Chef collaborative dinners are on the rise. Are four hands better than two?

L.A. chef Mei Lin welcomes Singapore chef Zor Tan to her Beverly Hills restaurant 88 Club. Also, the robot-made fried rice that pleased critic Jenn Harris, the restaurant that serves “lasagna on Ozempic” and Snoop Dogg’s delight when a Milan three-Michelin-star restaurant served spaghetti and meatballs with cheddar cheese. I’m Laurie Ochoa, general manager of L.A. Times Food, with Tasting Notes.

Four-hand cooking

The opening course at the collaborative dinner this month between Michelin-starred chef Zor Tan of Singapore’s Restaurant Born and chef Mei Lin of 88 Club in Beverly Hills was a presentation of four dishes that showed how two chefs from very different parts of the world can speak the same language through food. Their collaboration fit into the increasingly popular restaurant trend of guest chef and so-called “four-hands” dinners in which two chefs, often from different cities or countries, create a menu together.

Tan grew up in Malaysia, in a Malay-Chinese household, and at 17, moved to Singapore where he trained in Japanese and French-influenced kitchens, cooking in Taiwan, Spain and Macao before opening his own Restaurant Born in 2022. Lin, best known to TV audiences for winning Season 12 of “Top Chef,” grew up in Michigan after her parents brought her to the U.S. at just 3 months old from Guangdong, China. She cooked for the Detroit Lions before becoming Oprah Winfrey‘s private chef and finding her way to the kitchens of Wolfgang Puck and Michael Voltaggio before opening her own restaurants. (In addition to 88 Club, she runs the Szechuan hot chicken spot Daybird.) Similar to Tan, whose parents operated a mixed rice stall in Malaysia, she applies fine-dining techniques to foods she grew up eating at her family’s Chinese restaurant in Dearborn, Mich., and other dishes that reflect her heritage.

Mei Lin, chef-owner of 88 Club and Daybird, prepares chilled mung bean noodles in the L.A. Times Test Kitchen.

(Stephanie Breijo / Los Angeles Times)

Consider her take on ham siu gok, the fried glutinous rice dumplings that are seen on so many dim sum tables. For the Tan collaboration, Lin filled hers with Dungeness crab and topped them with caviar. She served them beside an elegant version of pork-and-shrimp egg rolls. Tan, meanwhile, prepared abalone with burnt chile pesto, a close approximation of one of his restaurant’s signature dishes, which was inspired by the spicy cockles he grew up eating in his hometown fishing village. With it, he served fried oysters, a variation on another dish he is known for at Born, oyster bao, inspired by his mother’s fried oyster cakes.

“Chef Zor and I really had an aligned vision of what we wanted the menu to be,” Lin said a few days after the dinner, which, for full disclosure, was hosted by the L.A. Times. “We had a theme — we were celebrating Lunar New Year. And we talked the same talk. The planning was honestly seamless.”

Singapore chef Zor Tan, from Restaurant Born, in the L.A. Times Test Kitchen with his yu sheng or lo hei salad, also called “prosperity toss” when it’s served during Lunar New Year.

(Laurie Ochoa / Los Angeles Times)

The Lunar New Year centerpiece was Tan’s take on yu sheng or lo hei, often called the “prosperity toss.” The salad of raw fish, vegetables, fruit and nuts is often served during the 15-day celebration, which this year ends on March 3. Tan, who came to The Times’ Test Kitchen to demonstrate the dish for our “Chef That!” video series, replaces the more traditional plum sauce-based dressing with yuzu for a bright, tart flavor and likes toasted pecans in place of peanuts. (Last year, Mei Lin also did a “Chef That!” episode, demonstrating spicy mung bean noodles for home cooks.)

Yu sheng or “prosperity toss” salad made by Singapore chef Zor Tan in The Times’ Test Kitchen.

(Laurie Ochoa / Los Angeles Times)

Alongside the salad — which everyone at the table tosses together while calling out “Huat ah!” or other wishes for good fortune — Lin served burnished crisp chicken wings filled with sticky rice and beautifully sauced Hokkaido scallops.

Next came the third course anchored by two very different meat dishes that demonstrated abundance and the range of each chef’s repertoire.

