This Is Cabanon Palace!

“I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I just knew I wanted to do something different. So, I slung a lobster over my shoulder, we made a video, and that was the start of it,” Helio shrugs. At that moment, Danang’s Cabanon Palace, in its post-pandemic, retro-chic, social-savvy incarnation was really born. 

“So, my hand is hovering over the ‘post’ button, and I’m hesitating, and my wife is saying, ‘everyone who sees the video is going to laugh at you,'” Helio recalls. 

“But I knew we had to do it.”

A Movie-Themed Mediterranean Dream

Among Danang’s culinary evolution, that’s rapidly gathering pace, at Cabanon Palace they don’t just serve French food. They’ve created a stage for a movie-themed Mediterranean dream atop a dusty downtown hotel. 

Cabanon Palace is part family soap opera, part cultural time capsule, part Instagram phenomenon. This is what happens when a politics studies dropout decides to weaponize his family recipes against the forgetting of time. It’s here that Belle Epoque meets social media, where century-old slipper lobster recipes get their close-up, and where “l’art de vivre à la française” gets a Vietnamese remix.

The cast of characters reads like a mix of Sergio Leone and Marcel Pagnol, or maybe Wes Anderson and Wong Kar Wai: Helio, the chef-owner who abandoned politics for his aunt’s kitchen; Nathan, his yacht-waiter brother turned business partner; Chloé, his wife who just stepped back from luxury hotels to join Palace duties; mom and dad on baking duty; and the grandmother, who visits from time to time, whose astute assessment upon viewing their new venue christened their rooftop empire. 

“This Is Cabanon Palace!”

“This is not a cabanon,” she’d announced – cabanon meaning a kind of fishermans’ hut or shack in French – seeing their new rooftop location, “This is Cabanon Palace!” And the name stuck.

She had a point, Helio reflects. “Obviously, we don’t identify with Versailles or Buckingham! Maybe we’re resurrecting the soul of palaces now forgotten or destroyed: the Casino Palace in Marseille or Restaurant de la Réserve in Nice, or those survivors from another era: the Negresco in Nice or the Martinez in Cannes.”

“Because what inspires us is that era of the French Riviera, when people went out to restaurants not simply to eat well, but to experience a moment of excess, exhilaration, celebration, and friendship.”

Back To The Original Cabanon

The original Cabanon – still happily open in Hoi An although Helio and the team are more hands-off these days – settled comfortably in tourist-drowsy Ancient Town, doing what expat restaurants do: slinging comfort carbs to sunburnt backpackers. Seeing potential signs in Danang’s pervasive sprawl, Helio planted a second outpost: same sandwiches, same salads, and the same pasta that every foreigner eventually craves mid-vacation. 

Then the neighborhood got crowded with other places doing much the same, and Helio got something more profound – a dad panic. “That makes it exactly six years ago,” he remembers, the timeline etched by sleepless nights and first words.

“And I started to realize that my kids, growing up here, wouldn’t know French food; if I didn’t cook my grandmother’s recipes, they’d never know about it.” Cultural amnesia, counted in diaper changes.

Cook Like Great-Grandmother’s Watching

Enter brother Nathan, who was an occasional visitor at that stage, with his game-changing Christmas suggestion: forget the tourist fodder, cook like great-grandmother’s watching. “So, I made super traditional stuff,” Helio recalls, suddenly animated. “Crab bisque – an extraction of the crab with a star anise infusion, flambéed with some leeks and things – and calamari stuffed with confit pork and slipper lobster with anchovies, all old family dishes.”

Out came the white jacket, the ceremony, the ancestral muscle memory. “And that night we made more than any night over the previous four years.” 

It turned out authenticity sold better than safety.

Between The Burns And The Broken Sauces

As often happens, Helio had become a chef by chance. 

The 19-year-old art school dropout (“I had wanted to be an artist”) pivoted to political science, only to discover that the €10,000 annual tuition fees might require some work beyond the library. 

Enter his aunty’s restaurant in Corsica, a family-style place packed out in season. For the first two years of his studies, he’d spend the long summer months there as cashier – his aunty, who’d fallen ill, needed someone she could trust to count the monty. For all its sun-kissed existence, there were always dramas at the restaurant. And, when the chef abruptly walked out, mid-season, Helio’s aunt pointed to the kitchen and ordered him to: “Cook!” 

