Prada’s new Shanghai restaurant, designed in collaboration with renowned Hong Kong director Wong Kar Wai, is a cinematic convergence of East and West.
Mi Shang Prada Rong Zhai is Prada’s first stand-alone dining space in Asia, located within the Italian fashion brand’s meticulously restored cultural hub, Rong Zhai, in Shanghai’s Jing’an district. This heritage-protected 1918 mansion was restored by Prada in 2017, with the restaurant’s opening marking the latest evolution of this storied venue.
Prada previously collaborated with Wes Anderson to design its Milan outpost, Bar Luce, and has also worked with directors Ava DuVernay, Danny Boyle, and Pedro Almodóvar. For Mi Shang Prada Rong Zhai, the Italian fashion house drew inspiration from Wong Kar Wai’s iconic films In the Mood for Love and Happy Together, incorporating their soft, saturated color palettes and dreamlike aesthetics. Mirrored surfaces play a key role in the design, along with the philatelic motif of tête-bêche—a pair of stamps joined with one upside down relative to the other—symbolising the cross-cultural synergy between Shanghai and Milan.
The restaurant, which officially opened on March 31, 2025, occupies the entirety of the mansion’s second floor. Michelin-starred chef Lorenzo Lunghi and master pastry chef Diego Crosara have crafted a menu that serves as a cross-cultural dialogue between Italy and China, offering breakfast, lunch, afternoon tea, dinner, and evening cocktails that champion Italian cuisine infused with Chinese flavours.
‘Mi Shang’ translates to ‘obsessed with’ in Mandarin, and its opening underscores Prada’s continued commitment to the Chinese consumer market. Unlike many of its luxury counterparts, which experienced a slump in the post-pandemic period, Prada has defied the trend, generating €3.829b in revenue in the nine months up to September 2024, a 17.5% increase from the same period a year earlier.
