It’s not uncommon for a bar or café to remind patrons that someone famous once ate there by having a physical photograph of said VIP on display. For 36 years however, at Davé, a Chinese restaurant on Rue Saint-Roch in Paris’s 1st Arrondissement, Polaroids of beloved guests were less a marketing tactic than a key feature of the building’s interior, framed and affixed to any available wall space.
The various portraits, which included those of the singer-songwriter Serge Gainsbourg, filmmaker David Lynch, actor Leonardo DiCaprio, model Kate Moss, and entrepreneur and socialite Kim Kardashian, made up something akin to a personal album for owner Tai “Davé” Cheung.
“The immediacy fascinated me,” the restauranteur told CNN, recalling his initial interest in the Polaroid. He purchased the camera, at least partly inspired by Andy Warhol, the same year he opened Davé, in 1982, a year and half after his father’s restaurant shuttered. The photographer Helmut Newton and his wife June were early fans (so much so they spent a Christmas on the premises), quickly followed by Vogue’s Grace Coddington, until eventually Davé’s clientele was near-exclusively comprised of significant figures from the arenas of fashion, film, art, literature and music, as a new book, “A Night at Davé,” celebrates.
Conceived with writers Charles Morin and Boris Bergmann and released by the London publisher IDEA, the book boasts 115 pages of photographs and selfies, as well as doodles and postcards from several guests. Sofia Coppola, whose father Francis Ford Coppola once booked the entire restaurant for New Year’s Eve, wrote the foreword. “I was fourteen and the place was filled with the fashion and show business of that era, people table-hopping and hanging out, platters of Davé’s mom’s Chinese food and Davé taking Polaroids,” she recalled, characterizing the mood that night. “Somehow I ended up cozied up with Yves Saint Laurent” — one of the 20th century’s foremost designers.
At the beginning, the Polaroids just piled up. One day someone stole one — that’s when I understood they had value.
Eponymous founder Davé
“A party always felt like a kind of family gathering, something intimate,” Davé, as he is habitually referred, said over email. “Everything was closed, it created a very private, familial atmosphere.” Even outside the parameters of a private party, the discreet milieu of the restaurant — largely down to Davé’s considered seating arrangements and further encouraged by the scarce lighting (the glow of a tropical fish tank in the center of the space helped somewhat) — meant famous people, who would otherwise typically be bothered by strangers, felt comfortable and relaxed enough that most would return multiple times, making Davé the place to be.
Writing in The New York Times in August 1998, Dana Thomas observed, “You can gauge who’s in and who’s out simply by what happens when he or she walks into Davé,” alluding to the owner’s guarded system. That it was close to Jardin des Tuileries, where much of Paris Fashion Week played out, further enamored it to editors, stylists, and models. Indeed, in January 2005, The Guardian ran a profile of the restaurant with the headline, “Welcome to the fashion canteen” (by this point Davé had moved to new premises, about ten minutes away on Rue de Richelieu, but still within the vicinity of fashion week footfall).
With its distinctive swirling logo above the front door and, famously, always with a “complet” (meaning “full”) sign in the window, a practice that meant Davé was able to ensure space was kept available for his celebrity regulars, the Polaroid was a frequent feature of any night at the restaurant. “It was very instinctive (taking photographs). I wanted to preserve the beauty and joy of those moments, I didn’t know it would become a thing,” said Davé, who was taught how to focus the camera by the photographer and director, Jean-Baptiste Mondino. “At the beginning, the Polaroids just piled up. One day someone stole one — that’s when I understood they had value, that they were objects of desire.”
The images that appear in the new book were safely stored away for years (most of those on the walls of the restaurant were copies, a preemptive measure to secure the memories had a future), but Davé estimates he produced a few thousand over the years. “I’ve lost some, given some away, but most are still with me. I particularly love the photos I took of people on the phone, like Aurore Clément, Keith Haring, and Mick Jagger. It’s rare to see them photographed like that,” he noted, recalling pictures of people using the landline. “They (the wider clientele) were very happy because they could see the result immediately. There’s no surprise with the Polaroid — you can’t take bad pictures of people without them knowing.”
More than four decades after the restaurant opened, and seven years since it closed its doors for the last time, working on “A Night at Davé” has been a thoroughly positive experience for Davé. “I thought that Polaroids no longer had a place — that the phone has replaced them — but I loved diving back into my archives,” he said. “I didn’t feel sadness, nostalgia, or regret (putting the book together). I loved learning from people, diving into their worlds, their universes, so I was happy to see all the good moments I’d lived.”
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