The restaurateur who brought fine-dining back to Shanghai’s Bund: ‘I’ve had 40 years as a glorified waitress’

In the summer of 1999, about six months after she’d opened the first fine-dining restaurant on Shanghai’s Bund since 1949, Michelle Garnaut was on holiday in Europe when a friend rang and asked if she’d seen the Chinese papers. The head of the Jin Du group, which had leased her the top floor of the 1920s Nissin Shipping Building from which M on the Bund had such an excellent view of the Huangpu river, had been arrested for corruption. The friend suggested she return immediately.

She did. Garnaut had never met the accused man; she’d dealt with a woman further down the chain who’d agreed to grant the lease on discovering they’d been born four days apart, in 1957. Destiny now looked less accommodating. The building was barely occupied and utility and maintenance bills, including one for 750,000 yuan from the company that had just restored the lift, were piling up on Garnaut’s seventh-floor doorstep.

While Garnaut had been looking at properties around Shanghai, she’d offered the job of her assistant to a highly capable property agent, who’d declined but knew someone who might be good for the role. This was Carey Liu Xiaying, whose official title is now operations manager. As Garnaut likes to say, Liu interviewed her and began work in December 1998. When the summer crisis blew up, it was level-headed, unflappable Liu who kept things going.

“I think that was the turning-point,” says Garnaut, re-enacting it with a grin in her Mid-Levels flat. She has a taste for retrospective drama; when she gets really worked up, her low-ish voice rises until it sounds like the cockatoos swooping beyond her window. “Carey would come to me and say, ‘Today, the High Court came.’ The what? The who? The High Court came to visit? ‘Yes, they came and they said don’t worry.’ Oh good … worry about what? ‘They said we pay our rent now to them.’ We had instructions from the court if anyone wanted to claim we were to report them immediately, we weren’t to pay anything, and they sorted it out.”

In September 1999, she signed a new lease. “Even though I knew a hundred more things might go wrong, I thought, ‘Oh, all right.’ I think there’s this accusation about China that it’s completely corrupt, that every­one’s corrupt, and it’s not true. Yes, there’s corruption but you don’t have to deal with it. I said, right at the beginning, ‘I’m not bribing anybody, I’m not paying anybody, and if we go broke, that’s how it is’.”

This year, it’s 30 years since M at the Fringe – originally Michelle’s at the Fringe – opened in Hong Kong. It’s 20 years since M on the Bund opened in Shanghai. It’s 10 years since Capital M opened in Beijing. Those neatly spaced anniversaries suggest 2019 will be the year a new M-opening – in an original setting, stylishly cosy, with a menu offering M’s “famous pavlova” among many other favourites – will take place. Plenty of diners would be delighted to hear that that’s the case. But no.