Tan’s incredibly tender braised Wagyu beef, which arrived in a deeply flavored broth was served with noodles tossed with what the waiter euphemistically called “different cuts.” I picked up what I thought were bits of tendon and tripe. Paired with the Wagyu, it was a terrific high-low dish.

Singapore chef Zor Tan’s braised Wagyu beef noodles served at a collaborative dinner held at Mei Lin’s 88 Club in Beverly Hills.

(Laurie Ochoa / Los Angeles Times)

Lin served her take on san choy bao, or lettuce wraps, which are considered a prosperity dish. Although minced pigeon often fills the lettuce, Lin presented a showstopper short rib platter, the meat flavored with black garlic and chile, along with gorgeous, colorful leaves of lettuce and herbs.

Short rib san choy bao, or lettuce wraps, from chef Mei Lin at her Beverly Hills restaurant 88 Club during a Feb. 10 collaborative dinner with Singapore chef Zor Tan.

(Laurie Ochoa / Los Angeles Times)

Not every chef collaboration works as smoothly as this one. Lin says these dinners can go wrong when “the menu isn’t cohesive — when it really feels like the menu is forced.”

I’ve experienced this a few times when either the host chef hogs the spotlight from the visiting chef, or the host’s kitchen staff isn’t prepared to execute dishes to the guest chef’s usual standards.

“A lot of times when you do a collaborative dinner,” Lin says, “one chef will want to just cook whatever they want to cook. And that’s totally fine, but the food can be kind of all over the place. I think that sometimes there is a little bit of a disconnect.”

With Tan, however, she felt totally in sync.

“We had a blast,” she said. “His team was amazing. They were so easy to work with. No egos attached. It was all about cooking and having a good time. It was all about the food.”

And, as often happens when guest chefs come to town, Lin says, “I definitely learned something new.

“His technique for blanching an oyster is something I’ve heard of but never done. Essentially, he Cryovacs the oysters and steams them for, like, a minute. It’s a way of retaining all the juices. You can just stick an oyster in a steamer, but then a lot of the liquid that you want leaches out. That was a really fun technique he brought to the table.”

For his part, Tan loved eating around Los Angeles with Lin and on his own. He brought In-n-Out Double-Double burgers to his team. And after eating a tostada at Gilberto Cetina‘s popular Mexican seafood spot Holbox, he’s now thinking he should do an L.A. version of his lo hei or prosperity toss with bits of crisp tostada in place of fried spring roll wrappers. “You can just break the tostada,” he said, “and add a little crunchiness.”

Now that’s another collaboration we’d love to see.

Hot in Hermon

Some of the good eating at Hermon’s in Los Angeles.

(Ron De Angelis / For The Times)

One of the dishes I’m looking forward to trying at Hermon’s, named for the tiny neighborhood across the 110 freeway from Highland Park, near South Pasadena and Monterey Hills, is the slender two-sheet vongole from chef D.K. Kolender. It’s a folded sheet of pasta with clams and whipped ricotta that restaurant critic Jenn Harris called “lasagna on Ozempic.” In her review of Hermon’s, she writes that “the pasta is broiled until big, charred bubbles form across the surface, then it’s showered with grated Parmesan cheese and dressed with crispy breadcrumbs and chile flakes. … Is it more satisfying than tucking into a bowl of actual vongole? Not quite. But it looks fun, and it’s even more fun to eat.”

The only problem: Reservations, as Harris writes, are “nearly impossible to book,” and the line for one of the 18 bar seats available for walk-ins begins “between 4:30 and 5 p.m.” But with a cocktail menu from Eric Alperin, the creative force behind the late great craft cocktail bar the Varnish, and multi-layered pavé-style potato fritters topped with a “light as air” “cloud of cream cheese” and curls of Parmesan cheese, Hermon’s might be worth the wait.

• Harris also writes about a robot wok named Robby that, she says, made “fried rice that could have come from the weathered wok in my grandmother’s kitchen.” The Walnut-based company Next Robot is also developing a machine called Al Dente for making pasta, risotto and scrambled eggs. For now, humans are still needed to add the ingredients but the machines eliminate one tedious task most of us hate: doing dishes. “Robby,” says Harris, who saw the wok in action, “power-washed itself.”

Historic taco

King Taco’s original location, in Cypress Park.

