Does Chef Vincent have a Michelin family connection?

One of the most unexpected facts behind a Belgian brasserie of brigade tradition: the chef behind the stove is the direct heir of a Michelin-starred lineage. Vincent Frédéric De Laloy's grandfather held a Michelin star at the restaurant Chez Grégoire, in the 1960s. That single line of family history is rarely mentioned in the dining room, but it is, in many ways, the genetic explanation for the standard one finds on the plate at Chez Clément.

To understand what this inheritance means in practice, it helps to think about what a Michelin-starred household looks like in the 1960s. Standards are uncompromising, stocks are made from real bones, sauces are reduced patiently, the daily rhythm of the kitchen is shaped by an obsessive attention to detail. A grandson growing up in that environment absorbs these reflexes well before any formal training. Years later, Vincent's everything-made-in-house philosophy at Chez Clément, stocks, sauces, pastry, breads, finishing, is the natural outcome of that grounding.

The fact that Vincent chose to apply this inheritance in a brasserie context, rather than chasing his own star, is its own statement. Brasserie Chez Clément serves 200 to 300 covers per service, more than 1,400 covers a week. That is not a Michelin tempo. But Vincent has found in this register a place to channel the rigour he inherited, a brigade of thirty-two people, a stable team (the kitchen porter has been here twenty years), and a brasserie carte that maintains classical standards at volume. His signature dish, the cabillaud florentine, is the clearest example: classical French technique, brasserie-scale execution.

For a curious British visitor looking for the depth behind the surface of the brasserie, the family connection is a useful lens. The cabillaud florentine, the autumn game dishes, the spring asparagus, the patient stocks: none of these are surface gestures. They are the visible end of a forty-year arc that started in his grandfather's starred kitchen, passed through the CERIA hotel school in Brussels, crossed Étangs Mellaerts, Thoumieux, Le Méridien and Le Trèfle à 4, and settled at Chez Clément in 1996 to stay there for thirty years.