When I first met Hậu at his restaurant, The Monkey Gallery Dining, he was not what I expected. He is a man of few words, and possesses a calming, stoic presence. Throughout our conversation, he mostly sat still, apart from a few times where we shared a laugh or he gestured with his hands to better tell his story. As we got to talking, navigating his journey through various kitchens across Vietnam, I noticed the tattoos on his forearms, hands, and fingers. Tattoos, like pictures, are worth a thousand words. And such words can often tell a deeper story than the one that’s presented to you on the skin.
Hậu was born in Đà Nẵng to a family of fishermen. His parents, grandparents, and the generations that came before all shared the same profession. Although Hậu was expected to follow in his family’s footsteps, he didn’t share the same affinity for going fishing. He did like eating seafood though. Fish, shrimp, and his favorite: scallops. Since his parents divorced when he was very young, he lived with his grandparents. Hậu says his grandma was the best chef in his life. Her specialty? Fish stew. Despite the long hours spent watching his grandma cook, he never ventured to actually try it out himself. Having said that, he wanted and needed to help his family as much as he could. His family worked day and night, and yet, they didn’t have the financial means to keep paying for Hậu’s schooling. So, at the age of 14, Hậu dropped out of school and started working.
While his friends were running off to start their first year of high school, Hậu was off to work starting his first job as a “runner” at a nearby spot serving cơm niêu (rice cooked in a clay pot). As a runner in a restaurant you’re expected to do as you're told, filling in any gaps in a restaurant's operations. Setting tables. Cleaning tables. Picking up this. Dropping off that. Whatever. Whenever. Barely a teenager, Hậu was working six days a week from ten in the morning to ten at night. On Mondays, his only day off, he would either go play football with his friend or watch his favorite team, Manchester United. It was grueling work and even worse, it didn't seem like there was ever an end in sight. Hậu explained how that restaurant served between three to five hundred guests, day in and day out. Over thirty chickens were consumed every day they were open. After six months, Hậu was ordered into the kitchen to become a commis chef. Being his first time working as cook, he didn’t know a lot. He studied as much as he could and tried his best to keep up. A few months into his new role, he was given a task by the head chef: kill a chicken.
”Sorry,” I said, nervously laughing, “How does one exactly do that? Do you…” I lifted my arm and made a karate chop motion. This is when Hậu broke his stillness. He shook his head, “No.” Leaning back in his chair, he wrapped one leg around the other and showed me how you’re supposed to do it. Essentially, you put the chicken between your legs, and instead of chopping the head off, you’re expected to pull as hard as you can until it comes off. Though he’d performed all his other tasks as a runner and commis chef as best he could, this is something Hậu couldn’t do. He did try though. And tried again. Ultimately, however, he couldn’t pull himself to commit an act like that. Perhaps as a young boy, he simply didn’t have the physical strength to perform the act in totality. Perhaps he was scared. Hearing him talk about his experience, my intuition told me this moment wasn’t a sign of weakness. This was a moment of self-discovery. What the kitchen was asking him to do was simply not part of Hậu’s nature. After that day, his short tenure at the cơm niêu spot came to an end.
While he most likely would have preferred to be in school with his friends, that wasn’t an option his circumstances allowed. He needed to keep working, but the chicken incident taught him he had to work somewhere that better aligned with who he was. Despite the harshness of that first job, he felt drawn to the kitchen. As difficult as it could be, the environment quickly felt familiar to him. Afterward, he joined a French restaurant nearby as a commis chef. Thankfully, there were no more chickens to deal with. Under Bruno, the head chef, Hậu learned to cook beef steak, beef Wellington, and various pastas. Compared to his first job at the cơm niêu joint, working with Bruno was far more manageable. It was a small place serving about thirty customers a day, and it was here that his curiosity turned into a genuine passion. He wasn't just running anymore, he was improving his craft. By the time he had spent two years there, Hậu wanted to keep learning. That meant it was time to take a leap to a new city: Hanoi.
Hậu was around 18 years old when he left his hometown. His family saw him off with a bittersweet blessing—sad to see him break the cycle of the family trade, but trusting his hunger enough to let him walk into the unknown. The first couple months were rough. Besides the one friend he moved from Đà Nẵng with, Hậu knew nobody when he arrived. Yet, he was hungry to learn and was eager to start working. Hậu’s apartment was near the Tây Hồ District in Hanoi, where a lot of restaurants reside. One by one, Hậu knocked on the doors of every single restaurant and asked if he could work there. And one by one, reality kept hitting harder and harder. He didn’t have a lot of experience. He didn’t have a degree. And he didn’t have the level of English that most of those establishments required. But that didn’t stop him. Eventually, he says, he got lucky. La Salsa, a Spanish restaurant in the area known for its paella, was looking for an intern chef. The pay was low and he’d have to go back to working grueling hours, but in his eyes, he’d broken through to the other side.
