelin star at the restaurant Chez Grégoire in the 1960s, and consolidated it through his classical training at the CERIA hotel school in Brussels. His subsequent pre-Chez-Clément career, Étangs Mellaerts, Thoumieux, Le Méridien, Le Trèfle à 4, only reinforced the conviction.

The philosophy is not nostalgic. It is a positive choice for taste depth and consistency at scale. A house stock has a different gravity than a powder. A house pastry has a different texture than a frozen one. Across 1,400 covers a week, the cumulative difference is what regular customers describe simply as “Chez Clément tastes the way Chez Clément has always tasted”. That continuity is what thirty years of Vincent's hand have produced in the same kitchen.

To deliver this standard reliably requires three structural conditions: a sized brigade (32 people), a stable team (the kitchen porter has been here twenty years, many cooks have followed Vincent over decades), and an organisation able to absorb event peaks of up to 250 guests for a private event configuration without dropping the standard. Vincent's philosophy is therefore not just culinary: it is organisational, economic and human. It is what makes Chez Clément recognisably itself, generation after generation.