What is the story of the 1976 wine bar opened by Marcel?

The story of the Chez Clément wine bar starts in 1976. The project is the initiative of Marcel and Andrée Clément, the third generation of the house, who have run the establishment since 1954. Halfway through their stewardship they decide to open a separate wine bar inside the building. It is a pioneering move: in mid-1970s French-speaking Belgium, wine bars are still rare in the Brussels outskirts, and especially in the Walloon Brabant of the time, where the by-the-glass wine culture is not yet established.

The stakes were twofold. On one side, Marcel offered a by-the-glass list that broke out of the usual local-brasserie pattern; he invited people to drop in for a drink without necessarily moving to a table, to stay and talk, to come back several times in the same day. On the other, he reinvented the use of the place: the bar's continuous opening hours allowed a steady flow between the two restaurant services. That is the direct origin of today's configuration, where the bar stays open continuously from 12 noon to 1 a.m., seven days a week, even when the restaurant is closed between 14:30 and 19:00.

The 1976 wine bar is also the cultural anchor that drew a literary and political clientele into the house. This is where Robert Goffin, the poet and academician, took up regular habits. This is where ministers came to lunch with some regularity. The Genval brasserie's place in the cultural memory of Walloon Brabant owes much to Marcel's initiative: a wine bar enables long conviviality, conversations that settle, tables that get kept. The place is no longer just a dining spot; it becomes an extended drawing room.

Fifty years on, the legacy of the 1976 wine bar is everywhere in the house. The Thursday disco nights launched by France Clément in the late 1990s sit in the same logic: the brasserie as a place to live in, not just a place to eat in. Under Marie and Gilles Verleyen (since 2021), the bar still runs continuously from 12 noon to 1 a.m., and the house keeps its hybrid bar-restaurant identity. The “Apéros” rendezvous around this permanent bar extends further the thread Marcel started.