In the spring of 1998, Australian restaurateur Michelle Garnaut signed a lease for premises on the seventh floor of the 1920s Nissin Shipping Building on the Bund in Shanghai. She already had an award-winning restaurant in Hong Kong called M at the Fringe, which she’d opened in 1989, that managed to be committed to fine dining yet also fabulously blithe. Doubts were expressed that she could pull off the same feat on the Bund where (so locals warned) no one went except Chinese tourists from the countryside, carrying their jam jars of tea.
In the spring of 1999, she opened M on the Bund with its wonderful terrace overlooking the Huangpu river. In the summer, she learned that her landlord had been arrested for corruption. In the autumn, she signed a second lease. (Opaque is a word she uses about the leases in her life; they’ve always had a slightly wintry relationship.) Soon other restaurants, taking note of its popularity, began to stud the Bund. In 2001, Garnaut opened Glamour Bar on the sixth floor.
Expats, locals, tourists, consular staff, journalists, writers, musicians, film stars, royals – even North Koreans, as she likes to remark - came to Garnaut’s cheerful, cosseting worlds, transported in a lift that cost 750,000 yuan to renovate. Cultural events were staged, charities nurtured, special occasions marked and new relationships forged (the food and drinks editor of the South China Morning Post met her future husband at M on the Bund’s third anniversary).
Her success inspired Garnaut to look further north. In 2009 she opened Capital M, in Beijing, with its spectacular view of Tiananmen Square’s Zhengyang Gate.
Now, the show is – almost – over. M at the Fringe closed, after 20 years, in 2009. Capital M closed in 2017. Glamour Bar was reincarnated as Glam in 2015. Despite its rickety beginning, M on the Bund has lasted the longest of all her ventures. But in December, Garnaut sent out an email saying that it – and Glam – are closing. The final day will be February 15, 2022.
No sooner had she pressed send than a cyber-wail arose across the globe from diners with long and happy memories of everything from M’s famous pavlova to that fabulous riverside terrace. As one mourner said, it was the end of a belle époque.
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“I just got [an email] from an old chef who said a lot of people are asking if Michelle is going to organise parties in Melbourne and Sydney,” Garnaut says, via a Zoom call from Shanghai. “Are they out of their minds? I’m just closing a business in China and they think I might organise free parties so they can reminisce with each other?”
She’s simultaneously yelling and laughing. She has a heavy cold plus a pinched nerve in her shoulder, which is probably not the only nerve that’s feeling sore; she’s raw and under-slept. Yet, in an hour-long chat, the ingredient ratio of humour to dejection is about five to one (plus occasional salty observations, not repeatable in a family newspaper).
She’s had plenty of practice wearing an upbeat public face. Tears are for back of house. The anonymous chef who emailed, incidentally, had done so to say that working at M had been the highlight of his lengthy career.
To quote the email response from former Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, one of many politicians to have dined in various M restaurants: what happened?
“I’d signed a seven-year extension on the lease but I’d insisted on a two-year break clause,” Garnaut begins. That new lease started on March 1, 2020. At the time, she was giving upbeat interviews about the pandemic (“Give it a few months, we’ll be OK”) but soon realised the two years were going to be about survival.
She began, discreetly, to look at options that meant she could step away without jeopardising everything she’d built. “I knew I had to be careful. You can’t start telling people, ‘Oh my God, I’m in a panic and I need to get rid of the business.’ I tell you there’s a lot of ruthless, nasty, heartless people out there.”
A couple of deals fell through. “I dealt with one guy for four months. I got all the way to having the share-purchase agreements ready and he pulled out with a WeChat message, which I got on my birthday.”
That was in 2021. She was adamant that she wouldn’t sell to a fund and she wouldn’t sell to a group. On the day of this interview, Element Fresh, a Shanghai-based restaurant chain which had 31 stores across China, filed for bankruptcy. She didn’t want her business to go down that path, leaving staff unpaid.
“I had to find the best exit and, actually, I think this is the best exit. It’s the most dignified, the most honest.”
And so the M roller-coaster, which began with a Fringe Club lease in Hong Kong of two years, is slowing to its halt. “Boy oh boy, it’s been one hell of a fantastic journey,” as she wrote in her farewell email.
Over the years, if you asked her how things were going, she’d often make a hand-wobbling gesture. This could encompass, say, the constant closures of Tiananmen Square during government gatherings, or the Bund being dug up for two years before Expo 2010, or that time in 2000, when she was setting up Rollo di Pollo – a brief venture intended as a cheaper alternative to M on the Bund – and her kitchen equipment went missing, eventually turning up in customs when “the head guy was arrested”.
Has there ever been a moment of just restfully succeeding? Garnaut laughs for a long time. When she can speak again, she says: “No. It’s definitely been a series of challenges.” Later she adds: “I might have been forced by economic circumstances but I wasn’t forced by anybody. I want to allay this idea that there’s some heavy-handed state behind me, deciding what I’m doing. They’re not! OK, the landlords aren’t prepared to compromise – that’s landlords.” (The Beijing space vacated by Capital M four years ago still lies empty.)
In between the constant phone calls; the texts in which people describe juggling quarantine dates to have an M on the Bund last supper; the selfie requests in the restaurant; and the diverse emails from, among other notable names, British historian Rana Mitter, English novelist Alan Hollinghurst and former Hong Kong governor Chris Patten (after whom her Governor’s trifle was named) – she’s planning what she’ll do next.Recently, Shanghai’s Australian consul-general told her she’s the longest-resident Australian in the city. In 2018, Canberra awarded her the Order of Australia for her distinguished service “as a restaurateur and entrepreneur” and as a role model. But neither Australia nor Shanghai are where she eventually plans to live.
“Hong Kong is my home. I’ve got a flat there. That’s not changing,” she says.
She’d like to do a podcast series, telling the story of China through other personal accounts, not just her own. She already has a working title: China to Us (an admitted steal from Emily Hahn’s 1944 book China to Me).
“Funny stories, sad stories, disasters, triumphs … I’ve had millions of them since the day I got off the plane in Hong Kong on May 1, 1984 until today. I said to the landlords last week, ‘When I announce this, it won’t be a nothing, it won’t just disappear.’”
Meanwhile, she has a deadline to meet. As usual, she chose the date after consulting the Chinese almanac. “I’ve got to concentrate on getting through the next two months with patience and grace,” she says. She pauses, thinking about those words for a second, then adds two more: “Gratitude and positivity.”
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