Which begs the question: If you don’t believe in God, why study religion?
“I just needed to figure out…I just wanted to know,” he says, draining his beer a little sadly. “You know, I always thought you can never disprove faith. The Christian God seemed flawed. I mean, you only had one chance to make it into heaven.”
He looks up from a half-eaten skewer of chicken, worried. “What if you don’t get the chance? At the end of the day, the heart of the matter is: what happens when you’re dead? For me, the Christian ending just isn’t…good enough.”
He mentions the bodhisattva of Mahayana Buddhism, sentient beings who delay their own attainment of nirvana to become guides to those who have yet to reach it—as more worthy of emulation than the Christian saints.
I generally don’t hear a lot of talk about Buddhist spirituality (certainly not over chicken meatballs and beer), and I’m still pondering what it must be like to get out from under the twin boulders of a father’s love and expectations—and a God who turned out to be a disappointment. “I try to put my goals second to other people’s goals,” he says.
Which I wonder about—so I later ask his friend Peter Meehan. “I’d like to say he’s a fucking sweetheart,” he says, asked simply if he’d describe Chang as a nice guy, “that he’s compassionate. That he’s generous. And he is. But it’s, like, steel-jacketed love. It’s hard-edged. I mean, I’ve never woken up next to him, but I don’t think there are a lot of tender and delicate moments with David. He’s…loyal as shit. So if you’re part of his brood and somebody harms you? You can count on him to be appropriately supportive and vengeful.”
“Loyalty and honesty are really important things to me,” says Chang.
He is, to say the least, unforgiving of those he feels have lied to him or let him down in the loyalty department.
His friend Dave Arnold has told him, “Your hobby is hating people,” and, to be sure, he has a long and carefully tended—even cherished—list of enemies.
“I don’t mind people saying they hate my guts,” he says, warming to his subject. “Just have the balls to say it to my face.”
“Don’t try to be my fuckin’ friend and then…” he trails off, remembering the “Ozersky incident.” Josh Ozersky, at the time of his transgression, was an editor-correspondent for New York magazine’s influential food-and-dining Web site, Grub Street. The root of his conflict with Chang, it is said, stems from the publication of a Momofuku menu—before Chang felt it ready for release. There had been, Chang insists, assurances that the document would be withheld.
Ozersky’s “scoop” got him banned for life from all Chang restaurants. And when I say “for life,” I’m not kidding. There is no question in my mind that buffalo will graze in Times Square—and pink macaroons will fall from the sky—before Josh Ozersky ever makes it through the door of a Momofuku anywhere.
“I hate Antoinette Bruno,” says Chang. This was a wound inflicted early in his career, when the Momofuku thing was just getting going. Chang felt particularly vulnerable at the time, and the offense still burns, years later. Bruno is head honcho of Star Chefs, an outfit that, every year, organizes what Chang calls “a poor imitation of Madrid Fusion.” After one of the events, Bruno found herself shooting her mouth off about how “overrated” she found this David Chang character, blissfully—and stupidly—unaware that she was talking with Chang’s cooks at the time. “Opportunist. A fake. Not a good person. Sycophant. Dishonorable,” says Chang, still genuinely angry just thinking about her.
“I fuckin’ hate X,” he says, talking about the saintly proprietor of a good-for-the-world restaurant, a pioneer of conscientious, sustainable food production. “It’s like hating the Dalai Lama!” I protest. “How could you hate that guy? And he stands for everything you support!” (Chang is deeply involved with—and curious about—new avenues and new sources for sustainable, low-impact ingredients.)
“I fuckin’ hate him so much it’s unbelievable.”
“But you love Alice Waters,” I point out, as an example of someone far, far more dogmatic.
“Yeah, but Alice means well. She may not articulate as well as she could—but she’s a nice lady who maybe just took too much acid back in the ’60s. Plus…she’s a mom figure to me. When I got sick, she was the first person to call. Before my family even.”
He doesn’t elaborate about Chef X beyond “He’s weirdly manipulative.”
