Chef's new restaurant delivers culinary choreography

Chef David Tao has done a lot of cooking in his 30-year life.

He studied cuisine in Germany and Austria - "Graz is like my second home," he says of the Austrian city famous for its perfume and its produce, adding (in Chinese) that he's more comfortable speaking German than English. Then the cooking school where he'd taken up further study in China sent him to Australia to train, where he wound up cooking for VIPs at the Australian Open and then at the 2006 Commonwealth Games in Melbourne, where he'll never forget dishing up for luminaries like Britain's Queen Elizabeth II and Prime Minister Tony Blair. Since then, the Beijing native has been back in the capital, first cooking in the Olympic Village at the 2008 Games before moving on to top-tier hotel restaurants in China.

After all those plates, he's shifting downgear - opening up his own private dining room in a converted corporate apartment and directing his picture-perfect plates to a maximum of about 40 people per night.