Mr. Chow—Iconic Restaurateur to the Stars—Looks Back on 50 Years at the Top

When in February 1968 Michael Chow set aside his dream of becoming an artist to open a restaurant—he’d trained in painting at Central St. Martins before struggling for ten years to build a career—he did not intend to sacrifice one bit of his artistic passion. From the start, his eponymous restaurant aimed to dazzle Western diners with Chinese food more refined than any they’d had before, delivered in high style. It was not “going out to eat.” It was theater.

There were the celebrities, of course: The first Mr Chow, in London’s Knightsbridge, which opened its doors on this date in 1968, was an instant star magnet, attracting the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Later, when the restaurant expanded to Beverly Hills, there were sightings of Mae West, Jack Nicholson, and Federico Fellini. But it was Chow who set the perfect stage. “Every night was a show, and every detail mattered,” says Chow, who now goes simply by “M.” “The ultimate goal was to never bore the audience.” He pulled much of the restaurants’ art and furnishings from his personal collection. “The most important thing, I found, is to be true to your time,” he says. “In most restaurants, the space will speak to you. Most people don’t listen. I always did.”

In the new Mr Chow: 50 Years, a coffee table–memoir hybrid out March 6, M presents a collection of portraits, photographs, and reflections from his 50-year career as an icon of food, art, high society, and restaurant design. “The impact of the original Mr Chow restaurant cannot be understated,” writes Sir Terence Conran in the book’s foreword. “Let’s not forget [London] was not a city whose jaw dropped easily. . . . But when Mr Chow opened in Knightsbridge in 1968, it was something different altogether. . . . It was always just so terribly good and glamorous, and he seduced us all.”

Cover art by Keith Haring—a portrait of M as a “green prawn” in a bowl of Mr Chow noodles—segues into hundreds of works that have graced the walls of various locations of Mr Chow, created by art-world stars and friends that include Jean-Michel Basquiat, Julian Schnabel, Ed Ruscha, and Richard Prince. Many of the pieces are portraits of M himself. “53 years ago, portraiture was dead in the water,” he says. “Only the Queen had her portrait done. But I have always liked to be very specific in the category of whatever it is I am collecting.” When he was a boy, he collected stamps, but only Russian stamps. “So when I started collecting art, I started collecting portraits,” he says. “And I collected them, and commissioned them, violently and aggressively.”

One of the first he commissioned of himself was by David Hockney. The artist did a “beautiful drawing,” Chow writes in the book, in a caption beneath a hurried-looking sketch. “But he tore it up at the end. We rescheduled, and I sat for him again. This is the result.” (He couldn’t have thought it was that bad: The image eventually made it onto Mr Chow matchbooks.) On the next page, beneath a 2017 portrait by Jonas Wood, M writes, “Jonas enthusiastically exaggerated my lines on my forehead. If I only knew, I would have used Botox before this sitting.”

Mr Chow would eventually grow to 9 locations; after Beverly Hills came 57th Street in Manhattan and eventually openings in Kyoto, Japan; Seoul; Tribeca; Miami; Vegas; Malibu, California; and Mexico City (seven now remain). When the 57th Street Mr. Chow opened in 1979, “I hit the jackpot,” says M. “Schnabel, Warhol, Jean-Michel. Jasper Johns.” The restaurant became a cafeteria for giants of art and, eventually, M became their subject. Sometimes he would give instructions, he says, “but most of the time, the artists would do their thing. And for the most part, I had good fortune. Maybe because I’m Chinese, or maybe because my respect for them was very strong, but they would usually produce a very good portrait.”

Mr Chow: 50 Years also features stories and photos of M and his family, including his late ex-wife Tina Chow, by prominent 21st-century artists including Helmut Newton and Inez and Vinoodh. There’s also an illustrated history of Mr Chow’s most famous dishes, most of which have remained on the menu for 50 years; restaurant artifacts, like Cy Twombly–designed crockery; plenty of star-studded photographs; and a who’s who list of patrons who have visited the restaurants over the years. (“Me being extremely vulgar,” says M, “but it’s everybody, literally everybody.”)

A few years back, M took up painting again, at the encouragement of friends Schnabel and Jeffrey Deitch, hosting his first-ever solo show at the age of 72, and Mr Chow: 50 Years offers, too, some of his own recent works. “It was a radical sabbatical,” he says. “But if I had painted throughout these years I would have failed. When I came back, my style had matured but I still knew how to do it, just like riding a bicycle. 50 years is a long time. But, it turns out, also a short time.”