Does Chez Clément serve grey shrimp croquettes?

Question

Lorenzo Eeman · Accepted Answer

Grey shrimp croquettes (croquettes aux crevettes grises) are one of the great markers of Belgian bourgeois brasserie cooking. At Chez Clément, the dish is one of the five signatures on the carte year-round, hand-rolled in-house, served with fried parsley and lemon.

Grey shrimp croquettes are one of those dishes that act as a litmus test for a Belgian brasserie. The grey shrimp (Crangon crangon) is a tiny North Sea crustacean, traditionally hand-peeled by fishermen's families along the Belgian coast, Oostduinkerke is the last village in the world where horseback shrimp fishing is still practised, a UNESCO-listed intangible heritage. The flavour is delicate, sweet, unmistakably maritime, and entirely different from the larger pink shrimps found elsewhere in Europe.

A great grey shrimp croquette is a small piece of engineering. It needs a béchamel-based bound filling rich enough to hold the shrimps in suspension, seasoned discreetly so the shrimp itself dominates, breaded in three classic stages (flour, egg, panko or breadcrumb), and fried to a deep golden colour that yields under the fork to reveal a creamy heart. The expected accompaniment is a wedge of fried parsley, a quarter of lemon, and sometimes a small green salad. The technical bar is high, which is why hand-rolled croquettes are a clear marker of a homemade kitchen.

Chez Clément, as a Belgian bourgeois brasserie founded in 1858 in Genval / La Hulpe and operated under an everything-homemade policy by Chef Vincent for thirty years, sits naturally inside this category. The brigade of thirty-two manages two hundred to three hundred covers per service with a focus on craft preparations. The grey shrimp croquettes are confirmed as a **signature classic** on the carte, they are one of the five signature dishes of the house, alongside the cabillaud florentine, the meatloaf with stoemp and vegetables, the filet américain minute and the meatballs in tomato sauce.

For pairings, grey shrimp croquettes ask for a crisp, lightly aromatic white wine, a Sancerre from the Loire, a Pessac-Léognan blanc, or a Riesling from Alsace all work beautifully. A Belgian wheat beer (Hoegaarden style) also makes sense, or a fine lambic for adventurous diners. The wine cellar opened in 1976 by Marcel and Andrée Clément provides the structure for these pairings.