He knows very well that he’s walking a high wire in front of the whole world of food wonks—and that many of them, maybe even most of them, would be only too happy to see him fall face-first into a shit pile. It is a characteristic of a certain breed of high-end foodie elite that they secretly want the place they most love to fail. Killing what one loves is a primal instinct. “Discover” an exciting new place, a uniquely creative chef in an unexpected location. Tell all your friends, blog gushingly about it. Then, months later, complain that because of growing pains, or because “everybody goes there now,” the young chef couldn’t handle the pressure, or that, simply because of the passage of time, the whole thing is “over.”
It’s great to say you ate the best meal of your life at the French Laundry. It’s a far rarer distinction to be able to say you ate at Rakel, Thomas Keller’s failed restaurant in SoHo, “back in the day”—and even then, recognized his brilliance. When Rakel closed and Keller left the city, it made for an instant Golden Era, a limited-edition experience that nobody can ever have again at any price. Unlike England, where they often build you up just so they can enjoy the process of tearing you down, people who genuinely adore and appreciate what you do as a chef are, at the same time, instinctively waiting for you to fail. As well, there’s the age-old syndrome common to fans of musicians with passionate and discerning cult followings. When the objects of adulation are crass enough to become popular, they quickly become a case of “used to be good.” As a devoted music fan himself—the kind of music nerd for whom listening to Electric Ladyland on vinyl is pure crack, and who gets most excited when indie musicians few others have heard of come to his restaurants—Chang is familiar with this auto-destruct impulse. Other chefs under that kind of scrutiny—the guys who’ve been around longer, stayed on top year after year—tend to deal with the problem laterally, through a subtle combination of good intelligence work and a continuing attention to the care and feeding of those who might, someday, hurt them.
Chang tends to attack the problem head-on, telling any and all—probably before it occurred to them—that yeah…things are very probably going to turn to shit any minute now. Only way one can react to that is with a gnawing suspicion that one should Eat Here Now. Much of what makes David Chang such a compelling subject is the ease with which one can imagine him as the protagonist of a neat, Icarus-style morality play. It is hard to imagine, meeting him, that he will not crash and burn. One Web site even has a “MomoWatch,” a regular newsfeed dedicated to tracking developments in ChangWorld—hour by hour, if need be.
The degree and kind of fascination with which his every move and utterance are observed and discussed is unique in the history of chefdom. Marco Pierre White’s exploits as the first rock-star chef—and Gordon Ramsay’s strategic evictions—were tabloid fodder. The people watching and writing about Chang are, for the most part, smart people, sophisticated about dining. They know exactly where to slip the knife if and when it comes to that.
How does he handle all this? “Rage or fear…It oscillates. Rage I need to motivate me to try things that I can’t ordinarily do—as I’m a lazy man. Fear—to keep pushing harder so we don’t lose what we’ve accomplished.”
He’s persisted with one even more bold throw after another: a series of what would appear to be erratic, straight-outta-left-field choices—and yet everything works.
When Noodle Bar opened, chefs and cooks liked that there was a place where they could get a bowl of noodles from a crazy, surly, overworked Korean-American who worked (fairly briefly) for Tom Colicchio and, later, Daniel Boulud. They enjoyed watching him curse at customers; liked that, after receiving complaints about the scarcity of vegetarian options, he’d turned around and put pork in nearly every dish on the menu.
It’s no accident that all of his restaurants seem designed exclusively for hungry chefs and cooks and jaded industry people. When they opened, they felt like manifestations of a collective secret urge. Everything from counter service to menus to music to the appearance of the cooks, the way one interacts directly with them, seemed to suggest to those within the business: “This is the way—this is how good, how much fun our business could be if only we didn’t have to worry about fucking customers.”
Now, non-industry people are clamoring to get in on the kind of dining experience that was once the perk of a debauched but exclusive elite. If the mark of a successful chef is, indeed, getting regular, honest-John diners to eat what chefs themselves have always loved to eat—the way they themselves like to eat it—then David Chang is a very successful chef. But in the process, he’s democratized a dining sector that once required, for admission, burn marks, aching feet, beef fat under the nails, and blisters. For some, that’s treachery of a kind.
At my first meal at Momofuku Ssäm, one particular dish slapped me upside the head and suggested that, indeed, something really special was going on here. It was a riff on a classic French salad of frisée aux lardons: a respectful version of the bistro staple—smallish, garnished with puffy fried chicharrones of pork skin instead of the usual bacon, and topped with a wonderfully runny, perfectly poached quail egg. Good enough—and, so far, not something that would inspire me to tear off my shirt and go running out in the street proselytizing. But the salad sat on top of a wildly incongruous stew of spicy, Korean-style tripe—and it was, well, it was…genius. Here, on one hand, was everything I usually hate about modern cooking—and in one bowl, no less. It was “fusion”—in the sense that it combined a perfectly good European classic with Asian ingredients and preparation. It was post-modern and contained my least favorite ingredient these days: irony. It appeared to be trying to “improve” or riff on an “unimprovable” and perfectly good bistro icon. Unless you’re Thomas Keller, or Ferran Adrià, I usually loathe that kind of thing.
