What tip should I leave at Chez Clément?

Question

Lorenzo Eeman · Accepted Answer

Tipping is voluntary in Belgium. Service is already included by law in the prices on the menu at Brasserie Chez Clément. A small round-up of the bill, or a few euros left on the table for genuinely excellent service, is appreciated but never expected.

The Belgian tipping culture is famously low-pressure and often confuses visitors arriving from the US or the UK. The legal baseline is simple: every menu price in Belgium is all-inclusive, VAT and service are built in. The bill at Chez Clément is therefore the final amount payable. No additional percentage is added at the bottom of the receipt, no tip line appears on the card terminal by default, and nobody hovers expecting a particular percentage. This applies on lunch (12:00 to 14:30), dinner (19:00 to 22:30), and at the bar (12:00 to 01:00).

Within that framework, leaving a small extra gesture is part of common politeness for genuinely good service. The typical pattern in a Belgian brasserie sounds like: rounding the bill up to the next round number, or leaving a few euros in change on the table after a long lunch. For a one-hour business lunch at 50 euros per head, a one or two-euro round-up is a perfectly normal gesture. For a leisurely 90-minute dinner with attentive wine service, leaving five or ten euros on the table for genuinely standout service is well received. The brasserie team rarely expects more, and never asks.

What about cards? When you pay by Visa, Mastercard or Bancontact, the terminal generally does not prompt for a tip on its own. If you want to leave something, the simplest pattern is to round the total up before the team enters the amount, or to leave the gesture in cash on the table. The Belgian convention discourages writing a tip on the card slip; cash is the cleaner gesture, particularly if you would like it to reach the floor team directly.

For corporate diners, business lunches, group dinners and events, the same rule applies: no compulsory service surcharge, no tip baked into the quotation, no gratuity line on the invoice. The events team at info@brasseriechezclement.be will produce a clean invoice for the agreed final amount. If your company has its own policy on hospitality tips, you can simply leave that gesture independently at the end of the meal. The brasserie has been welcoming guests under five generations of family ownership since 1858, and the relationship with the team remains decisively personal rather than transactional.