Is Chez Clément a good choice for a family meal?

Family meals are the heartbeat of Chez Clément. Five generations of the Clément family have shaped the brasserie around the rhythm of family dining, from Henri and Sidonie’s coaching inn in 1858 to Marie and Gilles Verleyen, who run J and JJ Brasserie SA today. On any given Sunday lunch, the dining room hosts grandparents, parents, teenagers and small children around the same long table, sometimes four generations on one plate of croquettes.

The carte is built for this. Vol-au-vent, grey shrimp croquettes, sole meunière, steak tartare, eels in green sauce, game in season, the dishes are immediately recognisable to a grandmother who has known them all her life and curious-but-safe to a child trying the brasserie for the first time. The chef Vincent Frédéric De Laloy has signed these dishes for thirty years, with a brigade of thirty-two cooking from scratch. The carte does not require commentary, which is a real advantage when half the table is more interested in the conversation than in food theory.

Operational details support family meals very directly. The seated capacity of 230 means a table of twelve, fourteen or twenty is welcome without negotiation. The conservatory and the bar area give natural alternatives for groups that need a quieter or more flexible corner. The huge free car park ten metres from the door removes the parking headache that often makes family lunches in Brussels a logistic ordeal. The brasserie is fully accessible at every level, entrance, dining room, toilets, for grandparents with reduced mobility or parents with a pushchair. The service runs lunch from 12:00 to 14:30 and dinner from 19:00 to 22:30, seven days a week, including Sundays and Mondays.

And, perhaps most distinctively, the staff have been there long enough to recognise returning families. The chef has been in the kitchen since 1996; the kitchen porter has been part of the brigade for twenty years; the front-of-house culture rewards continuity. Returning generations of local families, in Genval, La Hulpe, Lasne, Rixensart, Waterloo, Wavre, recognise faces here that they have known for years. That is a quality you cannot install on demand; it grows out of a brasserie that has refused to lose its thread for almost two centuries.