Mr Chow: the story behind the world’s most fascinating restaurateur
The food never shows up in AKA Mr Chow, director Nick Hooker’s feature-length documentary about restaurateur Michael Chow, but that’s sort of the point. Ever since the Shanghai-born impresario opened his first Mr Chow outpost in 1976, he has been building a mini empire of dining destinations better known for their star-studded clientele than starred reviews.
Hooker first set foot in the original Mr Chow, in London, as a young boy in the 1970s, when his father took him there for lunch. “My parents were separated, and I think there was a bit of ‘I’m gonna make sure he has a great time,’” he recalled of the excursion that became a father-son tradition. “We’d go to Mr Chow and have lunch and then we would go watch a James Bond double bill. Whenever I walked in there, something happened. The chemistry in my body kind of changed.”
Some four decades later, Hooker was shooting a fashion television show with Grace Coddington, the model and Vogue editor, at a Mr Chow dining room (Coddington and Chow were married for a year in the 1960s) when the man with the owlish glasses and flair for theatricality showed up. He blew Hooker away with his charisma and aura of mystery. “There were no biographies of Michael Chow,” the director said. “I thought he would be a great subject of a film.”
Graydon Carter, the former editor of Vanity Fair and a clubby restaurateur in his own right, as the owner of the Waverly Inn, signed on as a producer.
Most of the other creatives who were asked to come on board were of Asian descent, which Hooker said helped his subject feel comfortable and open up about his life. Jean Tsien, who eventually signed on as executive producer and editor, was not an easy sell. She hadn’t ever heard of Mr Chow, and the concept hit a nerve. “As an immigrant, and daughter of a chef at a Chinese restaurant, the last thing I want to work on is anything about Chinese restaurants,” she said. But she started conducting research on the subject, whose father was a grandmaster opera star and whose prosperous family was decimated during the Cultural Revolution.
For all their razzle dazzle, showmen can be squirrelly, and Chow is not keen to dig into his personal traumas in the film, which made conducting the interviews tricky. “It was sort of like bullfighting,” Hooker recalled. “He’s staring at me, I’m staring at him, and it’s a bit of a duel at times.”
Born as Zhou Yinghua, Chow’s childhood was shattered by the Cultural Revolution. His father, an opera star, was taken by Red Guards and imprisoned until his death. His mother, who oversaw her husband’s business affairs, put her children on a boat to London, and was beaten to death by members of the new political regime. Diane Quon, who came on as a producer, said: “It’s a story of the generation after the Chinese civil war, and how millions and millions of families were broken up.”
Skirting across decades and continents, with the help of evocative street footage and animations by Rohan Patrick McDonald, the movie is concerned with far more than Chow’s talent for befriending celebrities and flair for decadence. It touches on pain points of the disarmingly energetic (and disarmingly dark haired) 84-yearold’s life, including his depression, gambling addiction, and the tragic story of his wife Tina, who died from complications of Aids in 1992, at age 41.
Small, asthmatic and foreign, Chow had a miserable time at an English boarding school. He found refuge in the cinema, and perfected his party trick of describing, shot for shot, the opening sequence of every classic film (a skill he deploys in the opening shots of the documentary).
After school, he became an actor himself, appearing in films alongside Charlton Heston, Ava Gardner and Monica Vitti. He found a foothold in swinging London. To be a somebody at that place and time, “one has to be eccentric, aristocrat or artistic,” he explains in the film. He went with “eccentric”, donning clothes with slinky silhouettes and aviator glasses, and marrying Coddington.
Chinese people who wanted to go into business at the time had two choices: open a laundromat or a Chinese restaurant. Opening Mr Chow was an act of subversion, as he turned the cliche on its head. His version would specialize in small servings and whopping prices. “It was an embassy,” said Quon. “And he was the self-appointed ambassador.”
With its soaring ceilings and shiny white walls, his restaurant operated like a theater, where diners – many of them not white – were the stars. “It was an anti-racist restaurant,” Hooker said. Outposts in New York, Las Vegas and Los Angeles drew names like Mick and Bianca Jagger, Gregory Peck, Jack Nicholson and Mae West. Artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol and Ed Ruscha exchanged works of art for free eating rights. David Hockney designed the matchbooks. Chow installed a periscope with a video camera in the ceiling in order to watch the show from his office, a show that is still going strong. Kim Kardashian came by not long ago. A Jay-Z lyric calls out Mr. Chow. (“How many times can I go to Mr. Chow’s, Tao’s, Nobu? Hold up, let me move my bowels.”)
