Hanoi’s long-standing relationship with French cuisine gets a contemporary twist this month as two chefs with very different culinary journeys come together for a pair of collaborative dinners at Sofitel Legend Metropole Hanoi.
On Sept. 25 and 26, Le Beaulieu chef Charles Degrendele will share the kitchen with Christian Chu, chef-patron of Prague’s MICHELIN-starred LEVITATE and the first chef of Vietnamese origin in the Czech Republic to earn a MICHELIN star.
It is the latest edition of the Metropole’s “Rendez-vous” series, built around four-hands dinners that bring visiting chefs together with the team at Le Beaulieu.
This collaboration has an interesting symmetry.
Chu was born in Hoa Binh, Vietnam, before building his career in Europe. At LEVITATE, his cooking draws on Nordic techniques and highly seasonal ingredients while incorporating subtler influences from his Vietnamese heritage.
Degrendele, meanwhile, works from within one of Hanoi’s most historic French dining rooms. Le Beaulieu has been part of the Metropole’s story for generations, giving the collaboration a natural meeting point between European fine-dining traditions and contemporary Asian perspectives.
The chefs will create a five-course menu featuring ingredients including caviar, truffles, foie gras and blue lobster. Rather than simply presenting two chefs side by side, the idea is to build a single menu around their overlapping approaches to precision, technique and flavour.
There is also a wider cultural connection behind the dinner. The event is being presented with the Embassy of the Czech Republic in Hanoi and Czech Centre Hanoi, reflecting Chu’s own journey between Vietnam and the Czech Republic.
The dinners arrive during a significant year for the Metropole. The hotel is marking its 125th anniversary in 2026, having opened in 1901 and since become one of Hanoi’s best-known historic hotels.
That makes the latest Rendez-vous dinner more than another visiting-chef event. In a city where French and Vietnamese culinary traditions have been intersecting for more than a century, it offers a particularly modern version of that exchange — a Vietnamese-born chef returning from Prague to cook alongside a French chef in one of Hanoi’s most storied dining rooms.
The five-course dinners run from 6 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. on Sept. 25 and 26. Dinner is priced at VND 4,600,000++ per person, or VND 7,100,000++ with wine pairings.
