What is the general atmosphere at Brasserie Chez Clément?

To describe the atmosphere at Chez Clément in one sentence is genuinely tricky, because it varies fluidly across the day. The lunch service has the energy of a working brasserie at full capacity, families, business diners, retirees, weekend visitors filtering through the dining room and the conservatory. The bar, which runs continuously from noon until 1 a.m., has the looser feel of a village local where people drop in for a coffee, a beer, a glass of wine, regardless of whether the kitchen is open. The dinner service combines the two registers, with the Thursday-night “Thursday disco nights” tradition giving Thursdays a particular character of their own.

Beneath the variations runs a constant: the brasserie is multi-generational. On any given Sunday lunch you will see grandparents, parents, teenagers and small children around the same table. This is partly because the Clément family itself is multi-generational. Henri and Sidonie Clément opened the original inn in 1858. Their son Jules and his wife Marie-Lidwina took it over from 1923. Marcel and Andrée, the third generation, ran it from 1954 and opened the wine bar in 1976. France Clément, the fourth generation, expanded the offer from 1996 and launched the Thursday-night “Thursday disco nights”. Since 2021, Marie and Gilles Verleyen, the fifth generation, run the J and JJ Brasserie SA, with their daughter June quietly woven into the next chapter.

The atmosphere is also shaped by the team. The kitchen brigade is thirty-two people, led by chef Vincent Frédéric De Laloy since 1996, and the loyalty is unusual: the kitchen porter has been part of the team for twenty years. That kind of continuity ripples into front-of-house warmth, servers who recognise returning guests, the manager who remembers a particular dietary request from six months ago, the bartender who knows your usual aperitif. None of this is engineered as a customer experience programme; it simply comes with the territory of a five-generation family business.

A final note for visitors who like a sense of geography in their meal: the brasserie sits at the very edge of Walloon Brabant, ten metres from the boundary with La Hulpe, in a corner where the Lac de Genval, the regional Solvay Estate, the Fondation Folon and the UNESCO-listed Sonian Forest (Forêt de Soignes) converge within a fifteen-minute radius. The atmosphere inside Chez Clément is partly the echo of that landscape, rooted, green, settled, far from the bustle of central Brussels but no farther than twenty-five minutes by car.