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david chang THE MOMOFUKU STORY
THE MOMOFU
UKU STORY
“MOMOFUKU MEANS ILL-ADVISED”
Eating at Momofuku Ssäm Bar is like falling in love with a woman whose language you don’t speak —
CAPTIVATING BUT MYSTIFYING.
AT SSÄM BAR, you won’t understand the food, but you will immediately regret all the years you lived without it. For me, the decisive dish was Santa Barbara Uni—an arrangement of orange eggs from a spiny sea creature, pure white fluffed-up bean curd, and gummy black lychee-flavored tapioca balls. Unexpected colors, unusual consistencies, unlikely combinations. Yet it could well have been the scallops with pickled cherries and lemon puree, equally compelling but offering an alternate revelation: sweet-and-sour in renegade form. I marveled at the poise, the imagination, and the culinary expertise of the head chef, David Chang. I also wondered why all three of his restaurants were named Momofuku, which is Japanese for “lucky peach.” When I asked this of Chang, whose culinary genius has transfixed the restaurantobsessed city of New York, he replied, deadpan, “Momofuku means ‘ill-advised.’ ” And so it began.
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The New York Times may have written that “Momofuku occupies the realm of deeply personal restaurants defined by one person’s vision and drive,” but Chang, always willing to belittle himself, says, “I spend most of my days trying to keep my shit together. The guys I worked for would say David Chang would be the last to succeed and have a successful restaurant. My DNA has nothing to do with success.” Without a doubt, he is the most important and honored chef of 2007, having established a chain of small, hard-stooled, informal eating places in Manhattan’s East Village. Reservations are infrequently accepted, waits are long, and customers line up for food they do not recognize. Rarely has cooking so difficult to interpret been so completely adored, and by people who don’t ordinarily welcome unfamiliarity. A customer at Ssäm Bar said to me, “I took my parents here. They never eat like this, but it was like a film peeled away from their eyes.” Each ungarnished, undecorated plate holds just a few items, none carefully arranged. The food seems individualistic, yet it’s created by committee—Chang and his inner circle of chefs. It’s a mix of Asian ingredients, fastidious preparations, condiments shaken from jars, and sauces poured from bottles. Other chefs might attempt to interpret their food lyrically, adding to the aura, but not Chang: “It’s American food, man. That’s all there is to explain.” He need say nothing more, because even in the absence of critical analysis, the Momofuku empire is growing. Now there is Momofuku Noodle Bar, the original; Momofuku Ssäm Bar, which made his reputation; and the brand-new Momofuku Ko, which features a more upscale version of the antiauthentic food he has been preparing for the past three years. To taste the consommé at Ko—made with kimchi and pork—is to believe that Asian sensibilities combined with French technique might be the future of fine dining. His clientele consists mostly of regulars at Noodle Bar, adventurers at Ssäm Bar. Some might not know what they are eating, but Chang knows
exactly whom he wants in the seats. “I want to cook for real people who want to eat,” he says. “When I worked at Café Boulud, I hated making food for East Siders. I hate their air of superiority.
I hate investment bankers. I don’t want Momofuku Ko to come off as elitist or snobbish. I don’t want shithead bankers and the friends of dickhead traders who spend thousands.” One more thing: “My partner gets to kick me in the balls if he catches me wearing those reflective silvered sun- glasses that asshole Europeans wear indoors. I can do the same to him.” Worth noting is that an entire category of diners who might easily have become devotees have been deliberately excluded. Momofukus are houses of pork, an ingredient in about 60 percent of the dishes, and the dinner menu at Ssäm Bar reads, “We do not serve vegetarian-friendly items.” Just to rub a little suet in the wound, Chang says, “Vegetarians are a pain in the ass as customers. It’s always ‘I want this’ or ‘I don’t want that.’ Jesus Christ, go cook at home.” Such an attitude has brought predictable rewards: Las Vegas has called. Momofukus may
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soon be all over, or, knowing Chang, they may not. He says, “I don’t want to be that asshole who has restaurants all over the world and says he’s behind the stove at every fuckin’ place. That’s a lie.” Something else might be clear by now. He swears a lot. To hear him tell it, the success of his Momofukus is a divine error, all having to do with his dim-witted if well-meaning decisions about food that were reversed just in time by the brilliance of the people who work with him. Such an outlook has allowed him to collect fiercely loyal employees, many of whom earn less money than they did at the jobs they left. He has also verbally insulted his servers, not face-to-face but in blanket statements that question their dedication and work ethic. Surprisingly, they haven’t all quit, although he does appear to be phasing them out. The new Momofuku Ko has no waiters, only cooks who chat with customers, pour wine, and keep the tips.
