Why Prada chose a 38-year-old Chinese restaurant for its latest pop-up

Members of the pop-up club include people from a variety of fields, including art, design, fashion, music and film. The club has previously touched on six other cities, each occupying venues with specific design and symbolic ties to the host city, such as the storied Belle poque restaurant Maxim in Paris and 180 The Strand, a brutal building and culture center in London. . Prada Mode typically lasts two days and features musical performances, art installations, discussion panels, and food.

The club’s seventh iteration was held in a slightly less likely locale. Genghis Cohen is a 38-year-old New York-style Chinese restaurant located in a West Hollywood strip mall on a section of Fairfax Avenue across the street from an urgent care center. Like the surrounding area, its tiled exterior looks fairly non-descript.

Inside, however, dozens of paper lanterns hang from the ceiling, and red leather booths provide cozy Old Hollywood appeal. Signature dishes like Queen Chicken and No Name Duck are shared at lazy Susans in the middle of the table.

“Dan is Tana and Langer is and Spago is, but the list isn’t that long of restaurants in L.A. that have made it that long,” says film and TV producer Jamie Patrikoff, one of Genghis Cohen’s investors.

Artist and LA native Martyn Sims chose the location for Prada Mode and created a site-specific installation called Hella World, a commentary on her love-hate relationship with the city. The piece’s ticker-tape monitors look around the walls and in the parking lot, telegraphing messages—some of which came from event guests who messaged them on a bright pink background. For Sunday dinners and on Christmas, one of its most popular days, Sims is a regular at the restaurant. “When I was invited to do this project, I literally, the day before, said I wanted to throw a party here,” she says. “Genghis Cohen is very simple, and then you go in and you’re like, This is tight.”

In October 1983, music producer Alan Rinde opened Genghis Cohen, which featured a menu created by Sichuan chef Shu Xuan Lin. Later, Rinde added a small stage to an enclosed, adjacent venue, where James Taylor, Jackson Browne, Joni Mitchell and many others played. Genghis Cohen was the inspiration for the famous Seinfeld episode “The Chinese Restaurant”.

After 25 years, Rinde sold the restaurant to his longtime maitre d’, the family of Ray Qiu and Qiu, who ran the restaurant from 1997 to 2015, then to the hospitality group Call Mom owned by Marc Rose and Made Abros. sold. Both are native New Yorkers who loved the restaurant before even thinking about making it their own.

When he bought the restaurant, he didn’t change much. “We thought it was a very important thing for Los Angeles to have this style of restaurant,” says Abros. The chicken is now organic, and they have added other premium ingredients that were not available in the 1980s. Although he did renovate, Rose says he never closed the restaurant for a single shift.

This story has been published without modification to the text from a wire agency feed