Is Chez Clément a gastronomic restaurant or a traditional brasserie?

It is worth answering this question very directly, because the distinction matters. Chez Clément is not a Michelin-style gastronomic restaurant and does not present itself as one. It is a Belgian brasserie in the most traditional sense of that word, an institution founded in 1858 by Henri and Sidonie Clément, transmitted across five generations of the same family, today led by Marie and Gilles Verleyen of J and JJ Brasserie SA. The vocation is faithful, hospitable, lively cooking served to a wide audience, not haute cuisine.

The chef’s background is interesting precisely because it could have gone the other way. Vincent Frédéric De Laloy is the grandson of a Michelin-starred chef (the Chez Grégoire restaurant in the 1960s). He trained at the CERIA culinary school in Brussels and worked through the Étangs Mellaerts, Thoumieux, Le Méridien and Le Trèfle à 4 before joining Chez Clément in 1996 at France Clément’s invitation. He had the technical formation for a gastronomic kitchen; he chose the brasserie register, and has stayed in it for thirty years. The philosophy is “tout fait maison”, everything cooked from scratch on site, applied to a Belgian brasserie carte.

Operationally, the brasserie format also dictates the format. A gastronomic restaurant generally seats forty to seventy guests at most, with tightly choreographed service slots and one or two closed days a week. Chez Clément seats 230 guests for a regular service, scales to 250 guests for a private cocktail event, and serves between 200 and 300 covers per service, more than 1,400 covers a week. The kitchen brigade is thirty-two strong; the lunch service runs 12:00 to 14:30 and the dinner service 19:00 to 22:30, seven days a week, with the bar open continuously from noon until 1 a.m. That tempo and that volume are incompatible with the gastronomic register; they define the brasserie register instead.

For a guest, the practical implication is clear. If you are looking for the experience of a creative tasting menu in a refined dining room, Chez Clément is not the address. If you are looking for the experience of a great Belgian brasserie, reliable house cooking, a lively dining room, a long bar open into the night, a sense of being inside something that has lasted for almost two centuries, ten metres from the boundary between Genval and La Hulpe, in the green corner of Walloon Brabant twenty-five minutes from central Brussels, you are in exactly the right place.