But this was truly audacious. It was fucking delicious. And it had tripe in it. So, for me, there was a moral dimension as well: anyone who can make something irresistibly delicious with tripe and get New Yorkers to eat it is, to my mind, already on the side of the angels. It was as if all my favorite chefs had gotten together and somehow created a perfectly tuned, super mutant baby food—in Korea. I felt I wanted all my high-end meals—for the rest of my life—to resemble this one: both complex and strangely comforting.
From the outside, Momofuku Ko looks like an after-hours club—or a particularly dodgy storefront cocktail lounge. There’s no sign—only Chang’s tiny, trademark peach logo next to an uninviting door. You could easily stand outside looking for it for ten minutes before realizing you were there all along.
Reservations for the twelve seats at the rather spartan-looking bar are legendarily difficult to get—in that the process is the most truly (and painfully) democratic in the world of fine dining. You can’t call or write or beg or network your way into Ko. You log on to their Web site at precisely the right second and manage, you hope, against all odds, to get in your request for a reservation for exactly six days ahead. You do this only by beating out the thousands of other people who are doing exactly the same thing you are—at exactly the same second—not an easy feat. You get a seat at Ko only over time and through persistent effort. Beyond hiring a platoon of helpers to log on at the same time and attempt, simultaneously, to make reservations on your behalf—which might increase your chances—there is no gaming the system. It’s a lottery. The same rules apply for all: food critics, friends—even Chang’s parents. They had to wait a year to eat at their own son’s restaurant.
The menu at Ko—a set menu of ten courses for dinner (and sixteen for lunch)—changes with the lineup, and the chefs’ and cooks’ moods, though it usually includes one of a number of takes on concepts that have already been tried, tested, and found to work. The creative process leading up to each finished dish is mysterious and ill-understood. The natural inclination of lazy journalists is, of course, to credit Chang exclusively—which only (and unfairly) invites disappointment when one realizes he’s rarely present. As was intended from
its inception, Peter Serpico is the chef at Ko—and that’s whom you’re likely to find there.
The creative process by which the final dishes at Chang restaurants are arrived at is an absolutely fascinating stream of daily e-mails between chefs and cooks. Preceded and followed by many, many testings and tastings. Five-word rockets detailing a sudden flash of inspiration, thousand-word missives detailing an experience, a flavor, a possibility—an experiment that might lead to something great, continuing back and forth. The hard drive on Chang’s laptop—from what transcripts I’ve seen—contains a years-long conversation with some of the most exciting and creative minds in gastronomy. And it’s not just employees weighing in. Somewhere in the ether is a record of some seriously deep fucking thinking about food. Something I’d suggest, by the way, that the Culinary Institute of America make a bid on now—for their archives.
Service at Ko is informal for a restaurant with two Michelin stars. There are no waiters. The cooks prepare the dishes and, after describing what you’re about to eat—with varying degrees of either casual good cheer or perfunctory (if charming) indifference—they put the plate in front of you on the counter. Though there is a wine list, it is advisable to allow the excellent sommelier to pour pairings with each course. She knows better than you. But if you just want beer with your dinner? They’ve got that, too.
There are no tablecloths or place settings, per se. The musical accompaniment to your meal is likely to be The Stooges or The Velvet Underground. The “open kitchen” looks more like a short-order setup than a Michelin-starred restaurant. And the cooks…they look gloriously like cooks. The kind they used to hide in the back when company came calling. Scruffy, tattooed, and wearing the same snap-front white shirts you see on the guys behind the counter at a Greek diner.
I was finally, after many tries, lucky enough to get into Ko.
There was a tiny plate of oyster, caviar, and sea urchin to start, three ingredients born to be together—followed by a dish of braised eggplant, tomato-water gel, and eggplant chip, a combination I’d hardly been dreaming of all my life (in fact, three ingredients I thought I could happily do without). Intensely, wonderfully flavorful—the kind of happy surprise I seldom expect from a vegetable. There was a dish of tofu and duck heart in homemade XO sauce, which fell more predictably into the territory of things I love; a “chicharrone/pork fat brioche” was a mercifully small portion of tasty, tasty overkill (and basically evil—in a good way). I pretty much hate scallops (too rich and too sweet for me). And I’m indifferent to pineapple (also sweet). But sliced diver scallops with pineapple vinegar, dehydrated ham, and fresh water chestnut was yet another dish I should have hated but ended up wanting to tongue the plate. There was another uni dish—this one in chilled “burned” dashi with pea tendrils and melon—which was simply brilliant. Then came a lightly smoked chicken egg with fingerling-potato chips, onion soubise, and sweet-potato vinegar—which tasted like something you’d only be lucky enough to discover if you were getting stoned late at night with Ferran Adrià—and you both found yourselves with the munchies. Corn pasta with chorizo, pickled tomato, dried chile, sour cream, and lime. Caper-brined trout with potato risotto, dill powder, glazed red-ball radish, and baby Swiss chard must have been the end of a very long and probably painful process. Also awesome…A frozen, freshly fallen snow of foie gras with lychee, pine nut brittle, and riesling gelée, if you close your eyes and imagine it, already makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? By the time the lighter-than-air duck liver melted on my tongue, it was already an answered prayer. Deep-fried shortribs (I ask you: Who the fuck wouldn’t love that?) with scallion, lavender, and baby leek finished me off with savory. Then desserts: peach soda with animal-cracker ice cream, which I didn’t love so much, maybe because I have no happy childhood associations with either ingredient. Cruelly, I wasn’t allowed to drink soda at my house (a fact about which I am still bitter), and animal crackers were, for me, a default sort of a cookie—the kind of thing somebody’s addled grandma would give you, thinking that they were just what every kid loved best. The loathsome-sounding black-pepper ganache, black-pepper crumbs, macerated blueberries with crème fraîche, and olive-oil ice cream was, typically of my Momofuku-related experiences, a shockingly unexpected joy. In fact, it was one of the most memorable dishes of the night—in a night full of them.
