The Rise and Farce of Xander Chow
A Cautionary Tale in Several Courses - By Someone Who Ate the Condom So You Don’t Have To...
For one brief, baffling year, Xander Chow’s name buzzed through London’s dining circles like a wasp in a conservatory - erratic, insistent, and, thanks first to an overcaffeinated PR firm, then the ignominy of Groupon, quite impossible to ignore.
He wasn’t the best chef in the city - he may not even have been the best chef in his own kitchen - but he was certainly the most... discussed. His restaurant, ‘Lotus Brut’, asserted itself on a corner of Mayfair like a knock-off lacquer urn from a Shenzhen gift shop - gaudy, self-satisfied, and hopelessly out of place in a postcode otherwise devoted, at the time, to discretion, dynastic wealth, and the dignity of decent tailoring.
Chow arrived with shoulder-length, faintly tinted hair, a crucifix earring, and a girthy cigar - always visible, never lit - jutting from his breast pocket like a prop in quest for a character. ‘I’m the King,’ he announced to anyone still within earshot. ‘And when the King’s gone, it’s Game Over.’ He wasn’t joking. Though for everyone else’s sake, one rather wishes he had been.
Lotus Brut launched with all the subtlety of a marching band in a monastery. There was dry ice. There were monologues. There was an exhausting amount of tweezering. And then came ‘Mating Tide’ - his self-anointed pièce de résistance. It featured an edible condom, crafted from konjac and kappa, injected with a blend of honey and ham, and artfully abandoned atop a powdered mushroom ‘beach’. Proceeds went to AIDS Concern, which did nothing to make it easier to eat with a straight face on a second date.
Chow insisted he tested his dishes on children, which might explain why so many evoked Gloy paste.
The interiors - if one absolutely must - were conceived in collaboration with a Fitzrovia outfit going by the name, ‘Studio ElementaLuxe’, a firm which claimed to specialise in ‘earth, wind, and fire’ (presumably not the band, though equally dated). The result was a bleak, metallic void of carbon fibre, scorched steel, and sulphurous lighting - a sort of dystopian sauna acoustically engineered to discourage conversation and encourage shouting. Chow, despite having previously made a tidy fortune designing noise-dampening foam, appeared to regard silence as bourgeois. ‘I like a noisy restaurant,’ he blared. Nobody was remotely surprised. Studio ElementaLuxe, for what it’s worth, later found their true calling designing burrito kiosks in Westfield Stratford.
A man of systems and metaphors, he had the staff dressed in uniforms emblazoned with chess pieces. ‘Pawns have potential,’ he intoned, while lavishly dusting MSG over a starter which looked like a crime scene staged by someone who’d binge-watched CSI: Reykjavik on a long-haul flight. ‘They can become queens. Rooks are stubborn. Knights - silent killers. And the King?’ With both hands, he tapped his chest with the gravity of a man unveiling a bust of himself. ‘Moves in all directions, one step at a time.’
Ever at his side was a weathered Hermès notebook, swollen with encrypted recipes, erratic diagrams, and - reportedly - a self-portrait drawn in Biro and squid ink. His favourite pen, he insisted, was inspired by van Gogh’s Sunflowers - ‘dab, dab, dab,’ he would whisper.
And then, without flourish, the whole enterprise vanished, like the filling from Mating Tide, sucked into the ether with nothing but a sticky residue to prove it ever existed. Media reported a ‘major water leak’, though whether this referred to plumbing or a metaphorical haemorrhaging of funds remains unclear. More cynical observers blamed the £145 tasting menu, the edible contraception, and the sobering truth that no one truly wants to eat their dinner in a room which feels like a nuclear submarine made of scaffolding, nor sip baijiu-forward cocktails from vessels which resembled gravy boats liberated from a Harvester.
Other theories abounded. Some talked of a karaoke-fuelled incident involving an enraged Emir and a sous-chef who had simply reached his quota of being compared, hourly, to a knight.
And Chow? Evaporated, like bone broth in a hot kitchen. He left behind little more than a faint whiff of tobacco.
Naturally, rumours rushed in to fill the void.
One version had him fermenting yak milk in Bhutan, where he was said to be developing a line of probiotic panna cottas for retired influencers. Another placed him in Cirque du Soleil, Vegas, pirouetting under the alias ‘Monsieur Umami’, performing a solo act entitled The Fifth Taste, which involved a kimono and an emotionally turbulent interpretive dance about congee.
A more plausible source insisted he was now running a members-only dining club in Macau, secreted beyond a reflexology parlour, accessible only via retinal scan. Prospective guests must first produce a dated receipt for colonic irrigation, proving they are sufficiently purged - physically, spiritually, and gastronomically - to endure what follows.
Within, Chow reportedly serves sixteen-course ‘journeys’, each dish introduced in a haiku and cleared away in silence by staff clad as endangered birds. Wine is forbidden; fermented bamboo sap is encouraged. Mobile phones are confiscated, returned, inexplicably damp, the following morning. Chow prepares some ‘chapters’ blindfolded, wielding a cleaver said to have once belonged to a Shaolin monk. Applause is discouraged; swooning, however, is permitted.
The experience is inexplicably popular with Berlin-based sound artists, Scandinavian design mystics, and a certain strain of Hong Kong financier who views enlightenment as a luxury commodity best pursued through fasting, discomfort, and a menu printed on rice paper which guests must, contractually, eat as part of the final course.
There was also a sighting - blurry - of a man shouting ‘I am The King!’ at a vending machine in Park Royal, which, on balance, felt about right.
Whatever the truth, one indisputable fact remains: no one has attempted a dish which so earnestly resembled safe sex. Xander Chow’s brief and bewildering stint in London dining will be remembered - if at all - as an expensive, sorghum-scented hallucination.
And yet, in a city paralysed by culinary conformity - a wasteland of infinite smash burgers, industrially fried nonsense, weaponised nostalgia, and tasting menus where half a scallop arrives costing the GDP of a small island nation (with complimentary jacket pressing to soften the blow) - perhaps, just perhaps, we needed a man who dared to fill a translucent sheath with ham, declare it art, and charge £42 for the privilege.
If only once.
Game over.
