Early last month on January 9, r é n held its FOOD+FILM event at the one-Michelin-starred Neighborhood, where chef-owner David Lai spun beautiful seasonal ingredients into indulgent dishes ranging from a heartwarming mac n’ cheese and his signature Ping Yuen chicken baked rice to a beef tartare with caviar and little fried fish which we excitedly dug into with our hands.  

The collaboration was a long time coming, after our founder Jo Soo-Tang became acquainted with David through a mutual friendship with Amber’s esteemed chef Richard Ekkebus. Since meeting each other, Jo became a regular at Neighborhood, spurring a friendship that has now extended into a collaborative relationship through our work at r é n, which David says he deeply relates to, understands, and supports. While it’ll no doubt be the foundation on which our collaboration will continue to flourish into the future, the special event in January also gave the chef-owner and opportunity to look back into the past and relive some of his earlier memories, revisiting the very reasons he became a chef in the first place. 

“As a young and impressionable art student eager for new experiences, UT Theatre on University Avenue in Berkely, California, was a convenient source for myself given its constantly rotating catalogue of films of artistic and historical importance,” David shares. “Two outstanding memories were: back-to-back-to-back binge viewing of the four-hours-long Lawrence of Arabia, with Peter O’Toole in the titular role, and British filmmaker Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover, which I must have watched half a dozen times over several consecutive days.”

As we might’ve guessed, he most resonated with the role of the chef, and the vibrant depictions of the kitchen and restaurant drew him in as a youngster. “I was also drawn to the theatrical nature of the restaurant itself – the opulent dining room, populated democratically by eclectic denizens, from a gluttonous, lascivious gang of criminal buffoons to the antisocial loner diner with a book. Regardless of their differences, the dining room was home for the homeless, a tolerant place that satisfies beyond basic hunger.

“The kitchen is the visual opposite of the warmly lit dining room, which is truthful about most restaurants I’ve worked in,” he continues. “The harsh lit fluorescent lights; the dead animals in various states of preparation; the motley crew in the galley; the grittiness of reality itself. In the midst of it all was the Chef. It is not a coincidence that the film title begins with “The Cook.” The Chef as the hero, the wise philosopher, the overseer of the circus, a master of his craft, and a keen observer of human nature. It was that in that moment I decided I wanted to become a chef.”

And it’s all because of this movie that Neighborhood has also now become what it is: a beloved cornerstone of Hollywood Road you can visit daily without – despite its accolades – an unnecessary sense of pretense, a venue which David hopes “can achieve a sense of ‘home’ and welcoming for people from all walks of life.”