And “I hate Y,” another beloved figure in cuisine, the hugely talented chef-owner of an innovative restaurant specializing in a cuisine that might be called “experimental.”
“But…but you worship Ferran Adrià,” I say, “you’re bestest pals with Wylie Dufresne, for fuck’s sake”—arguing the inconsistency in idolizing them while utterly dismissing the other guy, a major acolyte. Why hate this guy?
“For his seriousness” is all he has to say. “Eating in a restaurant should be fun.”
Anyway, he continues, “Ferran Adrià is a genius; [his work was] like Bob Dylan going electric. Nobody has quite fathomed the Ferran impact yet. It will last forever.”
I begin to gather that Chang doesn’t need a logical reason to hate a guy. In almost every case, it’s in some way personal.
Though he has said he “hates” San Francisco—and San Francisco chefs—neither is true. Ask him to mention chefs he really admires, who he thinks are doing important work, and he invariably names David Kinch, Jeremy Fox, and Corey Lee. He will hear no evil spoken of Alice Waters, worships Thomas Keller, and hangs with Chris Cosentino. He’s admitted envying the same Bay Area “figs on a plate” he’s claimed to hold in contempt.
He’s aware of the contradictions, maybe bemused by the fact that he’s just as much at war with himself as with anybody else, bemoaning the lack of order and discipline and high standards in kitchens on one hand and, moments later, regretting the passing of the time when “the funniest motherfucker in the kitchen” was a hero. “That doesn’t exist anymore…” he complains. “But, David,” I say, “you would have fired the funniest guy in the kitchen for not being serious enough about your fucking standards.”
He charges on nonetheless. “Take away Keller and a handful of others and there’s nobody producing serious cooks,” he says—before admiringly mentioning the story of a cook who “chops off a fingertip—they cauterize it on the flattop.” I am forced to remind him that this is a practice they would probably take a dim view of at the French Laundry.
“I hate that cooking has turned white-collar,” says a man who knows full well that, with every day and every new restaurant, he moves farther and farther away from ever working the line again.
So…whom does he like? “I don’t talk to anybody,” he confesses sadly. And I almost believe him.
Then he admits, reluctantly, that he’s actually got a few friends. Peter Meehan, the writer and journalist and coauthor of his cookbook, is a friend. From what I’ve seen, Meehan, a smart and decent guy, appears to serve as Chang’s thermostatic regulator, his consigliere. Someone he can turn to and ask, “Is this a good idea?” or “Is this good for me?” and get an honest answer.
Wylie Dufresne, the heroically innovative chef-owner of WD-50, is a friend. Chang calls him his mentor. “He lives close. He’s like an older brother.” Dufresne is always spoken of with both affection and respect. You get the impression that if you were to complain about so much as an appetizer at WD-50 in Chang’s presence, he’d never speak to you again.
The name of Ken Friedman—owner of the wildly successful Spotted Pig gastro-pub, the bar The Rusty Knot, and an expanding bundle of other establishments—comes up. After a storied career in the music industry, Friedman has had a similarly fast and stellar rise in the restaurant business. Chang seems to look on the way he’s handled his life with a mixture of kinship, admiration, and envy.
“He’s lived the most ridiculously good life…he [seems to have] just bumbled his way through. And a good guy.”
Dave Arnold, the head of the F
rench Culinary Institute’s Culinary Technology department, theorist, and advisor to cutting-edge chefs, is also a friend. (“Dave Chang + Dave Arnold = Happy Chang,” says Meehan.)
Asked for other examples of happy-making Chang activities, Meehan mentions beer, lots of steamed crustaceans—and an impassioned argument over New England transcendentalism as an effective palliative to the pressures of empire.
Chang describes himself as unhealthily obsessed with a hockey player, defenseman Rod Langway of the Capitals, because, he says, he was one of the last to play the game without a helmet. There is, perhaps, an important metaphor there for amateur Changologists seeking to sum up the young chef ’s career.
Peter Meehan says, “The most important thing about David is…that…restlessness, the willingness to throw it all overboard and start again, the drive to always do better, that there’s a palpable, actual dynamism to his places, which is rarer than rare.”
