Inside A Night at Davé: Paris’s Legendary Celebrity Canteen Gets the Book It Deserves

Long before Lucien became the bistro of choice for Lady Gaga, Bella Hadid, and Chloë Sevigny to nibble on petits filets and French fries, there was Davé—a Chinese restaurant in Paris’s 1st arrondissement that Tai “Davé” Cheung opened in 1982 and closed in 2018. For more than three glittering decades, Davé was the discreet hot spot for the biggest names in fashion, film, art, and music. Helmut Newton and Grace Coddington were early regulars, but as The New York Times recounted in 1998, the real origin story began in the mid-1970s: “Barney Wan, a British Vogue art director, dined at Davé’s father’s Chinese restaurant, Pergola du Bonheur, in Oberkampf, a terribly unfashionable Paris neighborhood, and liked it so much that he took his colleague Coddington to lunch there. Then Davé met a photographer named June Newton and invited her and her husband, Helmut, to the restaurant. They quickly became regulars.” From there, the crowd only grew, with the restaurant playing host to Iggy Pop, Rei Kawakubo, Lou Reed, Yoko Ono, Madonna, Alexander McQueen, Kate Moss, Tina Turner, Janet Jackson, and Mariah Carey over the years.

The food at Davé was, by most accounts, secondary to the experience. There were no menus, and a sign on the red-and-gold façade read “COMPLET” (“full”), even when it wasn’t. Guests came not for the cuisine but for the atmosphere, late-night mischief, and Davé himself, who swanned about the space, greeting VIPs, taking pictures, and covering the quilted red walls with photos of his famous customers. “My guests are tired, and this is where they can relax at the end of the day and be with each other socially,” he told The Guardian in 2005. “They don’t want to be disturbed by a bunch of tourists.… My job is to make fabulous people feel fabulous. I mean, really, anybody can serve a spring roll.”

But not everybody could draw a crowd ranging from Allen Ginsberg and Keith Haring to Yves Saint Laurent, Grace Jones, and Leonardo DiCaprio. Davé took Polaroids of them all, often in a proto-selfie style. Now, the new book A Night at Davé offers an inside peek at the hijinks and glamour of the former hot spot through Davé’s own lens. The limited-edition tome, conceived and edited by Charles Morin and Boris Bergmann alongside Davé himself, features a foreword written by Sofia Coppola (her father, Francis Ford Coppola, is a lifelong friend of Davé, and Sofia grew up frequenting the restaurant). Plus, there is an interview with Davé in which he tells the stories behind the photos. For a preview of the book, out now from IDEA, keep scrolling.