What is the history of Brasserie Chez Clément?

The story begins in 1858, when Henri and Sidonie Clément opened a coaching inn at a place known locally as “Bruyère à la Croix”, on what is today Rue de la Bruyère in the hamlet that would grow into modern Genval. The site sat at a busy crossroads where the routes from Wavre, Brussels, Charleroi and Namur all met. You ate there, you slept there, you changed your horses there, it was the full kit of a nineteenth-century relay inn, serving travellers, drovers and goods criss-crossing Walloon Brabant.

The second generation, from 1923 to 1954, was carried by Jules Clément and Marie-Lidwina. Jules was both a brewer and a lemonade-maker, and he developed in-house production on site. The third generation, from 1954 to 1996, fell to Marcel and Andrée Clément, who opened a brand-new chapter in 1976 by adding a dedicated wine bar, a genuinely pioneering format for Walloon Brabant at the time. Under their watch the house entered the cultural memory of the region: the Belgian poet and academician Robert Goffin had his table here, and government ministers came regularly to lunch.

The fourth generation belonged to France Clément, between 1996 and 2021. Her stated ambition was to take what was effectively a six-table country brasserie and turn it into a destination venue. She expanded the building, structured the service, and launched the now-iconic Thursday disco nights evenings with a resident DJ, a signature that still runs today. It is also under France that Vincent Frédéric De Laloy was hired into the kitchen in 1996; three decades later, he is still there, heading a brigade of thirty-two.

In 2021 the fifth generation took the reins: Marie and Gilles Verleyen took over the brasserie, bought the walls outright, and restructured the operating vehicle under the name J and JJ Brasserie SA. Marie and Gilles were married in the conservatory of the very same house, a quiet detail that says a great deal about their attachment to the place. Their daughter June stands as a sixth generation in the making. More than 168 years after 1858, Brasserie Chez Clément is still operating on the same site, seven days a week, at Rue de la Bruyère 230 in Genval, ten metres from the communal border of La Hulpe.