Mistress of M-pire

Renowned restaurateur Michelle Garnaut operates two of the classiest restaurants on the Chinese mainland, known for immaculate service, fine-dining cuisine and tasteful décor. The repertoire of the M Restaurants in Beijing and Shanghai now also includes a hugely popular literary festival and other cultural events throughout the year.Renowned restaurateur Michelle Garnaut operates two of the classiest restaurants on the Chinese mainland, known for immaculate service, fine-dining cuisine and tasteful décor. The repertoire of the M Restaurants in Beijing and Shanghai now also includes a hugely popular literary festival and other cultural events throughout the year.

But one of Garnaut’s primary goals — to open a restaurant in Hong Kong — is proving to be the toughest and most frustrating challenge of her career. The Australian’s first venture, M at the Fringe, closed two years ago after 20 years of operating. To date, another venue at the right rental price has proved to be mission impossible.

The restaurateur claims to have inspected hundreds of properties over the past few years, none of them quite right. The irony does not escape her: Two thriving operations on the mainland itself but no presence at all in the city where the M Group was founded and flourished.

“I spent three months on the last possibility and looked at two dozen really seriously,” she says. “It is important that the rent allows us to continue to be good value for money. When M at the Fringe opened in Hong Kong and we were booked for six months ahead, people said we should double or triple our prices but for me, it is important that we are good value for money. We are not cheap, we are affordable luxury.”

The runaway success of M at the Fringe, located in a Central district heritage building, persuaded Garnaut to take the same concept to the port city of Shanghai some 13 years ago. M on the Bund, located in a classic, British-style stone building on the famous riverside promenade, was the first freestanding western gourmet-level restaurant in the city; it was an immediate hit with the expatriates and, in subsequent years, with newly-affluent local Chinese.

The formula was simple but novel for China at the time. The M menu — then as now — was a mixture of classic European dishes, with emphasis on food from the Mediterranean region; the décor was ritzy, giving it a special-occasion ambience; the service, by English-speaking staff, was slick.

Says Garnaut: “We have dishes that go all the way from northern European to southern European to the Middle East. But we don’t do Asian food; we are in Asia. We are not fusion, because we do not mix East and West together.

“It cost us about $1 million to get Shanghai up and running, which now seems like nothing. But at the time it was one restaurant and that was an enormous amount of money for us.”

Garnaut, who hails from Melbourne, is a plain-speaking Aussie with a bone-dry wit and not afraid of using an expletive to emphasize a point. Behind that blunt facade is a keen intellect: Garnaut studied English literature at university and still reads voraciously, attends classical music concerts on her days off and ensures that the M restaurants in China have a strong cultural element.

The most high profile of these is the annual literary festival, which began when an author pal came to give a talk on how to mix the perfect martini. It ultimately grew to become the pre-eminent event of its kind in China. This year, 70 authors attended, including Alan Hollinghurst, Mohammed Hanif and Tom Rob Smith. Previous participants have been Amy Tan, Gore Vidal, Jan Morris, Junot Diaz, John Banville, and Louis de Bernieres.

The selection of flown-in writers is always eclectic, featuring individuals who have penned books on crime, business, China, sex, pop music, football, science, religion, wine and typography, meaning there is something for everyone who has an interest in the printed word.

“Running the festival is a lot of hard work and it certainly doesn’t make money, it costs money,” says Garnaut, who also sponsors residency programs for upcoming writers and poets.

“Through it, I have now met an unbelievable number of writers, and through the M restaurants’ connection with music, I have met some of the top conductors in the world. The nice thing about running a restaurant is that you generally find people who are usually in a happy situation.”

The success of M on the Bund gave Garnaut the confidence to open a second China restaurant, Capital M, in a prime location just to the south of Tiananmen Square, which cost almost $3 million to set up.

“Our first winter there was tough,” admits Garnaut. “We didn’t really allow for the deadness of the winter. The whole city seems to close down and people don’t go very far. We also faced very, very high costs in this location.

“We are now into our third year and the increase in business is 30 to 40 percent on last year. We have potential to grow with a bigger local base. Right from the word go, we had many more Chinese customers; when we opened in Shanghai 13 years ago, there weren’t really that many middle-class Chinese.”

The customers of Capital M know they are not in for any major surprises with the fare. Crispy suckling pig is an M staple, house-smoked salmon and imported steaks are popular and pavlova, an ultra-sweet dessert that hails from the proprietor’s home city, is an ever-present.

She says: “The formula is that we don’t have a formula; it is hard work and you have to make sure that it is the right thing at the right time. For success, you have to have a clear idea and carry through that idea and work hard and persevere and roll with the punches.

