What type of clientele does Brasserie Chez Clément attract?

The clearest way to describe the clientele at Chez Clément is to walk through a typical lunch service. Around twelve o’clock, the regulars arrive: locals from Genval, La Hulpe, Rixensart, Lasne, people who have known the brasserie for decades, sometimes since the days of Marcel and Andrée Clément in the 1960s. Many of them order without consulting the carte. Through the early afternoon, business diners fill another part of the room: managers from the south-eastern Brussels office belt, lawyers from Brussels, consultants and corporate teams using the brasserie as a reliable mid-distance lunch spot.

On Sundays the register changes. Families arrive in groups of six, ten, twelve, sometimes more, with grandparents, parents, teenagers and small children at the same table. This multi-generational pattern is one of the most distinctive features of the dining room and one that the chef Vincent Frédéric De Laloy, in the house since 1996, has cooked for over thirty years. The carte is designed for it, traditional Belgian dishes that work for every age, and the room is sized for it, with 230 seated covers and long tables that suit a family of fourteen as easily as a couple of two.

Visitors and tourists form the third strand. The brasserie sits in a corner where the Lac de Genval, the regional Solvay Estate, the Fondation Folon, the Château de La Hulpe, the UNESCO-listed Sonian Forest (Forêt de Soignes) and the Waterloo 1815 Memorial all fall within a five-to-fifteen-minute radius. International visitors crossing through Walloon Brabant routinely stop for lunch or dinner, often discovering a Belgian brasserie at the same time. The fact that the brasserie serves seven days a week, with lunch from 12:00 to 14:30 and dinner from 19:00 to 22:30, makes it easy to slot into a visit on any day of the week.

A fourth strand, more discreet but real, comes into focus in the evenings: couples. Anniversaries, first dates, quiet midweek dinners away from Brussels, the conservatory and the bar zone naturally absorb this audience. The Thursday-night “Thursday disco nights”, a tradition launched by France Clément in the late 1990s, adds a festive note to the end of the week. None of these audiences crowds out the others; the brasserie is designed to host them all on the same day, which is exactly the Belgian brasserie register at its best.