Mr Chow, by Andy Warhol
We’ve eaten at a variety of Michael Chow’s international outposts over the years, from Beverly Hills to Seoul, and we’ve marvelled at the scene (and of course art collection) in each. We’ve even been lucky enough to be invited to lunch at his self-designed L.A. mansion. But our heart belongs to the first restaurant he opened, on Valentine’s Day in 1968, in Knightsbridge. It’s the most modest of the bunch, but the most significant. Oh, if these glossy, soigné walls could talk…
This is where the legend – which would go on to become so aligned with Warhol, Basquiat, Haring and Hollywood – began. Despite an alleged relaunch and reboot in 2013, little has changed, for better or worse: it still looks like a vaguely fancy Halston-era Italian restaurant. There are the same circular Josef Hoffmann chairs; champagne bottles still sit in mountains of ice in giant silver buckets, and the façade is as it always was – its bowed windows resembling ornate Victorian display cabinets, as if this was a jeweller’s shop or fancy haberdasher rather than the kind of place Mick used to take Bianca on date night.
Mr Chow London
The food hasn’t moved on either. You can eat some of the most progressive Chinese food in the world in London right now (we are obsessed with Bar Shu in Soho, and who doesn’t love Hakkasan?), but when you want the Beijing equivalent of Angel Delight, Mr Chow is reassuringly, gloriously retro – right down to the curiously laminated menus.
No one chops up lines of cocaine on the tables upstairs any more (we have friends who were notorious for making themselves a little too much at home back in the day), and the basement bar is no longer filled with clouds of Gitane smoke, but this is a fabulous, glamorous timewarp: a throwback to a rock n’ roll, avant garde, high-fashion period in London, when restaurants weren’t necessarily about architecture, but about people and details. This small space, spread over two and a half floors, has the slightly shabby allure of the louche London of the 1970s: think Joan Collins at Tramp with Oliver Tobias; Celia Birtwell and Ossie Clark; Tommy Nutter suits; David Hockney and everyone.
There are some dishes here that will whisk you in a Proustian Datsun Cherry back to the Hong Kong Garden takeaway on Penge High Street circa 1980
Famously, Chow had the reception for his wedding to stylist Grace Coddington here, shortly after the restaurant opened. There was nowhere cooler to be at the end of the 60s and for most of the 70s. Now London is the centre of the restaurant universe, and places pass from vogue within weeks – but still, Mr Chow perseveres. On a Tuesday evening recently, we found it packed out, with a typically moneyed, handsome mix: Saudi women sipping Coca Cola; visiting New Yorkers sinking martinis; hip hop artists in baseball caps; gay couples wearing outré jackets liberated from the McQueen sale rail. It’s become a kind of Hard Rock Café for the jet set – a touch of Eurotrash and a soupçon of the die-hard art crowd mixed with a generous helping of faithful locals (for whom Harrods is the neighbourhood deli).
Sure, much of the food is pedestrian, even risible: there are some dishes here that will whisk you in a Proustian Datsun Cherry back to the Hong Kong Garden takeaway on Penge High Street circa 1980. But there’s also much to enjoy: we customarily eat so many pot stickers here (along with the fabulous minced squab in lettuce rolls) that we never make it to the “Chicken Joanna”, the most 1970s Chinese dish you’ll ever encounter, created by Michael Chow in tribute to the 1968 Donald Sutherland movie Joanna. We’re all about the dumplings.
To criticise the food for being an anachronism is to miss the point of Mr Chow. It’s the experience and the resonance of the room that counts. It’s about what went on here and what Mr Chow stands for, along with the contemporaneous people watching. And, of course, it’s about the art, much of it given to Chow by his famous artist friends in exchange for dinners. There is a ton of Peter Blake, while Clive Barker’s silvered bronze Peking ducks installation in the front of the ground floor is particularly eye-catching. Jim Dine’s Five Hearts represents some of the finest contemporary art to be seen in any London hotel or restaurant. Michael Chow has excellent taste.
From maître d’ Dino (an immaculately dressed force of nature who knows everyone) to the “thwack, thwack, thwack” of the Beijing noodles on their trolley during the chef’s genuinely dazzling mid-restaurant, mid-evening, live cookery demonstration, Mr Chow is one of the London restaurant scene’s treasures. May it never close, may it never change. C
Mr Chow, 151 Knightsbridge, London SW1X 7PA, UK
020-7589 7347; mrchow.com