Villa Des Fleurs Hanoi Review: French Fine Dining by Chef Sakal Phoeung

🗓 Last visited in October 2026

Villa Des Fleurs began in 2017 as a pretty café, tea room and flower shop. At the end of 2025, it turned into a high-end restaurant with French cuisine at its core. The chef behind this change is the well-known French chef Sakal Phoeung.

Anyone who follows French food or fine dining in Vietnam has probably heard of him. He is one of the most experienced and best-known French chefs in the country, and he owns Le Corto and P’ti Saigon, two French restaurants in Ho Chi Minh City that have been well regarded for years, except by the Michelin Guide, which has never considered them worthy of inclusion. That is something I personally do not understand when I see some of the other restaurants it includes.

He is also President of Les Disciples d’Escoffier Vietnam, the Vietnamese branch of Disciples Escoffier International, an organisation that has done a lot to promote French gastronomy in Vietnam.

So when I heard that Sakal Phoeung was taking over Villa Des Fleurs with a new concept, I was eager to try it. It still took us until October 2026 to find the time for a first visit.

See also: French restaurants in Hanoi: a complete guide by a French

The setting

Part of the appeal of Villa Des Fleurs is the venue itself. What could suit a French gastronomic restaurant better than an old French colonial villa?

Guests eat indoors on the ground and first floors, in a cosy, elaborately decorated space. Personally, it is not how I would decorate my home, but I understand that for a foreign audience looking for a “high-end” French experience, it is particularly fitting.

See also: Best restaurants in Thao Dien (District 2), Saigon: our favourite places

The menu

The menu Chef Sakal created for Villa Des Fleurs is not limited to classic French dishes. It also includes many variations built on French technique, using premium seasonal ingredients.

Alongside the à la carte dishes, there are set menus, which most guests choose because they offer better value.

If it is your first visit and you don’t want to spend too much, come at lunchtime. That is when prices are lowest, with three-course sets from VND 350,000++ per person, which seems like a pretty good price, even though we have not tried it ourselves.

In the evening, the cheapest set is VND 950,000++ per person for four courses.

There is also an all-you-can-eat Sunday brunch every week, at VND 950,000++ per person. The full menus are on the Villa Des Fleurs website.

The food

On this first visit, we chose the four-course Degustation Set at VND 950,000++ per person (pictured above). Each course offers two options, so it works well for two people: you can try two different dishes at every course.

First came the complimentary amuse-bouches, nicely presented: a salmon tartare and a small “pillow” filled with smoked eel and eggplant caviar.

Before that, the restaurant served complimentary bread with two kinds of butter, as French restaurants usually do. The bread is a very good homemade sourdough. You can buy a loaf to take home if there is any left, but it is best to order ahead.

The first course was a cold starter. Huong chose the blue crab tartare with fresh oyster, coriander, crushed avocado and bloody mary sorbet. We found it well executed but, in all honesty, not a standout.

My choice was more interesting: salmon smoked both hot and cold, a nice combination, served with pear, salmon roe and a yuzu butter sauce.

Next came the hot starters, and again we ordered one of each: a Đà Lạt asparagus soup with a slow-cooked egg and serrano ham, and a French-style asparagus fricassee with a parfait egg and truffle sauce.

Both dishes were very enjoyable, but I would not categorise them as “impressive”, even though we took a lot of pleasure in eating them.

I often joke with Huong that truffle is a “cheat” ingredient, because it tends to make a dish taste great without requiring much else.

In a similar way, the use of cream and butter makes French food taste great in many ways.

These two dishes relied a lot on both, which made them particularly tasty, but without a “wow factor”.

The third course was the main:

• I chose the Beef Wellington, the famous British dish of beef tenderloin wrapped in mushrooms and pâté or cured ham, then in puff pastry, served here with truffle mashed potatoes and a Port wine sauce. It was perfectly cooked and the dish we liked most in the whole meal. The beef was tender and juicy, the flavour rich, and the portion reasonable, so it never felt heavy. The pastry was thin and crisp rather than doughy. We have had other versions, including at RICO Steakhouse (Huong’s review, in Vietnamese), and the truffle and Port sauce make the Villa Des Fleurs version clearly more impressive.
• Huong’s choice, pan-seared scallops with brandade (a salt cod purée) and clam foam, left her puzzled, because it was clearly too spicy. When French cuisine uses heat, such as pepper or chilli, it is usually used with restraint, especially in a classic, delicate dish like scallops. I understand the idea: the heat of the chilli only hits you in a second wave, so it does not necessarily overwhelm the delicate flavour of the scallop. But in this case, the dish was far spicier than either of us expected, so we think it was more likely a slip in the kitchen than the chef’s intention.

The last course was dessert: a flambéed Crêpe Suzette, a French classic. In this recipe, butter is melted with caramelised sugar, orange juice and grated orange zest, then orange liqueur is poured over and set alight. It comes with vanilla ice cream. Huong particularly likes this dessert.

It’s also a smart PR choice as at Villa Des Fleurs it is made entirely in the dining room, which adds to the effect and will please anyone filming for TikTok.

That said, it is not a dessert I would consider particularly elaborate, but again, that does not mean it was not good!

The restaurant also ended the meal with a nice gesture: complimentary coconut macarons, which Huong enjoyed a lot.

Drinks

French food is not complete without wine. Villa Des Fleurs offers six sparkling, white and red wines by the glass, from VND 270,000 to 340,000++ per glass. That is clearly on the higher end, but the entry-level wines are much better than what you can find in a lot of Hanoi restaurants.

See also: 15 dishes you should try in France, by a French

Impressions and verdict

One thing is clear about Villa Des Fleurs: the set menu is good value. In Vietnam today, it is hard to find a high-end French or European restaurant with a four-course set at a similar price, not counting the complimentary extras. In France or other developed countries, the same meal would cost far more.

That said, if you set aside what the restaurant does well overall, such as the price, the setting and the service, the most important question remains: is the food worth it?

That probably depends on each diner’s fine dining experience and expectations. For us, apart from the Beef Wellington, no dish was truly impressive or creative, although the meal as a whole was delicious and well executed.

The cuisine at La Badiane, a French restaurant in Hanoi that I really like, has a much stronger identity and more creativity, for example. But it is important to note that the price range is not the same at all!

It should be noted that most guests during our visit were Asian tourists, from Korea, China and elsewhere. I think Villa Des Fleurs is a great fit for them and for anyone who wants to try high-end French food in a beautiful setting without overspending, if they opt for the set menu we tried.

There are more expensive sets, but they seem to cost more mainly because of luxury ingredients such as caviar and truffle, rather than more creative cooking.

Personally, I would be happier if Sakal Phoeung pushed Villa Des Fleurs in a direction closer to Le Corto, which I prefer, but the current formula clearly seems to have found its audience.

Also worth noting: Villa Des Fleurs often hosts events featuring famous French chefs from abroad. As I write, Thierry Drapeau, the chef behind the one-Michelin-star restaurant Signature in Bangkok, is expected to present a “floral” menu there.

Price and practical notes

For reference, our bill for two, with 50% off through the Visa Dining credit card offer (no longer available since November 2026):