Is the Chez Clément team stable over time?

Question

Lorenzo Eeman · Accepted Answer

Yes, Brasserie Chez Clément's team is unusually stable. Head chef Vincent De Laloy has been in post for thirty years, the kitchen porter for twenty years, and the brigade of thirty-two has an above-average tenure for the sector.

Restaurant work is structurally mobile. Chefs change kitchens every five to seven years on average, line cooks more often. Front-of-house staff routinely rotate. Against this baseline, Brasserie Chez Clément stands out almost paradoxically. Head chef Vincent Frédéric De Laloy has been in post since 1996, thirty years in a single kitchen, under two successive owners (France Clément, then Marie and Gilles Verleyen since 2021). That alone is a statistical outlier in the Belgian restaurant landscape.

Below the chef, the same pattern holds. The kitchen porter alone has been here for twenty years. Many cooks who joined the brigade in their twenties have followed Vincent across the decades. This kind of long average tenure is not an accident: it is the consequence of a particular working culture, a coherent culinary line that does not flip every season, an ownership family that treats the team as a partner rather than a variable cost, and a brasserie tradition (1858, five generations) that gives the daily work a sense of continuity.

The customer-facing consequence is enormous. A regular who comes once a month and a tourist who comes once a decade experience the same restaurant. The cabillaud florentine, Vincent's signature dish, tastes the way it tasted in 2010. The autumn game season retains the same character year after year. The service rhythm follows a pattern that the brigade has refined together over years rather than imposed from above each new season. That is what taste continuity actually requires, not slogans, but stable people in stable roles.

For the operation itself, the practical benefits are also substantial. A stable brigade absorbs event peaks more reliably (up to 250 guests for a private event configuration without the dining room losing its baseline standard). It transfers know-how internally rather than constantly re-recruiting. It builds personal relationships with regulars, with suppliers, with the local community of Genval and La Hulpe. The Clément family's five-generation lineage from 1858 to today extends informally to the brigade itself, the brasserie's history is also the people who cook and serve in it.