Chang says, as he has before, “I know nobody expects to make money as a cook, but cooks have to live, and they can’t live on $300 to $400 a week. It makes me mad that cooks are treated like shit and servers say, ‘Well, you choose your profession.’ Whatever you guys say, you don’t work as hard as cooks, so go fuck yourselves.” A brief but forceful dissertation on restaurant careers follows. The theme: Waiters want to be actors. Cooks want to send money home, take care of their families, learn English, survive. “Some servers in New York make $100,000 a year, which is more than I make,” he says. “As for the cooks, God bless them.” Chang is one of a kind. He is a humanitarian, post-hippie, blasphemous idealist, as well as an advocate of socialized gastronomy—his employees, including dishwashers, get benefits up to and including a dental plan, and all salaried employees until recently were called “managers,” regardless
“MY TEMPER IS TERRIBLE.”
The Beloved
MOMOFUKU PORK BUN
of their roles. All this humanism must be taken in context. He is also irritable. “My temper is terrible,” he admits. When he loses control, he punches holes in the walls of his restaurants. “We refer to them as Korean termites,” says his not-quite-equal partner, Joaquin Baca, who has the job of repairing them. “I can patch sheet board pretty well.” If there is genius at work here, it is apparently a consequence of the collective, interactive, and perplexing organization that Chang and Baca have established. If it has flaws, pride isn’t among them. “All of us feel guilty getting the recognition that other guys should be getting,” Chang says. “We might be a flash in the pan—a Rubik’s Cube or the Macarena.”
CHANG, 30, GREW UP IN VIRGINIA, just outside Washington, D.C., where his parents still live. His mother, Sherri, was born in South Korea; his father, Joe, in North Korea. Joe came to America in 1963
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with $50 in his pocket and slept in an all-night movie theater in Times Square for the first three nights because he didn’t know where else to go. “Then I found a nice Jewish lady in Brooklyn who rented me a room for a dollar a night,” he says. Part of the reason for the son’s extreme desire to better the lives of those who work for him is his father’s experiences as a dishwasher in New York restaurants, but it may well have been worse in the visions of the son than in the memory of the father. “They treated me okay,” Joe says, “and they gave me two meals a day.” Joe Chang became a success, first owning restaurants and now a golf-equipment company. He was always strong, a stern parent. “When you’re a businessman, you have to be tough, and when you raise children, you have to be, too. I wanted them to be right. No drugs. No bad friends.” While David enjoys portraying himself as hopeless, a useless figure who stumbled into undeserved cooking stardom, his father claims to
have seen nothing but promise in his boy. David was a junior golf champion who twice won the Virginia state championship in his age group. His father says, “If he had kept playing golf, he would have beaten Tiger Woods.” “No way,” says David, horrified at the suggestion. “He’s completely deluded. I remember trying to qualify for the Big I tournament in Houston, and Tiger was already the Michael Jordan of golf, on the cover of the tournament pamphlet, the defending champion at 13. The entire junior golfing community had given up because of Tiger.” David was the youngest of four children and the most indulged. “He led a country- club life, a good life, let me tell you,” says Joe, and hearing that, David again objects, explaining, “Yes, the youngest son in a Korean family is always spoiled, but the only reason I went to the country club was to play golf. What else is a 10-year-old going to do at a country club? Except for golf, I hated it. What’s the point? It’s for men to