“I’m living in the movies all the time,” Chow tells the camera. “Instead of three acts I have five.” These past few years, he has been focusing on his love of painting, making enormous abstract works. His process is cathartic and physically demanding, sometimes involving banging paint with a mallet and blow torches. “Painting was the magic carpet out of his depression,” Hooker said. “When he started painting again, he suddenly rediscovered his enthusiasm for being alive.”
The film-makers were nervous to show the movie to its subject. “I remember after the first screening with him, he was silent,” said Quon. “And then he said thank you, everyone, for making me a human being and not a Chinaman.”
AKA Mr Chow is now available on Max in the US with a UK date to be announced
their stashes by requesting revellers throw their drugs on to the stage.
There’s lots of juicy tidbits, from all the partying stuff to meatier elements such as Cave’s attraction to Christianity and the Bible – a brief tangent that could have been expanded. The singer indicates this wasn’t the standard “born again” chapter in a musician’s career when he recalls: “God was talking not just to me but through me, and his breath stank.”
For extra punch and panache, White integrates animated sequences based on the work of the German artist and graphic novelist Reinhard Kleist, illustrated with a spunky in-your-face style that gels with the film and its subjects beautifully. The use of these animated elements address a core challenge in documentaries about artists: how to use the subject’s work to influence the aesthetic of the film. This challenge was well realised in Ecco Homo, about another artist – Troy Davis – whose career was etched in the postpunk scene, and in 2021’s The Witch of Kings Cross, Sonia Bible’s trippy film about the artist, tabloid sensation and self-professed witch Rosaleen Norton.
By finding ways to mesh together the form of the film with the content of the artist, documentaries about famous creative people can be taken to the next level. In Mutiny in Heaven: The Birthday Party, it’s not just the subjects who rock out but the whole cinematic kit and caboodle, with White imparting a sense that the film, too, is necking bottles, smoking dream pipes and banging around in the mosh pit, soon to wake up with a terrible hangover.
• Mutiny in Heaven: The Birthday Party is screening now in Melbourne; it opens in New South Wales and Canberra on 2 November; and in Perth, Brisbane and Hobart from 9 November. It screens in the UK at Doc’n Roll film festival in London on 12 November
moments there’s a red flag: Auster’s actual words, and the events they itemise, matter less than the fact of their accumulation – a storytelling strategy whose recklessness comes into view once we slide from Baumgartner’s hereand-now into his memories of college, university, marriage and career as a Princeton philosophy professor. As he sifts the unpublished papers of Anna, a poet he first met in the 60s (excerpts include her memoir of an old lover named Frankie Boyle), there’s a dawning sense that the book won’t have the page count to resolve the vast number of threads it starts to spin. Texture, not substance, is the game, but when Baumgartner “asks himself where his mind will be taking him next”, you can hear the narrative architecture creak.
The oddest passage occurs when we find the protagonist “suddenly… remembering his trip to Ukraine two years ago and the day he spent in the town where [his mother’s] father was born”: a cue for Auster to plonk down an old piece about his own visit to an ancestral birthplace, transplanting his family tree to what Baumgartner calls “the obscure Auster side” of his heritage. The thriftiness is fine, ditto the long-patented authorial step from behind the curtain, but it’s hard not to see the episode as a bit of bodged-in bulk (Auster even introduces the segment as a “short, confounding text”, as if by way of apology).
When we hear that Anna’s death preceded “a glum interlude of masturbation [before he] started chasing after women” – the most important of them a divorcee 16 years his junior – the stage seems set for a probing of later-life lust, not least during a passage comparing their physical attributes. But even with the climactic arrival into Baumgartner’s life of a young female academic, familiar formulas are ignored in favour of a kind of amiable aimlessness. There’s a measure of charm in the news that a minor character is ready to come “back into the story after an absence of several chapters”, or the nudge-wink gloss on Baumgartner’s otherwise hazy opusin-progress as a “serio-comic, quasi-fictional discourse on the self”, although the book is only knocking holes in a fourth wall it never cared to build. Auster’s turbo-charged kickstart ultimately takes us on a ride without destination – yet who would blame him?
Baumgartner by Paul Auster is published by Faber (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply