Mr. & Mrs. Chow Invite You

Inside the totally over-the-top wedding of the world’s most recognizable—and perhaps most married—restaurateur

- Marshall Heyman

Love in an elevator is more than just an Aerosmith hit from the 1980s. According to the artist and restaurateur Michael Chow, it’s also exactly what he found with Vanessa Rano while paying a visit to their mutual nerve specialist in Beverly Hills about two years ago.

“It’s fate, kind of,” says Rano, who received a master’s in social work from Cal State Fullerton in July. During their initial encounter, “he was very cool at first,” she recalls. “I didn’t even know he was Mr. Chow. We just started talking, and he told me about his art.”

They ran into each other again immediately after their doctor’s appointments at Go Greek, a yogurt shop next door on North Bedford Drive. “It was love at first sight, from my point of view,” Chow says. “It was a fairy tale. Since I met her I’ve written a hundred poems. I had never even read a poem in my whole life.”

Of course, he has been busy with other pursuits. Chow, whose father was a Chinese opera star, opened his first Mr. Chow restaurant in London in 1968 (it is said that members of the Beatles and Rolling Stones ate there on the first night), and in the years since he has expanded, with locations in Beverly Hills, Manhattan, Miami, Malibu, and Las Vegas. The food at Mr. Chow, even the popular chicken satay and Beijing duck, is not thought of as being the point of dining there. The exorbitantly priced yet minuscule portions were awarded a zero-star review in the New York Times in 2006, but the restaurants continue to draw a parade of dedicated—and often very famous diners who don’t seem to mind. (Chow himself once noted, “People say, ‘Oh, it’s so expensive.’ I say, ‘Fantastic!’ Expensive is important.”)