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.”
To be photographed by Cheung was to be part of his world in a way that felt spontaneous, conspiratorial, and beautifully unposed. “The creatives—designers, visual artists, musicians, writers—I loved them because they shared,” he says. “They taught me that everything is connected. Literature helps you understand painting; paintings appear in films. I loved diving into their universes.”
Morin and Bergmann, who first met Cheung at his restaurant in about 2010, had long seen potential for a book. “We thought: How can we bring his archives to light? [Davé was] a place of passage, of encounters, of freedom. Places like that are becoming so rare,” says Morin.
“It felt a bit like Cronenberg’s eXistenZ—that strange, nocturnal energy, the low light. A kind of interzone, where anything was possible,” says Bergmann.
The editing process was painstaking. “We really wanted to keep only the most beautiful photos—the ones that share the spirit of the place, a place where people felt free, where they could be themselves,” says Cheung.
Also, Bergmann adds, “the ones that told a story.” They tried to include “all the eras, all the people, all the energies. Cheung gave us complete freedom. He trusted us entirely.”
Between the Polaroids are also intimate-feeling fragments of a vanished starry enclave—sketches by Jean-Paul Gaultier; doodles from Keith Haring, Leonardo DiCaprio, and George Condo; postcards from Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin; a note from Henri Cartier-Bresson. “I love Keith Haring’s cards,” Cheung says. “Especially the one from ’88.” (According to Morin and Bergmann, there’s more than enough material for a second volume.)
For Cheung, revisiting the archive was a joy. “I didn’t feel sadness or regret,” he says. “I was happy to see all the good moments I’d lived.” Still, the Paris that once thrived behind his red-lacquered doors feels distant now. “It’s over. The cellphone changed everything. You can’t offer a hidden place anymore, protected from the public eye.”
At present, Cheung still prefers the brasseries where nothing has changed, like Bofinger and La Coupole, while his collaborators frequent their own old haunts: Chez Georges or La Closerie des Lilas. Paris still hums with some possibility—but A Night at Davé is a reminder of a time when the city’s creative pulse was concentrated in one narrow dining room, where friendship, food, and art mingled with abandon and the night seemed endless—fueled by spring rolls or the night’s secrecies.
Photo: Davé, courtesy of IDEA1/19Davé and his cat Momo.
Photo: Davé, courtesy of IDEA2/19Cameron Diaz and Davé.
