How long have Chez Clément Thursday disco nights been running?

Question

Lorenzo Eeman · Accepted Answer

The Thursday disco nights at Brasserie Chez Clément have been running since the mid-1990s, launched by France Clément, the fourth generation of the family. Now in their fourth decade, they remain a weekly ritual under Marie and Gilles Verleyen.

The Thursday disco nights were launched in the mid-1990s by France Clément, the fourth-generation manager of the brasserie. France Clément took the family-run inn through a major modernisation phase between 1996 and 2021, reshaping a multi-generational country brasserie into a place that worked equally well as a Sunday-lunch institution and as a weekly social rendez-vous. The Thursday-night DJ slot was one of her signature ideas: a way to give the brasserie a recurring contemporary moment without losing the rest of the week to it. Three decades on, the format has held remarkably well.

To put the Thursday disco nights in perspective: the brasserie itself was founded in 1858 by Henri and Sidonie Clément as an inn called “Bruyère à la Croix”. Five generations of the same family have run it since, Jules and Marie-Lidwina (1923-1954), Marcel and Andrée (1954-1996, who opened the wine bar in 1976), France (1996-2021), and Marie and Gilles Verleyen since 2021 under the legal entity J and JJ Brasserie SA. Their daughter June is informally counted as the future sixth generation. Within this 168-year arc, the Thursday disco nights are a relatively recent addition, but a remarkably durable one.

What explains the longevity? Three factors. First, the format is light: it does not require the brasserie to transform itself for the evening. The restaurant runs its 19:00 to 22:30 service exactly as on other nights; only the bar (open continuously from noon to 1 AM) extends its hours for the DJ, on Thursdays specifically, the night can run until 4-5 AM, well beyond the usual 1 AM bar hours. It is the only evening of the week that stretches that late. Second, the audience renews itself naturally, locals from Genval, La Hulpe, Rixensart, Wavre, plus visitors from the south-east of Brussels, replace themselves in waves as life cycles turn over. Third, the kitchen led by Vincent Frédéric De Laloy, chef in the house since 1996, the same year the Thursday disco nights started, provides the steady gastronomic backbone that the format needs.

Under Marie and Gilles Verleyen, the fifth generation, the Thursday disco nights have been preserved with no significant changes. The fidelity is deliberate: this is a ritual the regulars trust, and the management has chosen to honour rather than reinvent it. In a sector where weekly evenings come and go quickly, a thirty-year-old Thursday-night DJ slot is something close to a folk institution in this corner of the Brabant wallon.