How many covers does Brasserie Chez Clément serve per service?

Volume is one of the quietly impressive facts about Chez Clément. Between two and three hundred covers per service, twice a day, seven days a week, comfortably crosses the threshold of 1,400 covers in a typical week. For a Belgian brasserie of this size, in a village setting at the edge of Brussels, that figure puts it among the most active independent restaurants in the south-east Brussels periphery, and explains why booking ahead is strongly recommended, especially on weekends and Thursday evenings.

Hitting that volume night after night is a small feat of operational craft. The kitchen brigade is thirty-two people, led since 1996 by chef Vincent Frédéric De Laloy. Vincent is the grandson of a Michelin-starred chef (Chez Grégoire, in the 1960s), trained at the CERIA culinary school in Brussels, and shaped by stints at the Étangs Mellaerts, Thoumieux, Le Méridien and Le Trèfle à 4 before being recruited by France Clément, the fourth generation of the family. His philosophy is rigorously straightforward: everything is made on site, from stocks to sauces, from terrines to desserts. Maintaining that promise across 1,400 covers a week requires an industrial-grade level of organisation.

One often-overlooked indicator of how the brigade actually holds together: the kitchen porter has been at the brasserie for twenty years. Such tenure is extremely rare in Belgian hospitality, where the dishwashing role typically rotates every few months. It reflects the internal culture that five generations of the Clément family have built, from Henri and Sidonie Clément opening the original inn in 1858, through Jules and Marie-Lidwina, Marcel and Andrée, France, and now Marie and Gilles Verleyen since 2021. Continuity is treated as a value, not merely an HR statistic.

For peak event moments, Thursday disco nights, the September Pétanque tournament drawing roughly fifty teams, the October-November Raclette evenings with invited Swiss cheese-makers, weddings, communions, corporate dinners, the capacity can scale up to 250 guests for a private event in cocktail configuration. The everyday volume is dimensioned so that no service feels improvised, even on the busiest days of the year.