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avoid their wives all day.” He says he peaked at 10 and practiced until his hands bled, but by 13 he was done. “In golf you’re never good enough. I flamed out.” Joe, with a sigh, says, “He was so small bigger guys were outdriving him by twenty or thirty yards, so he didn’t want to play anymore. He decided to play football. Every day he drank a gallon of milk, did a lot of exercises, and at 14 played football.” “Now, that was definitely worthwhile,” says David, who played at a private high school and made all-league his senior year, although he is careful to point out that it wasn’t a particularly hard-hitting league. The well-planned modification in body type succeeded; today, with his shaved head, he resembles a burly, slightly overweight judo competitor. The nickname given by the people who work for him is Gordo. It is not spoken when he might overhear. “In high school,” says David, “I was trying to figure it all out. I was a head case. I was an absolute mess.” By his account, he continued his nonsensical ways in college, almost failing his freshman year at Trinity in Connecticut. Here again comes the distinctive Chang disconnect: “I partied my ass off, is what I did. I had a 1.9 grade point average. You have to almost work at it to get that bad. I smoked pot every day. I was drinking. I was going out every night. I was a total waste. I’m surprised I wasn’t diagnosed with ADD. I have the attention span of a gnat.” Only later does he mention that he graduated in seven semesters instead of eight with a major in religious studies. “I wanted to understand Christianity and Eastern religions. If I’d endeavored to study more, I probably would have double-majored in philosophy.” Apparently, he was gifted in both disciplines practically from birth: “I was the kid who went to Sunday school, saw on the wall something about burning in hell, and thought, Isn’t that a little mean?”
ONE OF THE COOKS AT SSÄM BAR, Christina Tosi, who can be found happily toiling away in the thoughtfully air-conditioned basement prep kitchen, says of Chang, “He knows everything there is to know about golf, about ramen [Japanese noodles],
and about Thoreau—that was his thesis. He is really well-read for somebody who does things by the seat of his pants.” “She doesn’t understand,” Chang protests. “I was really bad in school. If I’d done better, I wouldn’t be cooking. I’d have a nice desk job. Who wants to hire a religion major with a terrible grade point average and no extracurricular activities?” Following college, he went to Japan to teach English for two months. He returned home to a job in a financial institution he won’t name because he did not thrive. “I was a glorified secretary, the donkey,” he says. After that, he enrolled at New York’s French Culinary Institute. His analysis of that esteemed institution? “They hated my guts.” There, at least, he found something he could do, even though he thought that beginning a cooking career at age 22 was too late. “I heard, ‘Dave, you’re going to do this three months and find something else.’ I was one of those kinds. But holy shit, I found something I liked.” He worked in some of New York’s best restaurants, worshipping the chefs, particularly Marco Canora at Craft and Andrew Carmellini at Café Boulud. Along the way, he developed an interest in soba noodles and, more prophetically, in ramen, in this country thought of as nonspecific noodles in broth but in Japan as a food with limitless local distinctions. His father helped him get a visa so he could return to Japan, where he worked three weeks in a ramen shop located in a homeless center run by a wealthy Korean. Then he moved to a soba shop, where he was fired after breaking a prized bowl given to the proprietor by one of Japan’s greatest artisans. He loved the food culture of Japan, which he calls “the most amazing in the world,” but little else about a country “where everything has to look perfect even though there’s Yakuza running things and people offing themselves in front of trains.” While working for Carmellini, he decided he wanted a noodle shop of his own, and he left Café Boulud after less than a year. He found a space, moved into a little apartment across the street—“a cockroachinfested shitbox”—and set out to open Noodle Bar, letting not much get in his way.
