How many people work in the Chez Clément kitchen brigade?

For a brasserie of this scale, the number is more telling than it looks. A brigade of thirty-two people sits at the upper end of what a Belgian brasserie of tradition typically deploys. It is the size that allows Vincent De Laloy to maintain his everything-made-in-house philosophy without ever cutting corners on volume nights. To produce 200 to 300 covers per service, with stocks built from real bones, sauces reduced patiently, pastry done on site and finishing executed in service, you need this kind of depth on the line.

The brigade is structured in the classical brasserie pattern: a head chef (Vincent), seconds, line cooks specialised by station (sauces, grills, fish, pastry), commis cooks in training, and a back-of-house contingent for prep, cleaning and dishwashing. The exact stations and the precise count per station vary slightly between weeks. What matters operationally is the total: thirty-two people behind the line on a normal service.

Three further numbers help frame the picture. The brasserie offers 230 seats in normal dining configuration and scales to 250 guests for events, which means the brigade has to absorb event peaks alongside the regular two services per day. The covers volume is 200 to 300 per service. The weekly total is more than 1,400 covers. Behind each plate, the standard remains the same: classical technique, made in-house, finished to order.

One of the quietly remarkable features of this brigade is its stability. The kitchen porter alone has been here for twenty years. Many cooks have followed Vincent across the years of his tenure (1996 to today). That stability is the structural condition for taste consistency over decades. A regular who came in 2000 will recognise the same hand at work in 2026, because the brigade around that hand has not been reshuffled every twelve months. For a curious British visitor, the immediate consequence is the calm rhythm one feels in the dining room, even on a Saturday lunch with 250 guests, the brigade is not improvising, it is executing.