Fifty years of the smartest Chinese eatery in town
With fans from Marlon Brando to Justin Bieber, Mr Chow’s fare has added untold glamour to oriental cuisine, finds Lucy Holden
It’s 9pm at Mr Chow in Knightsbridge, and things are getting serious. In the middle of the restaurant, an elderly Chinese chef in a toque blanche and chessboard trousers swings noodle dough like a skipping rope, then cracks it, bullwhip-style, on the table in front of him, emitting a small cloud of flour and making four martini-drinking bankers jump out of their seats. On the table behind them, singer Olly Murs, who’s having dinner with a pretty blonde girl, manages to stay cool.
As today is Chinese New Year, there is surely no better time to indulge those cravings of crab claws, fiery beef and crispy things dripping in plum sauce. And there is one destination insiders will be piling into to celebrate the year of the dog: Mr Chow in Knightsbridge, which turned 50 this week and still boasts a set of regulars who have been coming since it first opened in 1968.
This is the restaurant Sir Terence Conran describes as “the first ‘designed’ restaurant in London”, and it’s as chic today as it was then, when Mick Jagger and the Beatles piled in for Chow’s signature green prawns (£36.50).
These days, it’s Kate Moss, Naomi Campbell, Cara Delevingne and the Hadid sisters mulling over whether to try the drunken fish (£36.50) or the live lobster three ways (£48.50). Marlon Brando, David Bowie, Liv Tyler and Penelope Cruz have all eaten here, and Justin Bieber once turned up in a gas mask and floral trainers. That’s fashion for you.
Half a century of staying popular is even more impressive when worldfamous celebrity chefs are closing up to 20 branches of their restaurant chains a year. Jamie Oliver announced that he would be shutting 12 Jamie’s Italians in one fell swoop last month, having done away with six the year before, owing to the “tough market”.
The steep rise in chains that expand too fast and start feeling like Frankie and Benny’s has not gone unnoticed by British diners: with Ivy Brasseries now popping up all over the UK at what feels like the same rate as branches of Tesco Express, many will be watching to see if Richard Caring’s fast-food equivalent of the celeb haunt goes the same way as Oliver’s dwindling franchise.
But the ebullient Mr Chow is a different sort of famous to the Naked Chef. While the most important people you know might own paintings by Basquiat, Blake, Hockney and Warhol, Michael Chow has been the subject of them, counting each of the artists as friends. The portraits are included in Mr
Chow: 50 Years, published this week. “When we opened 50 years ago, the world was a very different place,” Chow says. “People were only going out to dinner twice a year to celebrate something, and then they were going to a hotel. There wasn’t really a restaurant scene like there is now, but our relationship with food has changed enormously.”
His first establishment opened following the boom in popularity of Chinese food in the UK in the Fifties and Sixties. Since then, it has come to dominate dining outlets, and British takeaway culture, too – research last year found that it was the most popular cuisine among those who ordered in, while one in 10 Brits have a Chinese meal at least once a week.
Once, Chow says, the British concept of Chinese dining would have involved eating everything separately: “vegetables on one side, meat on the other. We didn’t even put all of it in one dish until they started to do it in Paris.” But now, “food is more of a craft at modern restaurants” – even if Chow has an aversion to the idea that it has become “fashionable”, which “implies something is momentary”, he says. “There’s art in continuity, and that’s what I’ve tried to do with my restaurants.”
He’s branched out over the years, but there are still only eight sites, including in New York, Beverly Hills and Miami, which could perhaps teach modern restaurants a thing or two about quality, not quantity.
The man himself, now 78, is as much of an enigma as his A-list regulars. He’s an interior designer turned restaurateur, artist and actor, with screen credits in Lethal Weapon and the Rush Hour trilogy. Now married to third wife Eva Chow, who has been described by The New York
Times as “the culture queen of Los
Angeles”, US Vogue creative director Grace Coddington and Tina Chow, the Seventies American fashion icon, are ex-wives.
It was perhaps inevitable that someone so interested in fashion created a “designer” restaurant, and his glamorous dining rooms have since sparked a trend for high-end Chinese eateries in the UK. Duddell’s is the latest to open in London and they’re putting on an 11-course Chinese New Year menu containing slipper lobster and black cod. In China, different ingredients are eaten at this time of year to bring things such as more luck or laughter in the following one. If you’re feeling broke in the next few weeks, eat lots of chicken to make yourself richer by next year, their head chef says.
The Michelin-starred Hakkasan restaurants in Mayfair and Hanway Place have been around longer, the first of which was launched in 2001, and couldn’t be more “scene”. At Hanway Place you descend stairs into what looks like a nightclub and drink lavish-looking lychee martinis (£13.50) at the bar before you sit down to eat. The dim sum platters consist of beautiful, rainbow-coloured dumplings filled with king crab and black truffle and Dover sole (£30). These restaurants make the food look like art, and the diners themselves are well-versed in the art of looking cool.
At Mr Chow, much of the owner’s personal art collection hangs on the walls above emerald tiled floors and crisp white tablecloths. “It was always just so terribly good and glamorous… A perfect tribute to Chinese culture at the very epicentre of swinging London,” says Conran, also a friend, in the foreword to the new book.
“Posh Chineses” are sure to start springing up across the rest of the country, too. And they’re all about grandeur: you won’t find chopsticks on the tables, only heavy silver cutlery, champagne and impeccable service. It’s as far away from a greasy late-night dish in Chinatown as you can get.