“When we opened, my ambition was just to run one small restaurant. M is now a name that lots and lots of people know of; if you are interested in restaurants you would be familiar with it.”

There is, however, one Garnaut failure that most people have forgotten about. The ill-fated Rollo de Pollo opened in Shanghai, on the same premises as M on the Bund, with the aim of selling reasonably priced western fare. But locals gave it the cold shoulder — preferring to save up for a visit to the real-deal M rather than a budget-priced imitation.

Recalls Garnaut: “All the expats and international Chinese loved it but all the local people queued to go to M on the Bund instead. I began to understand that for the local Chinese market it was about the brand. They did not want the second-level brand. I learned that lesson the hard way.

“After about seven or eight months, we closed it. It is true you learn from failure. With success you think you can repeat the same thing. When you fail, you really have to examine what went wrong.”

Garnaut takes pride in maintaining an eco-friendly and ethical approach to doing business, a policy which involves putting back into the community via charity. One initiative that makes her swell with pride is the Village People project, set up to build bathhouses in the remote, and desperately poor, communities of far-western Gansu province

There are now four bathhouses, giving peasant women access to the fundamental hygienic necessity of a regular bath. Once built by Garnaut’s charitable foundation, the bathhouses are operated as ongoing concerns, with the proviso that young children and elderly people are admitted free

 “We found it made a really big difference,” she says. “M Restaurant funded them for the first five years, and after that, we went and found other sponsors. We set them up as social enterprises where we had real input and real decision making, and weren’t just part of a big organization. It was originally just me and my friends. We wanted to do something that met a real need rather than impose a view.”

Contacts made through the restaurant business have subsequently brought individual and corporate sponsors on board. Garnaut can be formidably persuasive when asking wealthy business people to open their wallets.

The self-made entrepreneur does not have any formal business training — and her speech is refreshingly free of corporate MBA-style jargon — but she does hold firm views on the approach every entrepreneur should take.

She says: If you asked me what my greatest achievement is, I think it is doing business ethically, delivering more than expectations and combining things that I am interested in and which have a broader appeal, not just business.”

But one of Garnaut’s primary goals — to open a restaurant in Hong Kong — is proving to be the toughest and most frustrating challenge of her career. The Australian’s first venture, M at the Fringe, closed two years ago after 20 years of operating. To date, another venue at the right rental price has proved to be mission impossible.

The restaurateur claims to have inspected hundreds of properties over the past few years, none of them quite right. The irony does not escape her: Two thriving operations on the mainland itself but no presence at all in the city where the M Group was founded and flourished.

“I spent three months on the last possibility and looked at two dozen really seriously,” she says. “It is important that the rent allows us to continue to be good value for money. When M at the Fringe opened in Hong Kong and we were booked for six months ahead, people said we should double or triple our prices but for me, it is important that we are good value for money. We are not cheap, we are affordable luxury.”

The runaway success of M at the Fringe, located in a Central district heritage building, persuaded Garnaut to take the same concept to the port city of Shanghai some 13 years ago. M on the Bund, located in a classic, British-style stone building on the famous riverside promenade, was the first freestanding western gourmet-level restaurant in the city; it was an immediate hit with the expatriates and, in subsequent years, with newly-affluent local Chinese.

The formula was simple but novel for China at the time. The M menu — then as now — was a mixture of classic European dishes, with emphasis on food from the Mediterranean region; the décor was ritzy, giving it a special-occasion ambience; the service, by English-speaking staff, was slick.

Says Garnaut: “We have dishes that go all the way from northern European to southern European to the Middle East. But we don’t do Asian food; we are in Asia. We are not fusion, because we do not mix East and West together.

“It cost us about $1 million to get Shanghai up and running, which now seems like nothing. But at the time it was one restaurant and that was an enormous amount of money for us.”

Garnaut, who hails from Melbourne, is a plain-speaking Aussie with a bone-dry wit and not afraid of using an expletive to emphasize a point. Behind that blunt facade is a keen intellect: Garnaut studied English literature at university and still reads voraciously, attends classical music concerts on her days off and ensures that the M restaurants in China have a strong cultural element.

The most high profile of these is the annual literary festival, which began when an author pal came to give a talk on how to mix the perfect martini. It ultimately grew to become the pre-eminent event of its kind in China. This year, 70 authors attended, including Alan Hollinghurst, Mohammed Hanif and Tom Rob Smith. Previous participants have been Amy Tan, Gore Vidal, Jan Morris, Junot Diaz, John Banville, and Louis de Bernieres.

The selection of flown-in writers is always eclectic, featuring individuals who have penned books on crime, business, China, sex, pop music, football, science, religion, wine and typography, meaning there is something for everyone who has an interest in the printed word.

