There is exactly one rule that has never bent at House of Nanking, the cramped, beloved Shanghainese spot in San Francisco’s Chinatown: everyone waits. No one skips the line. Not Francis Ford Coppola, not anyone. So, in 1997, when a young actor in all black turned up hoping for a table, Peter Fang did what he did to everybody. His daughter Kathy, then a starstruck fan, recognized the man instantly and begged her father to let him skip the line. As Kathy told the SF Standard, her dad refused without budging, which is its own kind of immigrant-parent comedy. “Not only do they not give an inch, but they can embarrass you, all within five minutes,” she said. View this post on Instagram The embarrassment was just getting started. Peter, who didn’t watch many movies, walked over, took one look at the famous-seeming customer, and reached for the only relevant name filed in his head. “Kathy, come take a picture!” he called out. “It’s him! It’s Sean Connery!” It was not Sean Connery. It was Keanu Reeves. Mortified, Kathy apologized on her father’s behalf. Reeves, by every account the most gracious man in show business, took it perfectly. As the SF Standard reported, he thanked Peter and said he was deeply honored to be mistaken for an actor as talented as Sean Connery. Before he left, Kathy grabbed a disposable camera and snapped a photo with him. It went up by the front window and stayed there for decades. “Keanu Reeves was such a gentleman,” Kathy recalled. “You know how everybody talks about him being the nicest person in the industry.” Coming around again Here’s where it loops back on itself in a way no one could have scripted. In February 2020, Reeves came back to San Francisco to film The Matrix Resurrections. House of Nanking, the very restaurant where Neo, decades earlier in the first film, had famously praised the “really good noodles,” was chosen as a location. Kathy was now 36 weeks pregnant and fighting to keep the family business alive in the first brutal months of the pandemic. A producer reached out about a secret project, NDAs got signed, and only then did the Fangs learn their corner restaurant was going into The Matrix. Sweet surprises When the movie came out, fans spotted the Easter egg: as Neo slurps noodles on screen, the old photo of a younger Keanu hangs on the wall behind him, the same snapshot from the disposable camera. Per Kathy’s account by way of GamesRadar, the crew were longtime regulars, and they surprised her by making a cleaner, better copy of the photo so it could keep hanging by the window for years to come. The really fun part, though, is the baby. Kathy and her husband, Caleb Sima, had a name picked out for their son: Hawk. But Sima, as it happens, is a former hacker, the real kind, which makes him spiritual kin to a certain fictional hacker named Neo. Right around the filming, Sima floated the obvious idea. They were going to have to change the kid’s name. Their son is Neo now. The whole saga eventually became part of a House of Nanking cookbook, more than 100 recipes including the yang chun noodle soup that inspired Neo’s onscreen bowl. This particular recipes is built around Kathy’s relationship with her parents, Peter and Lily, who at 75 and 76 still work the restaurant every single day. It is, somehow, a true story: a father’s stubborn fairness, a celebrity misidentification worthy of a sitcom, and a movie star humble enough to wait for a table and gracious enough to come back two decades later and turn the whole thing into cinema. The post A chef made Keanu Reeves wait in line, then called him Sean Connery. He came back 23 years later. appeared first on Upworthy.