Trying to figure out Chang’s “style” is a challenge—as he does his best to present a moving target, and because his menus are so collaborative.
But one window into where it all comes from is the time he spent at Café Boulud with chef Andrew Carmellini. His job there was the amuse-bouche station—challenged to throw together an always-changing array of tiny and, hopefully, exciting bites of first-course freebies, mostly with ingredients at hand. The idea of the amuse being to “wake up” or “tease” the customers’ palates in preparation for the more studiously composed dishes to follow. Fast, pretty, flavorful—and, most important, “amusing.” Whoever’s making the amuses is usually less constrained by a need to stay “on brand.” There are fewer rules. You are more likely to be allowed to stray from France, for instance—in what is otherwise a strictly French restaurant—on the amuses. Whimsy is a virtue.
Because David Chang is an interesting guy doing interesting things, and because, unusually for a chef with a lot to lose, he’s both articulate and impulsively undiplomatic, people who get paid to write about food, or blog about food, or make television about interesting people are constantly coming round and poking him with a stick—in the not-unreasonable assumption that something quotable and, hopefully, even controversial will come tumbling out of his mouth. An off-the-cuff and only half-serious quip that he “hate[s] San Francisco—all they do is put fuckin’ figs on a plate” can be easily conflated into weeks of blog posts and newspaper articles. Actually, with Chang, you don’t even have to poke him. Just wait around long enough and he’s pretty sure to drop a soundbite that will piss off somebody somewhere. Column inches, especially for print food writers, are harder and harder to fill with something “new” or relevant these days. As drearily limiting as writing porn is for someone who enjoys adjectives, and difficult as hell for those looking to keep up with the many-headed, quick-reacting blogosphere. For a food writer usually consigned to matters no more exciting than cupcakes, Chang-watching has become something of a one-man Gold Rush, a potentially life-giving font of hipness. There are those who grudgingly admire the guy and look to his next move to show them what to write about or talk about (“The Next Big Thing!”), and those who sense the injury just beneath the surface of Chang’s public persona, the recklessness—and hurt—and want to write about that. And those like me, who straight-up love the very fact that he exists—but also can’t help trying to psychoanalyze him.
“Why does everybody want to get inside his skull?” asks his friend and coauthor Peter Meehan. Though he knows the answer.
Unlike just about any other chef in the public eye, Chang wears his fears and his most deeply felt loathings right on his sleeve, for everybody to see.
What Chang would have you believe is that he really deserves neither the acclaim nor the success. He’s been saying this to journalists quite disarmingly for some time, repeatedly pointing out his relatively minimal qualifications and experience—and insistently comparing himself (unfavorably) to other chefs. To what degree this is a pose is debatable. I’d maintain that just because he says it often doesn’t mean it’s not true.
“I didn’t want any of this,” he says. A statement, conversely, I do not believe for a second.
He’s a former junior golf champion, after all, who quit the sport completely at age thirteen because, he’s said, “If I can’t beat the brains out of everyone, I don’t want to play. It’s not fun otherwise.”
That doesn’t sound like somebody who doesn’t want things. “Golf fucked me up in the head,” he says, by way of explanation. We’re talking about God over skewers of chicken ass at Yakitori Totto on the West Side.
He was born into a Korean family of observant Christians, the youngest of four kids.
In his book, he describes his relationship with his father—and the beginnings of his relationship with food—thus: “I grew up eating noodles with my dad…On nights when it was just him and me, he’d make me eat sea cucumber along with the noodles. And the weirdness of eating them would be offset by the warm afterglow of pride I felt in being an adventurous eating companion to him.” His father, who had first worked in restaurants after emigrating from Korea, warned him to stay away from the business.
It is my theory that the fact that Chang attended Jesuit High School and then Trinity College, majoring in religion, is of vital significance to the emerging science of Changology.
“For me…it wasn’t…enough,” he says cryptically. “I used to give a shit about God…but if God were to exist, I’d rather burn in hell. If he failed, he failed by putting the message in human hands. I guess I’m pretty pissed at God. The Crusades…Pol Pot…Hitler…Stalin. The same time all these terrible things were happening, people were bowing their heads and thanking God before they ate.”
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