Mr. Chow restaurant serves as more than a dining room in the diary: it is a recurring stage where social circles shift, professional judgments are contested, and new connections are deliberately arranged. Across several meals, its polished social setting is also shadowed by questions of labor, credibility, and who belongs in the room.

A Restaurant in a Changing Social Scene

For Jerry Hall’s birthday, Keith picked the diarist up in red patent-leather shoes and took him to Mr. Chow restaurant, where the bill was not the point so much as the changing composition of the party. Jed Johnson was there with Alan Wanzenberg. The diarist observed that Hall’s celebrations had grown more “hardcore” each year: gatherings once populated by her model friends and their boyfriends now had no model friends at all. The restaurant provides a fixed setting against which that social change becomes visible.

Labor and Professional Judgment

The restaurant’s owner was resisting unionization, arguing that he needed the kind of young, attractive waiters he could find by hiring directly off the street. The diary records this labor dispute within the same account as the birthday dinner, placing the restaurant’s service economy alongside its role as a fashionable meeting place.

At another dinner, David Horii, a new illustrator for Interview, joined the diarist and Fred. The diarist praised Horii’s work, while Fred said he would need to see the portfolio before judging it. The diarist insisted that Horii was very good, making the restaurant a setting for a small but pointed disagreement over how professional talent should be assessed. The dinner cost $530.

Matchmaking at the Table

The restaurant also hosted a blind-date dinner organized around the idea that each guest would bring a date for someone else. The diarist said he took part partly in hopes that Tama Janowitz would write about him in one of her stories, and partly because the gathering offered a way to meet new people. He brought Dr. Bernsohn as a match for Tama. She wore Chinese clothes for the meal and crystal earrings so that the crystal doctor could examine them. The diarist worried that Janowitz might write about Dr. Bernsohn and that the attention could cause him trouble, since the healing use of crystals was not considered legitimate. At this table, dinner becomes a social experiment whose risks include not only an unsuccessful match but also the exposure of a guest to unwanted scrutiny.