
Scene Cuisine: Mr. Chow, Riyadh
The impresario behind his namesake Mr. Chow restaurant opens his seventh location—his first in the Middle East—in the Saudi capital
Related articles
Michael Chow is not one for false modesty. “Before me the only international restaurant was McDonald’s,” he says, with the assurance of someone who knows what he brings to the table and isn’t afraid to share it. “I started the concept of having a high-end restaurant in multiple locations around the world over 50 years ago. I was light years ahead of everybody.”
He may be blunt, but he is not wrong. Since opening the first Mr. Chow restaurant in London, in 1968, Chow has redefined the international fine-dining experience. In short order, the chic Knightsbridge eatery, known for its elevated Chinese food, spectacular service and super-charged prices, became the last word in scene cuisine: the Champagne-fuelled place for the bon ton to go for a wonton.

Presciently anticipating the convergence of the culture and lifestyle industries, Chow hitched his wagon to the fashion and art worlds from the outset. (His first wife, Grace Coddington, a top model in the 1960s before becoming the longtime American Vogue Creative Director, probably made entrées into the fashion milieu a little easier.) A proto-meta-celebrity for the pre-internet age, Chow is famous for being famous among the famous.

Now, after successfully opening various outposts in Los Angeles, New York, Miami and Las Vegas, the impish restaurateur has hung out the shingle in the Middle East, unveiling a Mr. Chow in Riyadh in October.
“All the big boys are there,” Chow told Robb Report ANZ of his decision to expand into the region. “So I figured it was time to make the move.”
Besides, he suggests, sitting in a corner of his sprawling Los Angeles studio, Dubai has become a veritable supermarket of options. “It’s like Mount Olympus,” Chow points out, “all the gods are there. Cipriani, Nobu, Zuma. And, unlike Vegas, every brand there is authentic and the standards are very high.”
In addition to wanting to avoid the crowded competition, Chow was also drawn to the relaxing of Saudi policy towards the West. “Before they’d say stay away, don’t come near us,” he says. “But the whole Middle East, particularly Saudi Arabia, has lightened up and is going through a major cultural change. They want to be part of the international conversation. The roads are still being paved, so to speak, but it’s a very exciting time.”
Despite the welcome arms, the new location comes with considerable concessions to local palates and customs. “For starters,” Chow explains, “there is no pork and no alcohol. That’s the biggest change. It’s not like Dubai where you can get alcohol in restaurants and hotels. They’re two different animals in that sense.”
Also absent in the Riyadh chapter is the art on the walls that is part of the DNA at Mr. Chow. “We have a couple of ceiling art projections, including one that resembles a flower opening up over the room,” he offers. “Eventually the plan is to introduce art on the walls, maybe by local artists, but I haven’t got around to it.”
In the tortuous decade prior to opening the London restaurant, Chow, who was born in Shanghai in 1939 and moved to London at 13 to attend boarding school, left architecture school to train as a painter. He wound up at the swinging Robert Fraser Gallery near Grosvenor Square, a beau-monde salon of sorts where the debonair blade, who by then was sporting shoulder-length hair and Yves Saint Laurent suits, met the leading artists of the day, like Peter Blake, Allen Jones, Jim Dine, Patrick Caulfield, Paul Huxley and Clive Barker—many of whom swapped art for a generous tab at Mr. Chow.
As a result, the paintings on the walls (and the artists who dined there) became as much of a draw as the restaurant’s storied Beijing duck. “The London restaurant is practically a Peter Blake museum,” he concedes. A soi-disant name-dropper, Chow is wont to remind people that every major artist has signed his guest book, which is also full of drawings by a slew of luminaries including Andy Warhol, Francesco Clemente, Francis Bacon, and Jasper Johns. “Everyone except Picasso,” he says. Without missing a beat, he adds, “But I had lunch with Van Gough. Just kidding.”

The rest of the signature Mr. Chow experience, from the locked-eyes acknowledgement that greets all diners to the theatrical pyrotechnics of the twice-nightly noodle-making “performances”, remains on display in Riyadh.
“I’m a painter at heart but I also follow my father’s footsteps and he was the king of the theatre,” Chow explains. “Both mediums draw on deep suffering and can transcend the audience to a spiritual level. I turned the restaurant into theatre. Never bore the audience and reach for transcendence and a higher level of communication every night.”