Hậu really liked working at La Salsa. Not only was he proud that he willed his way into a kitchen in a city far from his hometown, he also got the opportunity to learn a lot. Under Head Chef Tam, he started as an intern chef. Six months later, he became a commis chef again and just one month after that, he earned his first role as a sous chef. This is when his learning experience really took off. Hậu explained that as a commis chef, you’re expected to master the basics: how to cut, clean, and stay organized. But the responsibility of being sous chef is much more all-encompassing. He had to develop his leadership skills to ensure everyone on the team worked well with one another. He had to figure out how to make a menu, price each dish, and prepare each dish consistently so customers could enjoy it whenever they returned. He also had to strengthen his communication skills and learn how to speak to his superiors, peers, and customers in a confident, respectful manner. After one year working as a sous chef at La Salsa, the urge of wanting to keep growing returned to Hậu. As he explained, there are so many cultures in the world with their own unique cuisine. Hậu, wanting to be the best chef he could, wanted to learn about more of them. He believed he must you must keep venturing forth so that you can keep broadening your understanding of food, people, culture, and the stories that shape them. Next stop: Saigon.
Moving from Hanoi to Saigon at twenty was the start of a new life for Hậu. In his eyes, the city is unmatched—a landscape is defined by a dense culinary industry where Michelin-starred dining rooms sit adjacent to multi-generational street stalls. His first major step was joining La Villa under Head Chef Thierry Mounon. While the grueling kitchen schedule was familiar, the role was new: demi chef and captain of the sauce station. The experience was defined by access—both to Mounon’s technical mentorship and a steady arrival of high-quality ingredients sourced directly from France. For those visiting, Hậu suggests the pot-au-feu, a classic French soup that serves as the ultimate test of a kitchen's foundations.
After one year at La Villa, a new restaurant opened up which caught Hậu’s attention: ESTA, an Asian fusion restaurant led by Head Chef Francis Thuan. Hậu started working at ESTA as a demi chef in 2019, but unlike his role at La Villa, he was also tasked with helping out on multiple stations. This was due to how small the team was at the start, but rather than see that as a weakness, Hậu was eager to continue honing his craft. At ESTA he got the chance to learn about their signature charcoal grill cooking techniques which produced their trademark, deliciously smoky dishes. Hậu worked for three months before the restaurant closed down due to Covid. After the pandemic, he rejoined the team for another year of work, but before long, another new chapter was knocking on his door. A friend of Hậu’s is friends with the owner of The Monkey Gallery Dining and put in a word on Hậu’s behalf. Since the head chef at the time moved away to Denmark to study, an opportunity opened up. The owner followed up by reaching out to see if Hậu wanted to become the head chef. At just twenty-three years old, Hậu became the head chef of The Monkey Gallery Dining in 2022.
Up until this point in time, Hậu had already overcome many stressful periods of his life: dropping out of school to work at a young age, leaving his hometown, relocating once again to Saigon where’s been ever since, and of course working in many different styles of restaurants along the way. And yet, this was a completely new level for him. As the new head chef in the kitchen, he had to create a brand new menu from scratch. To do so, he says the most important thing is to look within and ask: what do I like? For him, it was simple. Hậu loves his hometown. He loves seafood and spicy flavors. And he loves art, especially spending his off days, alone, walking around Saigon and looking at exhibitions inside either Quang Sang, his favorite art gallery, or sometimes the Ho Chi Minh City Fine Arts Museum. Taking in the different concepts and abstractions in those spaces not only relieves the stress of the hours of grinding in the kitchen, but he also takes as much inspiration as he can to help design his dishes. Fitting, considering when dining inside The Monkey Gallery Dining you feel like you’re eating inside an actual art gallery! There’s even a framed painting hanging on the back wall of the kitchen which was done by Hậu’s sister. It shows a classic hairpin turn along the Hải Vân Pass that connects the cities of Đà Nẵng and Huế. You can see people on motorbikes driving on both sides of the road, going to and from, perhaps in a way symbolizing Hậu’s unbreakable connection to his hometown. Always traveling back and forth to his roots for inspiration while broadening his perspective on cooking, Vietnam, and life itself.
