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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
One evening not long ago, I wandered down the Rue de Richelieu on my way to a Chinese restaurant called Dave, which is recommended regularly by people in the fashion business. Like many popular restaurants in Paris, reservations are hard to get at Dave. So I wasn't surprised to find a Complet sign hanging over the lacquered red door. Inside, though, the place was practically empty--there was just one couple, sitting at a table near the window. A rumpled, unshaven Chinese man of indeterminate age emerged from the kitchen. He had wild black hair flecked with gray and was wearing an untucked pink cotton pin-striped shirt, a gray sweater-vest, seersucker pants, and lime-green silk slippers. This was the owner, Dave Cheung--but nobody uses his last name. He led me to a banquette and poured tea, and I asked him why he'd placed a "Sold out" sign on the door on a night when there were thirty empty tables.
"Are you kidding? Do you know what would happen if I took that sign off the door?''
"People might come in to have dinner?"
"Exactly! They would just walk right in. I would have to let anybody who wanted come and eat here. I would have no control. No control over my own restaurant!"
There are more than fifteen hundred Chinese restaurants in Paris--among them Cantonese, Szechuan, and Hunan. As a culinary experience, Dave ranks somewhere in the top half. Nobody recommends Dave for the food, however, which is adequate, or the prices, which, while always high, vary according to what the owner feels like serving. Or for the ambience. Dave is dark and claustrophobic even on the brightest day--hemmed in by quilted red walls and a velvet curtain inside the door. A tropical-fish tank, which sits in the middle of the front room, provides the only real source of light. Despite all that, Dave may be the most frequently and reverentially mentioned Chinese restaurant in France. It's certainly the most exclusive. Except on weekends, when he does not serve lunch, the place is open every day. Dave seats about eighty people, and on a busy night during fashion week it might serve a hundred dinners--much of them tofu and bok choy--at an average price of around sixty euros a person.
"I know you are saying to yourself, 'This is a restaurant in Paris, of all places--why would somebody go there if the food was not spectacular?' " Dave said. He threw up his hands. "It's simple. People don't come here for the food. They come for me. I offer my guests peace. They are tired and hassled and bothered, and this is where they can relax at the end of the day and be with each other socially. They don't want to be disturbed by a bunch of tourists.'' The word seemed to twist his face into a moue of distaste. "My job is to make fabulous people feel fabulous. I mean, really, anybody can serve a spring roll.''
Dave is a restaurant that caters to writers, actors, filmmakers, and rock stars. Allen Ginsberg would wander in when he was in Paris, choose a quiet corner table, ask for a bowl of wonton soup, and read in the dark. ("I always worried he would hurt his eyes,'' Dave said. "We don't have that much reading here.'') Bernardo Bertolucci has eaten at Dave, and so have Oliver Stone and David Bowie. Dave is always happy to see them, but when he talks...
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