Who were Marcel and Andrée Clément?

Marcel and Andrée Clément opened a new chapter for the house in 1954, after Jules and Marie-Lidwina. They ran the brasserie for 42 years, the longest single-generation stretch after Henri and Sidonie's. Under their direction the place slowly stepped out of the strict nineteenth-century coaching-inn format and started sliding towards the modern brasserie we know today.

The defining gesture of that period is the 1976 opening of a dedicated wine bar inside the building. In the mid-1970s, this was a pioneering project for Walloon Brabant: wine bars were still rare in French-speaking Belgium at the time, especially in the Brussels outskirts. Marcel built a wine list, ran tastings, and created what would become one of the lasting identity cores of the house, a place where you come as much to have a drink as to eat, and where the bar stays alive between the two restaurant services. The bar is still open continuously from 12 noon to 1 a.m., seven days a week, you can drop in for a glass in the afternoon, a direct legacy of the 1976 project.

Under Marcel and Andrée the house also entered the cultural memory of the region. Robert Goffin, the Belgian poet and academician, had his table here. Government ministers came for lunch on a regular basis. These two anchor points mark a literary and political clientele that went well beyond the immediate neighbourhood. Without slipping into specific anecdotes, they signal an era when the Genval brasserie was a recognised meeting point on the scale of the Nivelles district and the wider Brussels area.

In 1996 Marcel and Andrée handed over to France Clément, the fourth generation. That same year, France hired Vincent Frédéric De Laloy into the kitchen, the chef who is still in place thirty years later, heading a brigade of thirty-two. The hand-over took place without an interruption of service, and the Marcel-and-Andrée legacy, wine bar, cultural openness, brasserie as a place to live in, remained a claimed foundation right through to today's stewardship by Marie and Gilles Verleyen.