Those not familiar with the Tao According to Chow can now discover his Byzantine history in Aka Mr. Chow, a no-holds-barred HBO documentary (streaming on Binge in Australia) that sheds light, with sometimes brutal candour, on his longtime gambling addiction and his voracious appetite for collecting everything from prestige cars to door hinges, Lloyd Wright–designed houses to ice buckets. “What can I say? I take collecting very seriously, and I am very obsessive,” he offers flatly. “Doesn’t mean I’m a bad person.”
As the documentary illustrates, Chow has also been known to collect beautiful women and he is currently on his fourth wife, Vanessa Rano, with whom the 84-year-old has two young sons. (The rest of the Chow brood comprises China, 49, Maximillian, 46, and Asia, 29.) The film is particularly unsparing in its retelling of the doomed marriage between Michael and second wife, Tina Chow, mother of China and Maximillian, internationally renowned beauty, businesswoman, collector, jeweler, and member of the International Best-Dressed Hall of Fame. Michael and Tina were the Brangelina of their day, but the glamour couple divorced in 1989 and Tina died of AIDS three years later.
Equally uncompromising are the sections of the film that ruminate on Chow’s Chinese ancestry and the vicissitudes of fortune that resulted from being the son of arguably the most famous man in China at the time. Chow’s father, Zhou Xinfang, whom he credits with his creative drive, was a highborn Chinese national treasure and a famed star of Shanghai’s Peking Opera Theatre who went by the stage name Qilin Tong (Unicorn Boy). His mother, Lillian, was the daughter of a Scottish tea merchant who scandalised Chinese society when she ran off with the older, married performer. When government forces began to clamp down on Unicorn Boy’s increasingly nationalistic performances, Chow’s parents sent him off to England. He never saw his father again; his mother visited him once.
“I wish I could say I went kicking and screaming,” Chow says of being banished to Wenlock Edge, a school he has described as Harry Potter without the magic. “But I was too dumb to do that. Basically, my mother wanted me to get out of there, period.” (One of his sisters, Tsai Chin, a former Bond Girl who appears in You Only Live Twice, was also hurried off, to Europe.)
Of his parents, Chow says: “Terrible, terrible things happened to them. They were among the first to be purged in the Cultural Revolution, but I didn’t find out about their deaths till much later.” His life, as he recounts in the film, has been an attempt to reconcile his love for them and their fate with his extant love of China, which he visits occasionally. “It sounds corny, but everything I do is to make China great to the West. But, of course, I have mixed feelings about my homeland because there are some things I can never forget.”
Even in this fifth chapter of his life, as he refers to it, Chow appears as spry as ever. “I’m doing very well,” he says. “I’m getting on, but at the same time, I’m active and very ambitious on two fronts—on my painting and, you know, the rest of it.”
The documentary, which premiered at MoMA in New York (“The cathedral of art,” he gushes) has led to more interest in his painting and he has several works showing during Art Basel Miami Beach this month. There are also new restaurants on the horizon. Having resisted all entreaties to open shop in Dubai, he is finally doing so at the end of next year. And then there are famous people to watch and to namedrop. “Can you blame me?” he asks. “I’ve met everyone. Marlene Dietrich. Marx Brothers. Ginger Rogers. Drake.” As Chow himself says, surmising his future, “The best is yet to come.”
Scene Cuisine is a new column, showcasing the fashionable spots where the elite meet to eat.
Bldg 2.09, Metro Blvd,
Riyadh, Al Aqiq 13519;
T: +966.9200.12658
Subscribe to Robb Report ANZ
Subscribe to the Newsletter
Recommended for you
Gordon Murray Says It’s Easier to Win an F1 Championship Than Le Mans—Here’s Why
Murray helped win Ayrton Senna his first Formula 1 title and also won Le Mans with the McLaren F1.
February 11, 2025
Capella Brands Their Own Caviar to Mark Chinese New Year
Capella Sydney continues its commitment to exceptional luxury experiences, with a high tea and caviar upgrade all part of its 2025 Lunar New Year celebrations to usher in the Year of the Snake.
February 7, 2025