Regretful, I think, about the limited time he spent at Café Boulud and Craft, Chang idealizes the great New York kitchens of Lespinasse, Le Cirque, Gramercy Tavern, Le Bernardin, Daniel—places where entire generations of chefs grew up and learned their craft.
“Christian Delouvrier…I would have been miserable as fuck working for him. But there’s something romantic about it as a cook.”
Longingly—like a kid with his nose pressed to the glass—he looks back at the superheroes of previous generations of cooking. In an amazing e-mail, he described in elegiac terms a cooking event in Copenhagen, where he got to watch the great Albert Adrià at work.
“Albert is all fun and games until we get to the kitchen and he turns into a maniac. He puts on a chef coat for the first time in over eight months (porter shirt), explains why high gastronomy is dead to him…I think three hours went by as I watched him work, his brain churning away…What was sad and beautiful was that we were watching what will probably be the last time he cooks, like watching Michael Jordan retire…He plated everything solo, the whole room, guests…cooks…chefs, watch in reverence. And it was fucking delicious.”
“I’m a geek of culinary history,” he says. At Ssäm, he keeps a gallery of photographs of chefs he respects on the wall for his cooks to memorize. “A chef comes in? I know.” (And he wants his cooks to know, too.) He mentions no-longer-living legends like Jean-Louis Palladin and Gilbert Le Coze like some talk about Golden Age baseball players, and asks me, “Do you have any idea who went through Bouley’s kitchens? Everybody!”
He observes that the recent trend away from white tablecloth, crystal glassware, and classic high-end service and haute cuisine is both good and bad. “Good because of the proliferation of restaurants that are not fine-dining. But it’s a double-edged sword—because that erodes the training ground that produces better cooks. And what restaurants need,” he stresses, “is cooks.”
“But, dude! It’s you killing it,” I could easily have pointed out. If anybody has pointed out the way out of fine dining—created a viable and worthwhile alternative to the old model—it’s Chang. After seeing the success of Ssäm and Ko, why would any chef want to weigh down their operation with all the bullshit of stemware and linen service? However he might feel, Chang—if only by example—is helping to kill what he most loves. He’s making his heroes—the names on the cookbooks on his office shelves—obsolete.
Above all others, he seems to respect Alex Lee, the one-time chef of restaurant Daniel. The standards and level of performance he saw there during brief visits made a huge impression on Chang. It’s a template he constantly measures himself against—and he’s never satisfied with the comparison. That Lee, in his late thirties, with three children, recently went to work in a country club was an understandable move for a family man facing forty. But it was a strangely devastating moment for David.
“I see that, and I think, I’ll never be that talented—or have the work ethic of this maniac—and he’s calling it quits?!?!”
Given his own repeated claims to mediocrity as a chef and as a cook, I ask him what he thinks he’s good at.
“I’ve got a weird ability to think what the other person I work with is thinking,” he says, and when I ask whether he’s a better manager or a cook, he says, “The best cooks are like the pretty girl in high school. Gifted. Born to cook. They never had to develop other skills.” He thinks for a moment. “I mean…Larry Bird was a terrible coach.”
Which leaves me with the definite impression that, in his heart of hearts, Chang would have greatly preferred to be a virtuoso talent like Larry Bird (and a crappy manager)—instead of whatever it is he turned out to be.
We’ve wiped out three beers and a fair amount of chicken parts. A cup in front of him bristles with bare skewers. Chang sighs and sits back in his chair.
“Everything has changed in five years. The only things that stay the same are the platonic ideals. Love. Truth. Loyalty. It was the prettiest thing when nothing is expected of you.”
But everything is expected of David Chang these days. In only five years, Momofuku Noodle Bar begat Momofuku Ssäm, Momofuku Ko, Milk Bar—and now, moving midtown to take over the hotel space once occupied by Geoffrey Zakarian’s Town, the open-any-minute Má Pêche. The Momofuku cookbook (at time of our meeting) is hitting the shelves any second with book tour to follow—and with it all come attacks of unexplained deafness, psychosomatic paralysis, the mystery headache. When will enough be enough? Chang talks about taking a year off.
