When Michael and Tina Ruled the World
One evening sometime in the mid eighties, the film producer and director Brett Ratner went to New York City’s Midtown for a Chinese meal. “I’m sitting there, and right next to me you’ve got David Bowie,” he recalled. “Sitting across from me is Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Madonna, too, and Francesco Clemente. This place instantly became my favourite restaurant in the whole entire world.”
By now, you’ve probably twigged that Ratner hadn’t popped into the Golden Dragon Buffet or the Old Sichuan. He’d opted for a place where the melange of celebrities was as piquant as the chicken satay or the green prawns: Mr Chow. Presiding over the revels — Julian Schnabel’s 40th birthday party, say, or Warhol’s 58th — were the restaurant’s charismatic hosts. Michael Chow, Shanghai-born and Europe-schooled, would be acting as beetlebrowed ringmaster, immaculate in his bespoke Hermès suit, keeping a beady eye (encased in his trademark chunky-framed, starchitect-style round glasses) on his Armani-clad Italian waiters as they filled flutes, changed tablecloths, or painstakingly deboned rare, fresh pieces of fish. His wife, Tina, half-American, half-Japanese, whose gamine beauty saw her serving as model and muse to the likes of Helmut Newton and Cecil Beaton, would be sharing fashion- or art-world gossip with friends such as Herb Ritts and Karl Lagerfeld. Like Studio 54 in the previous decade, it seemed that this 57th Street establishment had captured the super-heated New magazine, when attempting to account for his restaurant’s folkloric stature. “The twenties was Berlin, the thirties was Paris and Shanghai. In the fifties, everything is Rome. And then in the sixties, it’s London. Then the seventies in L.A., and then eighties art-world New York. We are always in the happening city.” True, but Mr Chow’s New York outpost — the restaurant’s third iteration — was widely regarded as the couple’s masterpiece. It opened in 1979; the interior, as in all his restaurants, was designed by Michael, who’d studied both art and architecture. It was a white glass-lacquered space with a bronze standing lamp by Giacometti, double glass doors by Lalique, a soaring ceiling sculpture by Richard Smith, white marble floors, alabaster and bronze fan-shaped sculptures by Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann, ice buckets from the SS Normandie, padded tables lit from below and surrounded by Josef Hoffman chairs, and specially commissioned 28-inch-square napkins, which, according to Tina, were “like blankets”. The Chows lived above the shop, in a duplex with a neo-Gothic Louis Comfort Tiffany interior described by Michael Walsh, a vintage fashion dealer and friend of Tina’s, as “a satanic mess, dark and amber, like Citizen Kane”. In the early eighties, the apartment was transformed into a white silk-walled showplace for Michael’s extensive collection of art deco furniture — by Ruhlmann, Eileen Gray and Jean Dunand – which, according to Walsh, was “like the set of Fritz Lang’s ”.