(Stephanie Breijo / Los Angeles Times)

One of the great taco innovations for Angeleno food lovers is the appearance from Mexico of the “two-bite” tortilla, a “four-and-a-half-inch, taquería-sized corn tortilla,” which as L.A. Taco’s Vladimir De Jesus Santos wrote in 2021 and Times food editor Daniel Hernandez recounted in his 2024 essay, “How L.A. Reached Peak Taco,” is credited to Raul Martinez Sr. Breaking away from the hard-shell tacos that were ubiquitous at the time, Martinez, the late founder of L.A.’s King Taco chain, started selling soft tacos in a converted ice cream van in 1974 (though one report dates the truck to 1972). That van, as Times columnist Gustavo Arellano said in his book “Taco USA,” was the first taco truck as we know it in the U.S.

Now, as Stephanie Breijo recently reported, Los Angeles’ Cultural Heritage Commission has voted to name Martinez’s first storefront, King Taco #1, “a city-designated historic-cultural site … Next, the City Council’s Planning and Land Use Management Committee will weigh in on the original King Taco, followed by the City Council.”

• And for a column analyzing Chipotle‘s recent economic woes, Arellano ate a chicken al pastor burrito from the troubled chain. It was only the fifth time he’d eaten at Chipotle. “The idea,” he wrote, “of spending money on pricey, whatever-tasting burritos was never my thing.” Apparently, it’s still not his thing. On his way home, he said, “I stopped to buy three carne tacos from a truck. Cheaper, tastier, better.”

Also …

Onil Chibas inside his Pasadena restaurant of Deluxe 1717.

(Da’shaunae Marisa / For The Times)

• A year after so many Black-owned businesses were destroyed in the Eaton fire, senior food editor Danielle Dorsey put together a guide to 10 Black-owned Pasadena and Altadena food spots to support in this time of rebuilding. Her picks include Onil Chibas’ bistro Deluxe 1717; Perry and Melanie Bennett‘s Perry’s Joint, known for its jazz-inspired sandwich names, and Rodney Jenkins’ popular barbecue food truck Rodney’s Ribs.
• Restaurateur Brad Johnson writes an appreciation of chef and author Joseph G. Randall, the “Dean of Southern Cooking,” who died this month at 79 in Savannah, Ga. “His life’s calling was championing the contributions of Black chefs,” wrote Johnson. “And he particularly inspired me, as a Black restaurateur in Los Angeles.”
• Geoff Davis’ Oakland restaurant Burdell, which was ranked No. 1 on the San Francisco Chronicle’s Top 100 list in 2025 and named the best restaurant in America by Food & Wine magazine, has been the subject of online hate after a now-deleted Reddit post complained about Davis’ long-standing practice of adding a 20% service fee to its bills in place of tipping. As reporter Suhauna Hussain points out in her recent story, many other restaurants charge similar fees but the language Davis uses to point out the “ugly past” of tipping practices offended many in the online discussion, which led to “angry, hateful and, at times, threatening emails, phone calls and direct messages on social media.“ And yet, Hussain reports, many of Burdell’s actual customers have rallied around the restaurant, which has been as busy as ever this month.

Kuku sandwich at Azizam in Silver Lake.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

Finally …

After Martha Stewart tried to get Snoop Dogg to eat snails at Paris’ famed Le Cinq during NBC’s coverage of the 2024 summer Olympics, you knew they’d reprise their fine dining routine during this year’s games in Milan. Sure enough, they showed up at Enrico Bartolini al Mudec, which has three Michelin stars. Snoop, who let Stewart take the caviar on his plate for herself, was pleased when she had the kitchen bring him a plate of spaghetti and meatballs after demurring when one of Bartolini’s signature smoked pasta dishes, this one with rabbit, was served. When grated cheddar was offered instead of Parmesan cheese, some online commenters were taken aback. But cheddar on spaghetti — “the D-O double G way,” as Snoop put it — isn’t shocking in parts of the South and the U.K. Surprisingly, even more online wanted to scold Stewart for telling Snoop that the proper way to eat pasta is to twirl it into a spoon. That is not Italian, they said. Craig Claiborne once wrote in the New York Times, “Spoons are for children, amateurs and people with bad table manners in general.” No matter, Bartolini himself seemed pleased to host TV’s great celebrity odd couple.