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Not women? “I like women, yes,” he says. That’s as far as it goes? “I’ve had girlfriends in the past. They’ve all… been… Well, the restaurant came first.” No relationships? “I got restaurants. Having a girlfriend is a full-time job.” Nobody around? “I potentially might have one.” I’d like to meet her. “You’re not going to meet her.” Tell me about her. “She lives on the West Coast. It’s awesome, because I don’t have to see her.” Not long after this conversation, they broke up. Commitments appear to be a recurring problem. He met Baca, his partner, because none of the friends he expected to support him at Noodle Bar came through. “It was hurtful,” he says. “Some said they wanted in and then backed out. Some said it was about money. Some said it was an insane idea. As far as they were concerned, I was a guy who would go out of business.” His father loaned him most of the $130,000 he needed, and he went looking on the Internet for a partner. Baca had come from the Southwest to work in New York, and his girlfriend at the time—he’s now married to someone else—saw Chang’s ad on Monster.com. “She engineered the meeting,” Baca says. “She definitely takes credit for it.” Momofuku Noodle Bar opened in August 2004, and Baca’s girlfriend left him a few months later. “We broke up at the first Noodle Bar Christmas celebration,” he says. “I had to plunge a toilet. She thought I was obsessing.” Chang had indeed found the ideal partner. Initially, Noodle Bar operated without acclaim. Industry friends stopped in. Then business tapered off. Much has been made of the now famous Momofuku pork buns—pork belly, hoisin, scallions, and cucumber stuffed into steamed buns—but they were offered from the beginning, and the restaurant remained almost empty. Baca says, “There was a crappy Japanese restaurant across the street from us that was packed all the time. We were holding our heads. We had a real good chance to go out of business. What could we do?” They decided, simply, to cook as best they
could. It’s hard to determine who gets credit for the dishes that altered the fate of Noodle Bar, but Baca remembers a strategic decision “to cook whatever we felt like cooking.” Word spread. Joe and Sherri showed up one night to have dinner. When they were done, their son handed Joe a bill for $50. “My wife was really shocked that parents had to pay the tab,” he says, “but I think it was really smart to show all the managers and support team that nobody gets comped. So I paid. I gave him $100 and told him to keep the change.”
THE BO SSÄM LADY—that’s what she likes to call herself, although she also happens to be an editor at a New York food magazine—is in the house. She describes herself as an almost-vegetarian addicted to Ssäm Bar’s bo ssäm. She is legendary, having ordered this eight-pound extra-fatty chunk of pork butt almost twenty times in the past year. Most customers, if they are prudent, have it once, sigh with pleasure, and do not eat it again. To do so repeatedly is dietary disaster. The restaurant’s signature ssäm—Korean for a wrapped food—is an Asian-style burrito. It costs $9. Most other menu items are under $20. The behemoth-like bo ssäm is $180. Along with the pork butt come a dozen fresh oysters, a few sauces, some lettuce leaves for wrapping, and a table reservation. Since the dish is intended for eight to ten, providing folks with a spot to eat it was deemed the right thing to do. The bo ssäm might be worth ordering simply to avoid waits for seating, which have been known to exceed two hours. At first, when Ssäm Bar was primarily about burritos, it didn’t do well. Just as Noodle Bar customers wanted more than noodles, Ssäm Bar customers wanted more than ssäms. When I mention to Baca that the strategic plan for Ssäm Bar appeared to be a repetition of the neardisastrous one that almost brought down Noodle Bar, he looks at me ruefully and says, “Dave’s heart was set on the Asian burrito. That’s all he wanted—burrito, burrito.” The basicssäm at Ssäm Bar is a flour pancake stuffed with pork, rice, pickled shiitake mushrooms, kimchi puree, roasted onions,
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Rarely has cooking so difficult to interpret been
SO COMPLETELY ADORED. 04. and edamame. (It could do without the edamame.) The burrito is savory, satisfying, and impressive. When I tell Chang that I see why a man might be tempted to put the resources of his entire organization behind such a dish, he is grateful to find somebody on his side: “Tasty. Affordable. Not a stretch of the imagination, right?” The turnaround in popularity started when Baca and Cory Lane, the general manager, started arguing in favor of more ambitious food. At first, the new dishes were available only after 10 p.m. Lines formed. Soon Tien Ho, the chef de cuisine, joined in, and the burrito was relegated to lunch duty (it remains on the dinner menu as an afterthought). Dishes such as the Santa Barbara Uni, the scallops, and perhaps the most popular dish of all, fried cauliflower, appeared. I was sitting in Ssäm Bar when chef Michael Cimarusti of the restaurant Providence in Los Angeles walked past me. Offhandedly, he muttered,
“I just had one of the best things I’ve had in a long time—fried cauliflower, fish sauce, puffed rice, and garlic. You hit yourself on the head and say, ‘Why haven’t I had this before?’ ” Bo ssäm, the centerpiece of the evening menu, is a knock-off of a Korean dish that Chang describes disparagingly as “steamed pork belly, oysters defrosted from a frozen block, kimchi, and steamed cabbage.” He says the crucial difference is that the ingredients he uses are superior. He offers no apologies for inflicting better quality on the masses: “If you want authentic food, go to the authentic country.” According to the Bo Ssäm Lady, the smart way to partake of the Momofuku bo ssäm is to sit in the center of your group, snatch one of the four tongs that come with the pork, and greedily grab as much crisp skin as you can. The oysters are intended to be eaten with the pork in a lettuce wrap, as is done
“I FEEL GUILTY IF I ENJOY MYSELF, BECAUSE I DIDN’T EARN IT.”