When I ask Meehan about this later, he scoffs: “A year? No fucking way. He’s too ambitious and has too many people he’s accountable for. [He’s] like those touring juggernauts—like the Grateful Dead—there’s a vagabond tent city of people relying on those tours for their livelihood. If and when David walks away from Momofuku, it’ll be for health reasons, or because he’s leaving the kitchen for good.” On the other hand, he considers, “If your hero is Marco Pierre White and you listen to enough Neil Young, there’s significant appeal to burning out instead of fading away, right?”
It’s so easy to see or hear about what torments David Chang that I have to ask…what’s a good day for him?
Chang looks up and away, as if trying to remember something so remote he’s not sure anymore if it ever existed.
“I get up in the morning and it’s not a business meeting…I get to go to the market, say a Saturday, early enough so I can talk to the farmers and beat the crowds and the rest of the chefs who descend on Union Square. If I go later, a forty-five-minute excursion turns into a three-hour bullshit talkfest.
“I get to the restaurants and everything is clean, the sidewalks are clean, the awnings glisten with water…I run through all the restaurants, make sure the walk-ins are tight and all the day mise-en-place is clean and great. The cooks are pushing themselves, there’s a sense of urgency throughout the late morning and evening. The low-boys [refrigerators] are clean.
“Front-of-the-house meeting. The servers show up on time and no one is hung over or bitching…
“I eat a bowl of rice and kimchi and maybe some eggs—or whatever is for lunch staff meal. Lunch service, the trailer comes in and I don’t have to say anything to him. All I want is for the cook to season properly, to label things, and condense his mise-en-place. The cook never responds with a ‘no’—just hauls ass. Everyone has a sharp knife and there is no attitude. No one burns themselves. Servers don’t fuck up the tables, and I don’t have to yell…
“I step downstairs to work on new dishes or butcher or clean veg. That’s so relaxing. Working on a dish with those in the inner circle at the restaurant and via e-mail. I give some to everyone to taste…
“I get no e-mails that say, ‘Dave, can we talk for a bit’ (translation: ‘Dave: I want a raise,’ or ‘I quit,’ or ‘I’m unhappy’).
“I stop by Ko and Noodle Bar, make sure everything is copacetic, everything tastes the way it should, every station is clean, every cook trying to find a way to make their prep better and faster and more efficient…I can see them going over the
ir mise-en-place over and over again to make sure it’s right, I can see them asking themselves, ‘Is there a better way to do this?’ I don’t have to question anyone’s integrity or commitment.
“Family meal is a perfect spread of fried chicken, salad, lemonade. The most important meal of the day. I shoot the shit with the boys…
“Get ready for dinner service. No VIPs, but we’re busy. I stand in the corners of the various restaurants and watch. I avoid service at Ko like the plague, stop by Noodle Bar and see them hustling and tinkering, see a line of people waiting and see happy faces. I keep my hat down low so I don’t have to talk to anyone.
“No equipment breaks, and the air-conditioning or the heat is working, there are no plumbing issues and the walk-in is fuckin’ cold. No problems.
“I walk downstairs and see the new trail or new hire doing knife work, and they don’t realize that I’m watching, and they do it the right way—which means the long and stupid way (which is cooking with integrity)…cooking or prepping something, with no one watching, realizing there are a million shortcuts but taking the hard road [without] any glory or satisfaction from one’s peers. I see this and walk back upstairs, see that the restaurants don’t need me at all, that they run better during service without me. That makes me smile.
“I walk back to Ssäm and Milk and stand in the corner and watch one of my cooks berate another cook for not pulling their weight. The level of accountability is so high that I can bolt at around ten p.m. on a Saturday night with some other chefs who maybe skipped work early, grab a drink with a friend or my girlfriend…maybe a late night of drinking. A bar with a great jukebox. A night of bourbon.
“Basically? A night of no problems and where everybody is busting their ass and doing their jobs. I don’t have to yell.”
Finished with his reverie, he adds, “This used to happen. No more…This is more hypothetical.”
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