The Divine Miss M

By Christine Laskowski (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-09-23 08:43

After years of planning, and during the hectic 60th anniversary preparations, restaurateur Michelle Garnaut has opened Capital M in Beijing.

Michelle Garnaut has set the bar pretty high for herself, and she knows it. After all, she did pioneer the first international restaurant on the Bund in Shanghai.

There are, no doubt, high expectations for Capital M in Beijing, the latest in her lauded string of high-end restaurants in China. Beginning with her first restaurant M on the Fringe in Hong Kong in 1989, Garnaut has no doubt learned to take all the challenges of opening a new restaurant with aplomb, and with the requisite sense of humor.

Opening Capital M has been a seven-year process. With the soft opening on Sept 15, due to traffic restrictions around Tian'anmen for the 60th anniversary celebrations, it will not be fully opened until Oct 5.

"People will often say that they don't have high expectations, that they don't expect it to be perfect the first night, but they do," Garnaut told METRO Beijing after the Sept 15 opening.

"There are a lot of moving parts to a restaurant - chuck in the element of surprise on Oct 1 and the whole thing opens and closes. Just like a concertina."

Situated at the entrance of Qianmen pedestrian street, just south of Tian'anmen Square, its location seems to go against the current of more popular locations in Beijing, like Gulou or Sanlitun. But according to Garnaut, doing what everyone else has already been doing is just not her style.

"We needed something iconic. That's one reason why it's taken so long. When we first started scouting for spaces seven years ago, we looked around Houhai and Sanlitun, but then we found this place and we knew we wanted in.

"There's no other restaurant in the city that offers a terrace with a view of Tian'anmen."

Over wine and exquisite dishes at a table with her business partner and Capital M manager Espen Harbitz, Garnaut told her story of how she stopped in Hong Kong in 1984 to get her visa into the Chinese mainland, only to stay and work her way up as a cook.

A rogue traveler in her early 20s, she said that time hitchhiking around the United States really made an impression on her and what she was capable of achieving.

"You know, I kept hearing: 'If you want to be the president, then go be the president'," she says with an impressive southern US accent.

"That was the mentality. It was so radically different from Australia, where the British class system still exists in a lot of ways."

After working in hotel restaurants in Hong Kong for several years, Garnaut decided to break out and start her own restaurant, but said that the eponym was not her doing.

"We were initially going to call it Cafe Fringe because it was the late 80s. Everything was cafe this and cafe that, so we thought we were being so clever," she says.

"But my business partner at the time, who was on vacation in Hawaii, called me up on the phone and said: 'Listen, I'm in a restaurant right now called Michelle's and it's brilliant.'

"He basically said, 'I've insisted on nothing so far, but I'm going to insist on this'.

"So we called it Michelle's until the Fringe Club, which was the building we were in, became furious that their name wasn't in it. Then it became M on the Fringe."

According to Garnaut, Hong Kong's international dining culture was well established even in the 80s. And currently Beijing, with its own medley of international restaurants and gourmet dining, offers challenges in terms of competition, but Garnaut is undaunted.

"It's very important for us to be a part of the community we're in, not to just be a tourist restaurant. You have to belong to your community to be relevant. And our goal is to do just that."