By the third and fourth year, he’d dropped out of his politics studies completely, realizing a well-rounded politician would need life-experience to lean on. And he’d started to enjoy working in the kitchen, learning from his retired-chef uncle, despite initially making what Helio now dismisses as “complicated stuff, but not something I’m proud of today.” 

But between the burns and broken sauces, something shifted. He’d started to pick up his great-grandparents’ ‘super-antique recipes’ too – the kind of throwback Corso-Marseillais cooking that makes modern French chefs nervous. An endangered species of Mediterranean cuisine.

Sundays Became Grandmother Day

Flash forward to Danang, and they began calling Sundays, ‘grandmother day.’ “Every week, I’d call my grandparents,” Helio smiles, “And I’d ask, ‘What are you cooking this weekend?’ And they’d say, for example, ‘We’re doing a lamb, and I’d ask for the recipe, and cook the same.’”

The community was so small at that time, that they’d bring everyone they could gather around the table. And people really responded to it. “In 2017, we had the chance to move the restaurant to a rooftop in the city center. A guy told us ‘we have a place.’ Our grandmother was visiting, and she came with us, and immediately on seeing the rooftop, she exclaimed, those fateful lines: “This is Cabanon Palace!” 

We realized the type of food we’d been making didn’t fit this place, this traditional kind of food did. But the name stuck, because we had the cabanon in Hoi An and one in Danang and we needed to differentiate them. 

Cabanon Palace’s Lobster Moment

He started diving deeper into these ancestral recipes, building menus around memories. Then the pandemic hit – a year and a half of shuttered doors and silent kitchens. Blinking into this strange new reality “where everything had changed, and if you weren’t on social media, you didn’t exist,” Helio and his Cabanon Palace crew found their next act in another new space: atop the Cordial Grand Hotel. New venue, new manifesto: resurrect the family cookbook for the social savvy generation.

The social media baptism sucked magnificently. “We worked with a digital agency,” Helio winces. “They wanted us to have baguettes and accordions, and pointy French mustaches,” he mimes twiddling his moustache for effect. “All the clichéd stuff.” Picture it: algorithmic Frenchness, the kind of content that makes actual French people die inside. “After a few months of getting nowhere, and not posting anything, we got disillusioned.”

Enter the lobster moment – with the help of Chris Love and Marius Roy – that blessed crustacean that would crack their digital code. No berets, no Edith Piaf soundtrack, just a man with seafood and the magnificent stupidity to hit ‘post’ while his wife predicted a social media disaster. Sometimes the best marketing is just embracing the absurd.

“My brother saw it from France and said: ‘Wait, I’m coming, I want to be a part of this!'” Helio smiles at the memory. Nathan now features in most of the content – Helio’s doppelganger with a rounder face, ponytail, and orange-tinted shades. Two French brothers weaponizing their grandmother’s recipes with a content crew in tow.

The internet never stood a chance.

That the lobster became their digital messiah makes perfect outlandish sense. This isn’t just seafood – it’s the ultimate Provençal celebration dish, New Year’s Eve royalty with a pedigree longer than most French presidents. “This recipe comes from our great-grandmother, Louise Grand Renucci, who inherited it from her father, Mathieu, a maître d’hôtel on the ‘French Lines’ ocean liners that sailed between Marseille and French Indochina. He once had the honor of serving the Queen of England!”

The Real Turning Point

But there’s that twist Helio reminds us of again: Cabanon Palace wasn’t born from business plans or market research. It arrived the day Chloé announced her pregnancy. “That moment was a turning point: I rolled up my sleeves and got behind the stove, with only one goal in mind – to ensure our children grow up with the flavors of our story.”

In the end, every viral video, every retro-chic detail, every carefully plated memory comes down to this: a father’s panic about cultural amnesia, transformed into Danang’s most unlikely culinary success story. 

Cabanon Palace: Serving Time Travel On A Plate

It’s what happens when tradition meets desperation, when social media meets ancestral recipes, when a politics dropout decides the best inheritance isn’t money or property, but the ability to stuff a squid exactly like great-grandmother did.

Helio doesn’t know how long this experiment will last. But for now, atop their dusty downtown hotel,  Cabanon Palace keeps serving time travel on a plate – one lobster, one memory, one sensationally cinematic social media post at a time.

“After all,” he concludes, “We never ask for the ending before going to the cinema, right?”