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in Korea, but most people seem to prefer them separately—fresh oysters topped with kimchi sauce are, like most items at Ssäm Bar, revelatory. Many of the best dishes at Chang’s restaurants are inspired adaptations of the creations of other chefs. The uni-tapioca-tofu dish that enthralled me is a variation of chef Thomas Keller’s Oysters and Pearls. Says Chang, “It’s a ghetto version of one of the greatest dishes.” He was inspired to create the pork buns, currently the most sought-after unceremonious food in New York, after he ate Peking duck and realized that he preferred the skin to be fatty—to traditionalists, a flaw. Chang’s pork buns are served in the style of Peking duck, except that pork belly replaces duck skin. The hoisin comes from a can—Lee Kum Kee, which is made in America. A commercial Chinese bakery makes the buns. The kitchen shelves of Chang’s restaurants resemble those in Asian groceries, stacked with the packaged goods used in some of his best-known dishes. The reason he utilizes them instead of house-made equivalents is simple: Noodle Bar was so small, the cooks had no room to do much from scratch. Ask regulars why they love Chang’s food and the responses are not particularly eloquent. One food editor gave my favorite explanation: “It’s delicious, but not like any other delicious.” The amalgam of classic, innovative, and canned goods is a concept few customers have encountered previously, and the reaction is usually the same: Where did this idea come from? Anna Hollyman, a waitress who works at both Noodle Bar and Ssäm Bar, says of Ssäm Bar, “People come in confused and leave connected.” The answer in part is that Chang, or at least his organization, combines institutional vision with a matchless work ethic. All key personnel are linked by a BlackBerry communications system, and they are encouraged to offer ideas. Lane, the general manager, says, “I wake up some mornings with forty-five e-mails in my in-box because a couple of guys are going off on a dish.” When Chang was away for a few days, the chefs came up with General Chang’s Sweetbreads, a play on the Chinese
dish General Chang’s Chicken—in this case fried sweetbreads with orange-glazed vegetables. Baca says happily, “Dave didn’t think it was funny.” It’s no longer on the menu, because few men are
as sensitive as Chang, even to what some might interpret as a gesture of admiration. Chang has become the focal point of every bit of acclaim received by his restaurants, relentless in the past year. Baca is Mexican-American, and a running joke among staff members is that one day they will open a Mexican spot, and the press will write, “David Chang has discovered his Mexican roots.” Chang has been named chef of the year wherever such awards are given, and he has problems reconciling who he thinks he is with what he seemingly has become. He is uncomfortable thinking about all the great chefs who have won the same prizes now being given to him. “It’s insane,” he says. “I feel guilty if I enjoy myself, because I didn’t earn it. I’m the fucking asshole who won the same award they did. I’m the fucking schmuck who doesn’t know how to do things right.”
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He has, basically, two expressions: big dimpled smile and the one I see most often, deadpan despair. “Nobody ever tells you that success is stressful,” he says.
