“I hate people who drop names—and Lady Gaga agrees with me!” says Michael Chow, better known as Mr. Chow, the name of his global network of fine-dining temples. Joking aside, memories involving A-listers are always within reach for the restaurateur.
Chow was just 12 when he left his native Shanghai to attend boarding school in England. Both his mother and his father, a leading Beijing opera performer, fell victim to China's Cultural Revolution. He wanted to be an artist but was told that Chinese men in the West faced a stark choice: “restaurant or laundry,” as he put it in last year's HBO documentary aka Mr. Chow.
He turned to acting, scoring roles in films before his entertainment-world contacts helped finance his first restaurant in London in 1968, when he set out to prove that Chinese cuisine can be as chic as anything you'd find in Europe.
