There’s a reason for the enduring allure of the collaboration dinner.
For the guest, it offers a one-of-a-kind dining experience — unlikely to ever be repeated — and the opportunity to experience the cooking of chefs from further abroad.
For the chefs, it allows for not only the opportunity to cook alongside their peers, often friends, but also the chance to engage in a gastronomic exchange for themselves, their teams and their diners too. For these dinners often bring chefs, cuisines and culinary cultures into a conversation that they would be unlikely to engage in otherwise.
Two, in particular, caught my attention as they made the most of European summer, landing within a week of each other, with one upcoming Cape Town dinner sure to bring the same excitement to the Mother City.
A weekend in Bornholm
The first arrived on June 27, when Kadeau Bornholm threw open its own kitchen for what has become one of the most anticipated collaborations of the year for avid foodies, Bonhomie.
Fresh off receiving three Michelin stars at their Copenhagen restaurant, the team took to the picturesque island of Bornholm, where chef Nicolai Nørregaard grew up and home to their pared-back outpost Kadeau Bornholm, which sits overlooking the beach, for two days of unbridled gastronomic revelry.
For Bonhomie #3, cooking alongside Kadeau chefs Nørregaard and Kyumin Hahn was Merlin Labron-Johnson, from Osip in Bruton, Somerset, where he grows much of what he serves on a nearby walled garden and farm.
Karime López came from Xaak, the restaurant at Hotel Xcaret Arte on Mexico’s Riviera Maya, and Hugo Roellinger arrived from Le Coquillage at Château Richeux in Brittany, awarded a third Michelin star in March 2025 and named Chef of the Year by Le Chef the same year, cooking in the spice-trading tradition his father Olivier built the restaurant on.
The dinner was underpinned by Kadeau’s celebration of the island and all it provides, with each chef taking to the island’s produce when composing the menu and bringing their own distinct style and a taste of home to the pass. Touches of Mexico, Britain and France wove their way through Kadeau’s new Nordic sensibility to create a once-off eight-course menu.
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There was, naturally, Kadeau’s hot and cold smoked salmon, a signature and a standout. López sent out a king crab taco with marine mole, while Labron-Johnson’s scallop came with dried tomato, unripe strawberry and meadowsweet, and Roellinger’s lobster claw with a 27-spice rub. Each dish a conversation between the island and each of the chefs, Bornholm by way of Brittany, Somerset and Playa del Carmen.
The following day, the collaboration weekend finished with an outdoor party at Kadeau Bornholm with open fire, street food, natural wine and cocktails running late into the evening.
Austrian trio Healthy Boy Band — chefs Lukas Mraz, Philip Rachinger and Felix Schellhorn — cooked alongside the rest of Bonhomie’s crowd, while guests were in and out of the seasonally comfortable Baltic.
Aside from being a cheeky little play on Bornholm, the collaboration series borrows its name from the French word bonhomie, meaning cheerful friendliness and easy company, which is exactly what the weekend was all about. Grand cooking, great company and conviviality aplenty.
Dinner under the Roman sky
At the top of Rome’s famed Spanish Steps is where you’ll find Hotel Hassler, Rome’s first luxury hotel, open since 1893 and home to Imàgo restaurant on its sixth floor.
Here, overlooking the eternal city, chef Andrea Antonini runs a kitchen that has spent years distilling Italian cooking down to its essentials, plates built on two or three ingredients, displaying a deceiving simplicity, because once tasted it’s clear they’re anything but.
On July 4, a week after Bornholm, he welcomed Himanshu Saini, chef of Trèsind Studio in Dubai, with three Michelin stars and third place on this year’s MENA’s 50 Best Restaurants list, for a dinner built around Dom Pérignon.
Antonini had eaten at Trèsind Studio last year and came away calling his guest one of the finest chefs in the world — that dinner is where the idea for this one started.
Where the Roman leans towards minimalism, the Dubai-based chef has redefined modern Indian cooking through a maximal approach to layering spices, flavours and techniques, earning a reputation as one of the most compelling chefs cooking today.
The menu for this collaboration was not so much a juxtaposition of the two styles of cooking but a celebration of both, each course paired with a different vintage from the Champagne house.
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Guests began on the terrace with the 2017 Vintage, the view a mosaic of the city, its turreted cathedrals and domed churches ablaze in the rays of the setting sun.
Antonini opened with green datterini tomatoes in their prime, basil and vanilla, three ingredients doing all the work. Saini responded with roasted crab and burnt cinnamon, spice stacked on spice as the chef does best.
Once inside, the 2010 Vintage arrived with Saini’s prawns and asparagus in a potato foam and tomato rasam. The Rosé 2010 carried Antonini’s lumachine pasta dish with yellow datterini, anise and gentian. And by the 2008 Plénitude 2, it was Antonini’s pork, peanuts and lime on the table before Saini’s sour milk pandan payesh gelato closed the night, alongside Imàgo’s own gelato trolley.
Between them, the two restaurants carry four Michelin stars. Dom Pérignon himself is often misattributed to have greeted his first taste of the wine with “Come quickly, I am tasting the stars.”
Six floors above Rome, with four vintages of it moving through a menu built by both kitchens, and champagne a plenty, it’s safe to say, I was tasting the stars too.
A meeting of minds at The Mount Nelson
From August 13 to 16, Amura by Ángel León at Mount Nelson, A Belmond Hotel, will host a four-night residency built around two chefs carrying six Michelin stars between them, a first of its kind on this stretch of coast.
Chef Alain Roux will take over the kitchen at Amura for the first three nights, bringing a taste of his own restaurant, London’s The Waterside Inn, opened by his father, the great Michel Roux, on the Thames — and holder of three Michelin stars without a single break since 1985, the longest unbroken run any restaurant outside France has managed.
His menu for the residency will run six courses, built from local South African produce but unmistakably his own: a Truffle Croque Monsieur, a seared scallop with sweetcorn, lime and a vadouvan sauce — and, to close, a raspberry soufflé that’s been on The Waterside Inn’s own menu for more than 5 years.
On the fourth night, Ángel León will join him and the two will share the pass for a single four-hands dinner. The world-renowned León runs Aponiente in Cádiz, and he too holds three Michelin stars, along with another two at Alevante, and has built his entire career around the sea in ways few other chefs have considered, let alone attempted.
Guests can expect León’s ocean-inspired Spanish cooking, including his signature plankton risotto, alongside the likes of Roux’s pan-fried lobster medallion, ginger vegetable julienne and a white port sauce, classic French technique carried straight from the Thames to Cape Town.
South African chef Wandile Mabaso will work alongside them in the kitchen throughout the residency. French tradition and Spanish marine cooking don’t often share a pass, let alone at the bottom of Africa, yet for one night in August that’s exactly what they’ll do.
Wanted
