A Night at Davé: Inside Paris’s Most Storied, Cult-Favorite Restaurant
There are rooms in Paris where the air feels gilded, and for more than three decades, one such room was Davé. Situated on Rue de Richelieu, the Chinese restaurant became the city’s unofficial salon of the night and a favored celebrity haunt, where the spare ribs were sticky and the gossip was hot.
Opened in 1982 by Tai “Davé” Cheung, the menuless, velvet curtained restaurant, split in half by a tropical fish tank, attracted a constellation of artists, designers, and other fabulous people—though the door was always affixed with a “COMPLET” sign. Helmut and June Newton, Grace Coddington, Francis Ford Coppola, Allen Ginsberg, Yves Saint Laurent, Alexander McQueen, and Kate Moss all found their way to tables at Davé, as did Sofia Coppola and Kirsten Dunst (with ciggies in hand), the Olsen twins, and Linda Evangelista and Kyle MacLachlan.
Guests would dine on Vietnamese spring rolls and nước chấm, spare ribs, Peking duck, salt and pepper shrimp, and sliced up mango. “The Americans and Anglo-Saxons loved the ribs,” Cheung says. He was also happy to accommodate less conventional tastes—like when the legendary producer Jean-Pierre Rassam came with his cook and his own food. “They were supposed to have dinner at home but changed their mind at the last minute. They didn’t want to waste it…it made me laugh,” Cheung recalls. “I brought out some plates and offered to reheat everything. I played along.”
A Night at Davé, a new book from IDEA, seeks to capture the spirit of that exalted boîte, which quietly shuttered in February 2018. Edited by Charles Morin and Boris Bergmann alongside Cheung himself, it gathers hundreds of the restaurateur’s Polaroids—of everyone from Madonna and Lou Reed to Rei Kawakubo and John Travolta—alongside letters, sketches, and handwritten notes left behind by the restaurant’s famously loyal clientele. Coppola, who grew up eating there with her father, contributes the foreword, while French writer Jean-Jacques Schuhl offers an epilogue excerpted from his cult novel Entrée des Fantômes, translated into English for the first time by Morin.
Cheung wasn’t a photographer by training, but by instinct. “Andy Warhol and his Polaroids inspired me,” he tells Vogue. “In the early ’80s, everyone was doing the same. I got into the game.” His first image—a test shot taken by his sister, his cat perched in the frame—is the book’s cover, and among the first people he snapped were Brion Gysin, Jean-Marie Rouart, the Coppolas, the Newtons, and Aurore Clément. “I was lucky to have the greatest creators of my generation at the restaurant.”
