Only when he started the restaurants did he become a collector.”Ĭhow’s epiphany was to create a restaurant that was the culinary equivalent of his own eccentric self. When we lived together, we had four chopsticks, two plates, two chairs, a bed, a pot, and a frying pan-no pictures, nothing. His first wife, Grace Coddington, now a fashion director of Vogue magazine-and typical of his three wives, a woman of great style-told HG in 1988, “When I met him, he wanted and had nothing. In the late ‘60s, Chow’s personal style was spare. “I have always had a cynical saying, that for Chinese in the West, one thing they can do is laundry.

He also flirted with bit parts in movies like the James Bond film “You Only Live Twice” and Wim Wenders’ “Hammett.” But roles for Chinese were stiflingly limited. For a while he owned and designed chic little shops-a hair salon, a boutique that sold early Karl Lagerfeld. Chow, who felt quite at home with the English taste for eccentrics, mingled with artists like David Hockney and Peter Blake, designer Rhodes, Vidal Sassoon and the Beatles. In the ‘60s, Chow was in London enjoying a different sort of cultural revolution-the creative whirl in English music and fashion. There’s a touch of pride in his voice when he talks about his “broken education,” because it flew in the face of the Confucian scholarly tradition and appeals to his mutinous soul. With only bare-bones English, he bounced from school to school, finding a home only when he went to art school, where he spent three years studying painting. In typical Chow style, seat snobbery gets an unlikely dose of Oriental mysticism, or feng shui, the ancient art of enhancing good fortune by aligning buildings and their interiors with the environment.Ĭhow’s first years in the West were not happy ones. Chow, and not just because the mere idea of capturing a best table appeals to good old Western vanity. You can put me on the moon and it’s OK.”Ĭonsider the first table on the left, the best table at Mr. I can adapt to different cultures very quickly. So I have this professional refugee mentality that translates into survival instincts.

“I always say I’m a professional refugee,” says the Shanghai-born Chow, “meaning I left home very early, lost my parents so to speak, lost my country, don’t speak English very well. Neither this nor quite that, not entirely Eastern nor primarily Western, neither fish nor fowl but a stew for all species, Michael Chow is a man of the world and at the same time a man without a country. Chow, where lines of demarcation blur into oblivion, is the perfect postmodern environment for Mr.

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