Going to Mr Chow for the food, is kind of missing the point. To sit there, knife and fork poised (note: chopsticks do not come as a given at this Chinese restaurant), waiting for a profound culinary revelation, is to fundamentally misunderstand the world-renowned DNA of this establishment. It’s like going to the theatre and complaining about the quality of the props.
It is easy (and logical) to immediately compare the newly-opened outpost in Dubai’s DIFC to the other big named restaurants attempting to entice covers in the city’s most highly-concentrated high-end restaurant spot—but to do so is to ignore all what makes Mr Chow, well, Mr Chow.
Rather than a restaurant in the traditional sense, Mr Chow is a piece of living cultural history. When Chinese-Briton Michael Chow opened the original restaurant in London’s Knightsbridge in 1968, it was done as somewhat of a cultural embassy introducing the ‘exotic’ world of Chinese cuisine to the West. Sure, the prices were disproportionately high to the calibre of food (and still are), but it became a place where people would show (and show-off) that they had a knowledge and appreciation of the world beyond the familiar—it was showing that you were eating ‘Chinese food’ before everyone was eating Chinese food.
At the time to be seen dining at Mr Chow was essential to establishing your credentials as part of the ‘it’ crowd. Mick and Bianca Jagger ate there, so did Frank Sinatra. Following its Beverly Hills opening in 1974, and on New York’s 57th Street in 1979, names in the reservations books read Paul McCartney, Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Jack Nicholson.
Such has been its life-long pull with tastemakers, that Chow was even briefly married to Vogue creative director Grace Coddington. To this day across its locations, celebrities like Justin Bieber, Adele, and the Hadid sisters pull-up to order the hand-pulled noodles—presented theatrically in front of the diners since the ’60s in a way that kickstarted so much of what makes the modern cosmopolitan dining experience what it is today.
And now, Mr Chow has now found its rightful home in the land of high-rise spectacles and unabashed glamour. The whispers, of course, have followed it to Dubai. “The food is so overpriced!” they whine. “It’s just bland Chinese takeout!” And to that, I repeat: you’re kind of missing the point. The food is the supporting cast, the co-star to the real celebrity of the evening: going to Mr Chow.
The show starts when you are met by a squadron of staff in starched white dinner jackets, a phalanx of civility that ushers you into an unexpectedly clinical-looking dining room. Split across two levels, the lighting is low but bounces off the many white surfaces, the music is a suave pulse, and the floor-to-ceiling windows are there to showcase the diners as much they are to remind you that you are in the city’s financial heart. It’s a stage where the audience is as important as the performers. Like London, L.A. or New York, you come here to see and, crucially, to be seen.
The menu is a list of greatest hits—which looks and tastes like it hasn’t been updated since the 1970s. The chicken satay is an original recipe that has outlasted empires. The hand-pulled noodle show, a nightly reminder of old-world culinary craftsmanship serves as a centrepiece of dinnertime distraction. It is a museum of its own making. The price tag, which might give a lesser mortal a nosebleed, is a deliberate part of the experience. It’s a velvet rope, a key to the kingdom, an insurance policy that ensures the room is populated by people who understand the legacy of where they are eating, not just the cost of a noodle.
Is it the most authentic Chinese food in the UAE? Almost certainly not. Will you find a more flavourful, more profound bowl of wonton soup down the road? Quite likely. But you won’t get the drama. You won’t get the history. You won’t get to sit in a room that feels like it’s been airlifted straight out of a Hollywood dream sequence and placed here, in a city built on the promise of exactly that. Mr Chow has always been about the experience, and in that grand tradition, its new Dubai incarnation is worth the splendour.