Is Chez Clément a good address for a passing tourist?

Question

Lorenzo Eeman · Accepted Answer

Yes, Chez Clément is a natural lunch or dinner stop for any visitor passing through Walloon Brabant: five to seven minutes from the Solvay Estate and the Fondation Folon, ten from the Sonian Forest, fifteen from the Waterloo 1815 Memorial, with seven-day service and free parking ten metres from the door.

For a passing visitor, Chez Clément is genuinely well placed. The brasserie sits ten metres from the boundary between Genval and La Hulpe, in a part of Walloon Brabant that gathers several of Belgium’s most-visited cultural sites within a fifteen-minute radius. The regional Solvay Estate (220 hectares of woodland, ponds, paths and a château) is five to seven minutes away. The Fondation Folon, dedicated to the permanent collection of Jean-Michel Folon, sits inside the same estate. The Sonian Forest, a beech forest classified as UNESCO World Heritage in 2017, begins five to ten minutes away. The Waterloo 1815 Memorial and the Butte du Lion are fifteen minutes by car. The Royal Museum for Central Africa (AfricaMuseum) in Tervuren is eighteen minutes.

The brasserie itself is well suited to the rhythm of a tourist day. Lunch service runs from 12:00 to 14:30 and dinner from 19:00 to 22:30, seven days a week, including weekends and public holidays (except 25 December and 1 January). The bar stays open continuously from noon until 1 a.m., which means a visitor returning from an afternoon at the Solvay Estate or the Fondation Folon can drop in for a coffee, a Belgian beer or a glass of wine outside the usual service hours. Communication is comfortable in French, English and Dutch.

The carte is the standard Belgian brasserie repertoire, cooked from scratch by chef Vincent Frédéric De Laloy and a brigade of thirty-two, vol-au-vent, grey shrimp croquettes, sole meunière, steak tartare, eels in green sauce, gibier in season. For a foreign visitor curious about real Belgian cooking served in its native context, this is exactly the kind of address that justifies the detour. The family history, 1858, five generations, the same building, gives it the dimension of a small living monument as well.

Logistics are straightforward. Brussels-Zaventem airport is thirty minutes away by car. The Genval train station on SNCB line 161 (Brussels-Namur) is a ten-to-fifteen-minute walk from the brasserie, which means it is possible to come from central Brussels without a car. The huge free car park opposite the entrance solves the parking problem for visitors who arrive on wheels. The whole building is fully step-free, including toilets, relevant for older visitors or families with pushchairs.