‘Even at 70, the good Lord has a lot more things for me to do on this planet. I’ve only just begun.’ : At This Restaurant, Every Occasion Is a Black-Thai Affair

The menu ranges from “paht Thai”--spicy, stir-fried noodles with chicken and shrimp--to barbecued ribs. If your palate is not up to “tom yum goong,” a spicy soup, then the celebrated Mississippi Bayou gumbo might be more to your liking.

Those choices ranging from Asian intricacy to Southern soul are, as “gangsta” rappers might put it, “straight outta Compton.”

In a city so often stereotyped in music videos and news reports as all graffiti and gang violence, the King David restaurant rises on North Central Avenue like an elegant, gated country house on nearly three acres.

A waterfall spills down a wall in a “rain forest,” just in front of an imposing stairwell leading up to a rooftop gazebo.

“It has a spirit of its own,” said Tim Iverson, who works in the Compton city manager’s office. “It’s something out of the ordinary. It’s good to have people come from out of the area and take them to a place that is comfortable and where the food is excellent.”

At a table where half a dozen staffers from Pacific Bell’s Gardena office settled in for lunch, Jackie Thomas allowed as how she was curious about the restaurant’s ham hocks in barbecue sauce. Her co-worker, Mark Johnson, leaned toward the sweet-and-sour jumbo shrimp.

“To me, I’m not in Compton when I’m in here,” said Thomas, adding that the commonly held views of the city are often unfair.

The restaurant “is like its own little village,” said Johnson, adding that he is attracted to King David as much by the setting and its Southeast Asian decor as by the food.

The crowned head of the restaurant’s owner, David Briggs, smiles down from a two-story sign looming above the parking lot entrance. Briggs, 70, and his wife, Napacharee, 41, have put together a black-Thai affair in a 10,000-square-foot complex of dining and conference rooms, a gift shop and a banquet hall that has become a landmark in Compton.

“It’s nice having something right here in the community as opposed to having to drive all the way up to L.A.,” said Compton school district electrician John Tenette as he ordered a lunch of seafood rice recently.

Although Darnell Bolton was picking up a lunch of shrimp fried rice, he said he was very much aware of the combinations that make King David a one-of-a-kind restaurant: “You don’t see ham hocks in soy sauce anywhere else.”

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In 1934 when Briggs was a 9-year-old in Roxie, Miss., his father was fired from his railroad job after 21 years with the company.

“He had been there a lifetime,” Briggs said. “He didn’t know anything else to do.”

That experience seared an indelible lesson into the young boy’s consciousness.

“I made a vow at age 9 that I would never work on anybody’s job that long, only for them to tell me I wasn’t needed anymore,” Briggs said.

The Briggs family owned over 300 acres of prime timberland--property the family still holds--and Briggs’ father went from laying railroad ties to cutting them.

But his mother taught him to cook so well that he left Mississippi at 18, winding up in Cincinnati, where he became a cook for the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad in the 1940s. For all of his love of cooking, he said, he wanted to become a contractor--to start a business to avoid the fate that had befallen his father.

At 21, he started hanging wallpaper, painting and doing other cosmetic work. A decade later he was putting together entire housing developments in the Cincinnati area--laying out the streets, putting in sewers, subdividing the lots and building the homes.

He moved his business to Compton 30 years ago. The buildings he has put up in Los Angeles include the Echo Park Boys Club and a senior citizens center sponsored by the Delta Sigma Theta sorority at Adams and West boulevards.

In his early days as a builder in Cincinnati, he played guitar and sang in a rhythm and blues group that also sang gospel and country music--”anything that would make us a quarter.” His guitar case gathers dust in a corner of his office above the restaurant, but Briggs can still show off the dance moves he said he taught a very young Jackie Wilson.

“I’m a clean musician now,” he said through his own laughter. “All washed up.”

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As Briggs’ construction business prospered, he began importing intricately carved teak furniture from Thailand. All the while, he harbored a dream going back to his days as a cook--to open his own restaurant.

On one of his trips to Thailand in the 1970s, he met Napacharee Sangaroon, a 24-year-old nurse who helped him make contacts in the teak trade.

They married in 1977, and Napacharee admits that she could not cook at all then. “He taught me how to cook so good,” she said.

Briggs laughed, recalling those days. “When she came from Bangkok, she couldn’t boil water,” he said.

In 1982, Briggs broke ground for the restaurant he would not finish until 1989.

“It took seven years to build because nobody would loan money in the area,” Briggs said. “I had to build it out of my own pocket.”

When he opened his doors in August, 1989, he was welcomed as a shining asset. The city’s political Establishment, its churches and its newlyweds looking for a reception site kept King David busy. Word spread and customers began showing up from San Diego, Bakersfield and even out of state. Curiosity about the eclectic menu initially attracted them, and the food and decor kept them coming back.

But the 1992 riots dealt the restaurant a crippling blow from which it is only now recovering, Briggs said. Customers were afraid to venture into Compton after dark, and Briggs’ dinner business plummeted more than 50%.

“The banquet business is what really kept us going,” he said. “Right now the dinner business is back up to just over half of what it was before the riot, and we’re averaging 15 banquets a month.”

His wife has seriously plunged into cooking, completing a Chinese cooking course and graduating from a culinary arts program at Long Beach City College while raising two children, David Jr., 11, and Dacharee, 10.

At a time when most men his age are retired, Briggs is looking for new challenges. His voice crackles with excitement as he describes property he has bought in the Central American nation of Belize and his plans for developing it.

“I feel that even at 70, the good Lord has a lot more things for me to do on this planet,” he said. “I’ve only just begun.”