HÀ NỘI — Ever wonder what it’s like to work under a renowned Michelin-star chef?

Michelin-star French chef Raphael Le Mancq held a cooking class in Hà Nội yesterday, featuring a three-course meal cooked with the freshest of ingredients he personally selected and brought over from France.

Participants got to prepare all the cooking ingredients themselves, from the most basic of tasks like peeling and cutting vegetables to making caramelised sauce. They also got to put the finishing touches on presenting the dishes they cooked.

With the French chef’s delegating style, the kitchen was busy with everyone doing assigned jobs, unlike a typical cooking class in which students spend most of their time watching, not doing much themselves.

Le Mancq’s menu included creamy asparagus with pan-seared pigeon followed by scallops in sarrasin butter with stewed carrots and mushrooms, and apple pie with salted butter caramel as desert.

He said he learned a lot from Vietnamese cooking through the years. “In Việt Nam, people waste nothing when they cook,” said the French chef as he put all the vegetable skin in a mixer instead of throwing it away.

“As you can see I rarely use the trash bin. Nowadays, I use approximately 90 per cent of the cooking ingredients given to me,” he said.

The French chef has come to Việt Nam often in the last six years at the invitation of his partner, Journey to the East, a Hà Nội-based luxury travel company, to introduce and promote French gastronomy.

He has taken a liking to adding local herbs and spices to his haute cuisine. The finishing touch to the menu’s starter was a mix of black truffle on top of thinly cuts of perilla and spring onion.

The French chef’s cooking will be featured in the upcoming Goute de France (Good France) event, which takes place on Tuesday at Villa de Rose, 160 Từ Hoa, Tây Hồ District in Hà Nội.

Goute de France is a global event held annually in which chefs hailing from over 150 countries and five continents cook their best dishes to showcase and celebrate the excellence, diversity and modernity of French cuisine. — VNS