Mr Chow: the story behind the world’s most fascinating restaurateur

‘It’s a story of the generation after the Chinese Civil War, and how millions and millions of families were broken up’ … Michael Chow AKA Mr Chow. Photograph: HBO

The food never shows up in AKA Mr Chow, the director Nick Hooker’s feature-length documentary about the restaurateur Michael Chow, but that’s sort of the point. Ever since the Shanghai-born impresario opened his first Mr Chow outpost in 1976, he has been building a mini empire of dining destinations better known for their star-studded clientele than starred reviews.

Hooker first set foot in the original Mr Chow, in London, as a young boy in the 1970s, when his father took him there for lunch. “My parents were separated, and I think there was a bit of ‘I’m gonna make sure he has a great time,’” he recalled of the excursion that became a father-son tradition. “We’d go to Mr Chow and have lunch and then we would go watch a James Bond double bill. Whenever I walked in there, something happened. The chemistry in my body kind of changed.”