Who founded Chez Clément in 1858?

Question

Lorenzo Eeman · Accepted Answer

Brasserie Chez Clément was founded in 1858 by Henri and Sidonie Clément. They opened a coaching inn called “Bruyère à la Croix” in Genval, on the crossroads where the Brussels, Wavre, Charleroi and Namur roads converged.

1858 is the founding year of the house. Henri and Sidonie Clément, the first masters of the place, picked a plot at a strategic crossroads in Walloon Brabant, the intersection of the Brussels-Wavre and Charleroi-Namur axes, on the stretch that would later become Rue de la Bruyère. The local toponym “Bruyère à la Croix” combined the name of the heath with the cross-shaped landmark of the road junction. There they opened a coaching inn, a full-service nineteenth-century establishment.

The way a Belgian coaching inn worked in the mid-nineteenth century was tightly structured. You ate there, you slept there, and you changed your horses there. It was a fixed stop for stagecoaches, for travellers in transit, for cattle drovers going up or down to the regional markets. Henri and Sidonie ran the house in that logic: a broad activity, sizeable volumes, opening hours that followed the rhythm of the roads. That founding DNA, capacity, accessibility, versatility, is still readable in the modern brasserie, which can seat 230 people, accept up to 250 for a stand-up cocktail evening and stays open seven days a week.

The first generation held the house for 65 years, until 1923. That is a remarkable span and it anchored the Clément name in the Walloon Brabant landscape. Genval at the time was not yet the leafy residential commune it would become after the creation of the lake and the arrival of the railway. It was still a rural hamlet, on the border with La Hulpe, on the road to Brussels. A recognised coaching inn played a meaningful role in the local economic web. When Jules Clément took over in 1923 with his wife Marie-Lidwina, he inherited a sign that was already firmly established.

Henri and Sidonie were not just the first owners: they founded the line that would lead the house to its current five generations, Jules & Marie-Lidwina, Marcel & Andrée, France Clément, and now Marie & Gilles Verleyen since 2021. Every one of them has operated at the same address, Rue de la Bruyère 230 in Genval, ten metres from the communal border of La Hulpe. It is the same plot, since 1858, that today carries the trading name Brasserie Chez Clément.