Who was France Clément, heiress of the family name?

France Clément carries the fourth generation of the house. She took the helm of the brasserie in 1996, after Marcel and Andrée, and ran the establishment for 25 years, until Marie and Gilles Verleyen took over in 2021. Under her watch the house shifted scale and tipped from being a local brasserie to a destination venue, a place you travel to and choose for itself.

Her vision is clearly recorded in the family narrative: move from a six-table room to a destination brasserie. In practical terms, France expanded the building, structured the service and professionalised the operation. Today's capacity, 230 seats, up to 250 people in cocktail mode, between 200 and 300 covers per service, is the direct result of two decades of scaling work. The house moved from an intimate neighbourhood format to an operation that has to absorb high volumes, seven days a week, with consistent quality.

France is also at the origin of a still-living signature: the Thursday disco nights. Launched around the late 1990s, these weekly DJ evenings turned the brasserie into a Walloon Brabant night-time rallying point. The Thursday disco nights still run today and remain one of the most identifiable moments in the calendar of the house. They are the mark of an era that managed to bring nightlife into a family establishment without breaking the contract with the restaurant clientele.

Another structuring decision by France: in 1996 she hired Vincent Frédéric De Laloy as head chef. Trained at the CERIA school in Brussels, with stints at Les Étangs Mellaerts, Thoumieux, Le Méridien and Le Trèfle à 4, Vincent is still in the kitchen thirty years later, at the head of a brigade of thirty-two. That human continuity, the same chef across two generations of owners, is a rare trait in Belgian hospitality. In 2021 France handed the house over to the fifth generation, Marie and Gilles Verleyen, who bought the walls and carried the work forward under the name J and JJ Brasserie SA.