The woman behind the M brand
Print Edition
TODAY’S Shanghai enjoys a very diverse dining scene, especially when it comes to Western cuisine. Local diners can find everything from Hawaiian street food to new age molecular cuisine, and special dining events happen regularly throughout the year.
But 20 years ago, when Michelle Garnaut arrived in the city to arrange a 10-day pop up dinner at the Peace Hotel, she had to fly in 500 kilos of supplies from Hong Kong, including flower arrangements.
“20 years ago, there wasn’t much on the Bund except the Peace Hotel,” she told Shanghai Daily earlier this month.
Garnaut is now the CEO of the M Restaurant Group, which operates three dining establishments: M on the Bund and Glam in Shanghai and Capital M in Beijing.
Two decades ago, Garnaut was a successful restaurateur in Hong Kong with her M on the Fringe, which was among the highest rated restaurants in Hong Kong at that time. Her connection with the Peace Hotel goes back to the early 1990s. A friend of hers organized the Bella Vista Ball there in 1991 and she ended up co-organizing the event the following year.
After coming back occasionally over the next five years, Garnaut came to ask Wang Jiming, manager at the Peace Hotel, if she could come and cook here. Wang asked to taste her food first.
To prepare that dinner for 10 people, Michelle had to ask a friend of hers to carry supplies from her restaurant in Hong Kong to Shanghai — in a suitcase.
“I needed everything because we had none here, so he carried in hand luggage a meal for 10. He came to the hotel and knocked on my door, I took the food and went down the kitchen to get everything set up, I didn’t speak a word of Mandarin,” she said.
Salmon was the main course at that dinner and they finished with the meringue-based dessert pavlova, which is on the menus of all Garnaut’s restaurants today.
The meal gained Wang’s approval.
“We wrote out a menu, six or seven dishes for starters, five salads and soups; we had beef, salmon, some sort of oxtail, fish, prawn and pavlova of course,” she said. “We brought flowers, fish, beef, five whole salmons, fillets of beef. We brought tons of stuff because we couldn’t find them here — especially stuff where we could be happy about the quality.”
‘Trouble the whole time’
Garnaut’s team of five also brought coffee, sugar and cream. They were given one day to set up, and that also included cleaning the whole space from floor to ceiling.
The bread they served at the pop up dinners was made by chefs at Hilton Shanghai’s Italian restaurant, Leonardo’s.
The bread had to be picked up by taxi everyday, and the trip could take up to three hours as the traffic was so bad.
“I was in trouble the whole time, everything I did,” she recalls. “I wanted to take away the curtains and clean the filthy windows, but you had to get permission to do anything. Eventually I did it at about four o’clock and people were stunned with the nice view.”
She was called to the manager’s office almost every day.
On the first Saturday night of the dinner, a lot of people came and some booked at 8:30pm. An hour later they were short of wines.
“At about 9:30, I went to the cashier to get the wine but everything was locked and people had gone home with keys, so what could I serve? We took out the little bottles from the mini bars in the rooms,” she said.
After testing the waters in Shanghai, Garnaut began exploring the possibility of opening a restaurant here in 1997. She looked for properties and found a lovely space on a small street near the Hilton Shanghai. The deal fell through however, and it wasn’t until the following year that a customer of hers called to say she’d found a site on the Bund, on the top floor of Five on the Bund. They signed the lease and M on the Bund was opened in 1999 as the first independent restaurant on the historic Bund waterfront.
With restaurants in both Shanghai and Beijing, Garnaut finds there are big differences in Chinese people’s tastes for Western cuisine.
“Many people in Shanghai, even if they are not rich enough to be flying around the world and going to Paris for holidays, they still feel comfortable and familiar with Western food.
They have a history with Western cuisine, while Beijing is completely different,” she noted, “Shanghainese food is more subtle and not really strongly flavored, but a lot of Beijing food have big, strong flavors and other cuisines could get lost.”
About
Michelle Garnaut
- About Us
- |
- Terms of Use
- |
-
RSS - |
- Privacy Policy
- |
- Contact Us
- |
- Shanghai Call Center: 962288
- |
- Tip-off hotline: 52920043
- 沪ICP证：沪ICP备05050403号-1
- |
- 互联网新闻信息服务许可证：31120180004
- |
- 网络视听许可证：0909346
- |
- 广播电视节目制作许可证：沪字第354号
- |
- 增值电信业务经营许可证：沪B2-20120012
Copyright © 1999- Shanghai Daily. All rights reserved.Preferably viewed with Internet Explorer 8 or newer browsers.