“Running the festival is a lot of hard work and it certainly doesn’t make money, it costs money,” says Garnaut, who also sponsors residency programs for upcoming writers and poets.

“Through it, I have now met an unbelievable number of writers, and through the M restaurants’ connection with music, I have met some of the top conductors in the world. The nice thing about running a restaurant is that you generally find people who are usually in a happy situation.”

The success of M on the Bund gave Garnaut the confidence to open a second China restaurant, Capital M, in a prime location just to the south of Tiananmen Square, which cost almost $3 million to set up.

“Our first winter there was tough,” admits Garnaut. “We didn’t really allow for the deadness of the winter. The whole city seems to close down and people don’t go very far. We also faced very, very high costs in this location.

“We are now into our third year and the increase in business is 30 to 40 percent on last year. We have potential to grow with a bigger local base. Right from the word go, we had many more Chinese customers; when we opened in Shanghai 13 years ago, there weren’t really that many middle-class Chinese.”

The customers of Capital M know they are not in for any major surprises with the fare. Crispy suckling pig is an M staple, house-smoked salmon and imported steaks are popular and pavlova, an ultra-sweet dessert that hails from the proprietor’s home city, is an ever-present.

She says: “The formula is that we don’t have a formula; it is hard work and you have to make sure that it is the right thing at the right time. For success, you have to have a clear idea and carry through that idea and work hard and persevere and roll with the punches.

“When we opened, my ambition was just to run one small restaurant. M is now a name that lots and lots of people know of; if you are interested in restaurants you would be familiar with it.”

There is, however, one Garnaut failure that most people have forgotten about. The ill-fated Rollo de Pollo opened in Shanghai, on the same premises as M on the Bund, with the aim of selling reasonably priced western fare. But locals gave it the cold shoulder — preferring to save up for a visit to the real-deal M rather than a budget-priced imitation.

Recalls Garnaut: “All the expats and international Chinese loved it but all the local people queued to go to M on the Bund instead. I began to understand that for the local Chinese market it was about the brand. They did not want the second-level brand. I learned that lesson the hard way.

“After about seven or eight months, we closed it. It is true you learn from failure. With success you think you can repeat the same thing. When you fail, you really have to examine what went wrong.”

Garnaut takes pride in maintaining an eco-friendly and ethical approach to doing business, a policy which involves putting back into the community via charity. One initiative that makes her swell with pride is the Village People project, set up to build bathhouses in the remote, and desperately poor, communities of far-western Gansu province

There are now four bathhouses, giving peasant women access to the fundamental hygienic necessity of a regular bath. Once built by Garnaut’s charitable foundation, the bathhouses are operated as ongoing concerns, with the proviso that young children and elderly people are admitted free

 “We found it made a really big difference,” she says. “M Restaurant funded them for the first five years, and after that, we went and found other sponsors. We set them up as social enterprises where we had real input and real decision making, and weren’t just part of a big organization. It was originally just me and my friends. We wanted to do something that met a real need rather than impose a view.”

Contacts made through the restaurant business have subsequently brought individual and corporate sponsors on board. Garnaut can be formidably persuasive when asking wealthy business people to open their wallets.

The self-made entrepreneur does not have any formal business training — and her speech is refreshingly free of corporate MBA-style jargon — but she does hold firm views on the approach every entrepreneur should take.

She says: If you asked me what my greatest achievement is, I think it is doing business ethically, delivering more than expectations and combining things that I am interested in and which have a broader appeal, not just business.”

BIO

MICHELLE GARNAUT

Founder and operator of M Restaurant Group

CAREER MOVES:

2009: Opens second China restaurant, Capital M, located in a prime position just to the south of Tiananmen Square.

2009: M at the Fringe closes. Garnaut is still looking for alternative premises, stymied so far by high rents.

1999: Opens M on the Bund, the first free-standing gourmet restaurant in the port city of Shanghai.

1989: Opens M at the Fringe in a Hong Kong heritage building which operated for 20 years.

EDUCATION:

Studied English literature at Monash University and catering at William Angliss Institute, both in Melbourne.

QUICK TAKES:

Fondest memory:

I think fond memories are tied up with achievements for me. The night before we opened M at the Fringe, I was crying and thinking this is so stupid, nobody will ever come here. A week later, when it was clearly going to be a success, I realized that maybe I was wrong.

What do you miss?

Well, definitely not my mother’s cooking. We were a family of nine and she hated cooking.

Favorite fiction hero:

I just adore Becky Sharpe from Vanity Fair. She is an absolute monster. Do I identify with her? I do and I don’t! She is a real anti-hero.

Biggest mistake:

There are millions of them but the biggest one was probably walking out of a marriage. It was many years ago. I think you learn from your mistakes.

Born: Jan 31, 1957