davé

POLAROID COCAINE

polaroids

by TAI “DAVÉ” CHEUNG

From his first restaurant on Rue Saint-Roch to the second  on Rue de Richelieu, from 1978 to 2018, Tai “Davé” Cheung managed to create — and recreate — a place that escaped all rules, where people mixed and spoke to one another, far from the growing conformism and increasingly compartmentalized world of celebrity.

Davé Cheung bought his first camera in 1982, inspired by Andy Warhol’s Polaroids. As for technique, French photographer Jean-Baptiste Mondino taught him how to focus and, above all, how to properly frame his subjects.

It’s difficult to find someone of note in the art, fashion, literature, and cinema worlds who did not dine at Davé’s. Everyone was happy to be photographed by him and pinned to the walls, which were covered with Polaroids: Helmut and June Newton, Jean-Pierre Rassam, Grace Coddington, Francis Ford Coppola, Allen Ginsberg, Yves Saint Laurent,…