Since the beginning, Hậu was able to source the ingredients he wanted from Đà Nẵng, where he says he got the best and favorite sauces to use for his menus such as fish sauce, shrimp sauce, and crab sauce. All that said, even when you’re looking within, trusting your instincts, and doing what you think is right and true, that doesn’t mean others are going to feel the same way.
For the first year, Hau and his team went through five different menus. Some thought it was good. To others, it was fine. And for a select few, customers weren’t as happy as they wished. It seemed Hau’s skill and technique still slightly lagged behind the vision he had. That said, because he and the team were creating and experimenting constantly, the feedback they received increased the learning curve. After a year of trial and error, Hau changed gears, and in retrospect, made the right move.
In 2023, Hậu decided to create one menu and stick with it. Given that the Monkey Gallery Dining team had spent a year logging the necessary hours, he was certain they could produce something great. The ten-course experience released in July of that year was called the City of Liberty menu. It featured elevated interpretations of street classics like Bánh Tráng Trộn (Mixed Rice Paper), Sò Dương Nướng (Grilled Sea Clam), and Xoài lắc (shaked mango). Not only was Hậu proud of the result, but customers responded with fervor. Word of mouth spread, social media attention surged, and at the end of this fanfare came their biggest achievement to date: The Monkey Gallery Dining received its first Michelin Selected award.
The following year, having seen the value of focusing on a single, long-term concept, Hậu created the restaurant’s next menu: Màu Sắc (palette). This eleven-course meal featured one dish per color. The menu included a reconstructed beef Phở with wonton-style wrappers made from purple cabbage, a seafood course of crisp scallops paired with radish and coastal seaweed, and a complex dish of sea cucumber, coral oysters, wild pine mushrooms, and spirulina.
This sustained focus resulted in a collection of accolades that guests now see while walking up the restaurant stairs: Michelin Selected (2023, 2024, 2025), a Tatler Best of Vietnam 2025 recognition, and Tripadvisor Travelers' Choice Awards (2023, 2024). The restaurant's influence has even reached the global stage, earning a place in the prestigious 50 Best Discovery list. Since 2024, The Monkey Gallery Dining has been sharing its third major concept, Chi Mô Rứa—a Central Vietnamese expression meaning "What, Where, How." The menu is a deep dive into Hậu's hometown, focusing on the flavors, memories, and the rugged coastline of his childhood.
Shortly after interviewing Hậu, I was lucky enough to visit The Monkey Gallery Dining with my girlfriend for dinner. To put it plainly, I was astounded by the quality of the dishes, particularly the longfin squid with Trà Quế herbs and sea moss, the scallop with coconut and fish sauce, and finally, Huế crab cake with tête de Moine. Beyond the food, however, what struck me was how Hậu acted. He was the exact same during dinner service as he was during our chat. Calm, stoic, and although still a man of few words, every time he did speak, he never raised his voice. His team, whom he considers family, responded to his quiet orders with immediate precision. Hậu had earlier credited this synergy for the restaurant’s success, and seeing them in action made the gallery concept clear. Because the team moves with such quiet synchronization, the kitchen can remain entirely on display—each member, utensil, and plate functioning as a live exhibition where nothing, not even a raised voice, disrupts the view.
When Hậu came around to greet us, I noticed again his tattoos and the stories they tell from beneath the surface. On his left forearm are his tools. Knife, spoon, whisk, and an apron—perhaps a way to honor the tools that have served his true nature throughout his career. On his left hand’s fingers are four letters reading: C-H-E-F. On his right forearm are his favorite foods and ingredients. Fish, mushrooms, chilli, lemon, dill, shrimp, tuna, and scallops—his all-time favorite and the one he swears he’ll use on every menu he creates. Under his watch on the back of his right hand is his newest tattoo: an autumn tree with the roots extending down to his fingers. The reason for the most recent one is as simple to understand as the food, the tools, and the word chef. Simply put, he likes autumn. He likes seeing the leaves falling to the ground. It reminds him of his time in Hanoi and his passion for growth, both as a chef and as a human.
Hậu wears his story on his skin—past, present, and future, all in ink for others to see. He has moved from a teenager who dropped out of school to work endlessly, to a traveler seeking his craft in Vietnam’s biggest cities, to the humble, award-winning chef he is today. When I met Hậu, he was not what I expected. After speaking with him and seeing him work, I’ve learned he is someone who never forgets where he comes from, yet he understands that life, like a kitchen, moves in cycles. He finds beauty in the autumn leaves falling because he knows that letting go is the only way to prepare for the next season. To grow, one must remember the places they’ve come from, but more importantly, be willing to let go of who they were to make room for who they are becoming. The most vibrant seasons can only begin once the old ones have been cleared away.
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