Michelle Garnaut, the restaurateur who shaped modern dining on the Bund, wins the Tatler Best Legacy Award 2025
Michelle Garnaut is not the kind of restaurateur who chases an empire; she builds rooms that feel like they’ve always been there, then lets the city find itself inside them.
An Australian restaurateur best known for M at the Fringe in Hong Kong, M on the Bund in Shanghai and Capital M in Beijing, Garnaut has spent more than three decades setting a standard for independent dining in Asia.
She studied at Monash University in Melbourne before working in restaurants across Europe and the United States, later returning to Melbourne to train in catering at the William Angliss Institute. Moving to Hong Kong in the mid-1980s, she began a journey that would redefine what a modern restaurant could be.
This year, Tatler honours that enduring influence with the Tatler Best Legacy Award.
Michelle Garnaut and executive chef Hamish Waddel in the kitchen at M on the Bund
If fine dining had a frontier spirit, its name might well have been Michelle Garnaut. Long before “independent restaurant” became a buzzword, she made it a blueprint. Not through manifesto or marketing, but by simply opening the kind of places she herself wanted to eat in.
M at the Fringe appeared in Hong Kong in 1989 like a quiet rebellion: a dining room that didn’t belong to a hotel, with mismatched cutlery, filo tarts stuffed with goat’s cheese, and a hostess who believed charm mattered more than chandeliers.
Ten years later, she took that audacity north. M on the Bund opened in 1999, when Shanghai’s famous waterfront was still a ghost of its Art Deco past. Everyone else saw derelict offices and dust; Garnaut saw possibility. She moved in with the confidence of someone who’d already done the impossible once, and turned a crumbling shipping building into one of the most enduring dining rooms in modern China.
A decade later, she brought that same clarity of vision to the capital. Capital M, overlooking Tian’anmen Square and Qianmen Gate, opened in 2009 and quickly became beloved for its terrace as well as its warmth. Like its siblings, it was more than a restaurant. It was a meeting place, where diplomats, writers and locals shared the same view, and often, the same stories.
Dinner service at M on the Bund in Shanghai
Over twenty-three years, M on the Bund became a stage. It hosted prime ministers and poets, Gore Vidal and Mick Jagger, the curious and the homesick. Its tables were as much for conversation as cuisine. She launched literary festivals, artist salons and talks long before “cultural programming” was a hospitality cliché. “In many ways we were unpretentiously pretentious,” she says in M on the Bund, the documentary by award-winning producer and director Luo Tong of LP Films in Shanghai, chronicling the restaurant’s final days. “I can’t stand stuffy restaurants. I’ve never been driven by money.”
That film, shot during the restaurant’s final months in 2021, is part farewell, part love letter. Not only to the place, but to the idea of independence itself. Garnaut’s voice anchors it: dry, unsentimental, deeply humane. “So much about China is really misunderstood by people who haven’t been there,” she says in one of the closing scenes. “The dominant theory is it’s all bad. That’s all crap.” It’s pure Garnaut: a refusal to pander to easy narratives, political or otherwise.
A violinist performs at the final Chamber Music Concert held at M on the Bund, a last note in the restaurant’s long tradition of art and community
The Tatler Best Legacy Award acknowledges precisely that balance of nerve and nurture. It honours not only longevity, but the kind of vision that outlasts trends and tides. Garnaut’s legacy isn’t a single restaurant or menu. It’s an attitude: that hospitality can be fiercely independent and still profoundly generous; that a dining room can hold both art and appetite, ideas and laughter.
When M on the Bund closed in 2022, Shanghai had grown up around it—taller, faster, more self-assured. It’s impossible to imagine that story without her somewhere in the frame. To dine there was to sit inside a story, to feel part of a city learning how to sparkle again. Few restaurateurs have left a mark so indelible, or so full of heart. That’s why this year, we celebrate Michelle Garnaut. Not only for what she built, but for the spirit she left behind.
M on the Bund《米氏西餐厅》trailer
NOW READ
Tatler Best Takeovers returns to Bangkok with an epic week of chefs, cocktails and collaborations