“AM I EVER HAPPY? I don’t know, man. I’m only happy when the house is burning down, when things are moving,” he says. “I’m happy when my people are being taken care of. I don’t know if I’m happy.” He tells me a story about being happy. He glows as he relates it. It involves cheap beer, a kindly bartender, and a train ride back from New Haven, where he visited a farm project at Yale. “Did you know the bar car on Metro North has $2 beers?” he asks me. He’s remembering a rare moment, one without worries or frustrations. “I was happy because I was hanging out with friends, the bartender didn’t charge us until the end, and I’m having a real conversation about stuff you’re not supposed to talk about, like religion. I was drinking beers and having fun.”
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To hear him tell it, the success of his Momofukus is a
DIVINE ERROR.
It’s not clear that his childhood was happy, although it was certainly comfortable. When I ask Joe Chang if he told his son he loved him, he says, “We love him, but we don’t say that. We say to daughter, not to boy, because boy only say that they need this or they need that. Boys are terrible, no sweetness. If I would say to him, ‘I love you,’ he would say to me, ‘You must be joking.’ No sweetness, these guys. But maybe it’s my fault. All I say to him is ‘study, study, study’ or ‘work, work, work.’ ” “Koreans are a funny bunch,” Dave responds. “They say, ‘This is my son. He’s going to Harvard. He’s going to be an investment banker. He’s going to make $3.4 million a year.’ There’s a Cold War arms race among Asian parents: ‘This is my daughter who finished medical school while an undergraduate and can play Beethoven’s Fifth on the violin with her toes.’ My dad gave up on me long ago, this son who did terrible in school. Now he can throw me back into the ring.”
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06. Chang claims he was happy back when he worked at Craft and Café Boulud, because he had so much respect for the chefs, but Ho, the chef de cuisine at Ssäm Bar, says Café Boulud could not be thought of as joyous. “To be honest,” says Ho, whose year and a half there overlaps with Chang’s, “Dave had a hard time. Café Boulud was not for everybody. It was unique. You learned integrity. You learned the best techniques. They made sure you had it. But it was one of the hardest periods of my life, physically and mentally, and one of the most demanding kitchens. So aggressive—the cooks would be, ‘This is my area, don’t come near me.’ And the two sous-chefs were mean cocksuckers. Vicious. Oh man, they shit on every new guy.” It’s easy to see what such a life—outdriven on golf courses, outcooked in kitchens—has done to him. Chang is a practitioner of self-denunciation, lamenting success he is certain he does not deserve. He takes it beyond self-deprecation, which is partly a comedic form. To be fair, he is almost entirely admirable: honest, zealous, literate, compassionate,
and undoubtedly talented, although he makes such a compelling case for not being gifted that it takes a while to realize that this aspect of his harsh self-examination makes no sense at all. It’s almost impossible to predict what might become of him, to say nothing of the oddly utopian Momofuku organization. Only Chang himself can guess. “You can say that in conclusion, I believe that David Chang will be an absolute failure and the Momofuku crew will end up poor, destitute, and homeless, consulting to T.G.I. Friday’s, doing bad commercials for frozen food, lending our name to soy sauce and Asian beer, preparing platters for Nippon Air customers, and saying, ‘Hi, I drink Santori whiskey.’ ” He takes pleasure in the image. It cheers him up, this idea he describes as “falling from the grace of foodie heaven.” His delight lasts seconds. Even here he finds something wrong, an inevitable outcome he knows he could not endure. “David Chang wins comeback chef of the year.”
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THIS BOOK was made by Delaney Lundquist for the Visualizing Information course at Washington University in St. Louis during the fall of 2013. It is set in 9.5/12.5 pt Chaparral Pro, as well as Clarendon and Univers. Text for this book comes from “Year of the Pig,” an article by Alan Richman featured in GQ magazine in November 2007. Visual sources include the Momofuku cook book, Noodle Bar on Google+, Momofuku.com, and BonAppétit.com. Illustrations were done by hand with brush pen. When I asked my sister if doing a biography on David Chang in 2013 was passé, she said “Momofuku is a good restaurant that makes delicious food. Some of his other stuff might be passé. Like Milk Bar. I don’t need to know how to make trash cookies.” So I went forth with the partial blessing of my sister-chef and tried to avoid any mention of the trash cookies.
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