Medium Raw

17 The Fury

Build, therefore, your own world.

—RALPH WALDO EMERSON

What took me to cooking was that there was something honest about it,” says David Chang.

There is no lying in the kitchen. And no god there, either. He couldn’t help you anyway. You either can—or can’t—make an omelet. You either can—or can’t—chop an onion, shake a pan, keep up with the other cooks, replicate again and again, perfectly, the dishes that need to be done. No credential, no amount of bullshit, no well-formed sentences or pleas for mercy will change the basic facts. The kitchen is the last meritocracy—a world of absolutes; one knows without any ambiguity at the end of each day how one did. “Good” and “evil” are easily and instantly recognized for what they are. Good is a cook who shows up on time and does what he said yesterday he was going to do. Evil is a cook who’s full of shit and doesn’t or can’t do what he said he was going to do. Good is a busy restaurant from which the customers go home happy and everybody makes money. Evil is a slow restaurant from which the cooks go home feeling depressed and ashamed.

Nobody wonders, in a busy kitchen, if there is a god. Or if they’ve chosen the right god.

Except maybe David Chang. “I run on hate and anger,” says David Chang. “It’s fueled me for the longest fucking time.”

As usual, when I meet him, he’s got an air of frantic befuddlement about him—as if he just can’t figure out what just happened or what’s probably going to happen. He has the demeanor of a man who believes that whatever might be coming down the pike, whatever locomotive is headed his way, it’s probably not going to be a good thing.

“Dude,” he says, “I just got a spinal tap!”

Two days earlier, he woke up with the worst headache of his life, a sharp, driving pain in his skull so ferocious that he raced off to the hospital, convinced he was having a brain hemorrhage. He seems oddly disappointed that the tests found nothing.

Other successful chefs tend to screw up their faces a little bit when you mention David Chang. Even the ones who like him and like his restaurants, they wince perceptibly—exasperated, perhaps, by the unprecedented and seemingly never-ending torrent of praise for the thirty-two-year-old chef and restaurateur, the all-too quick Michelin stars, the awards—Food and Wine’s Best New Chef, GQ’s Chef of the Year, Bon Appetit’s Chef of the Year, the three James Beard Awards. They’ve watched with a mix of envy and astonishment the way he’s effortlessly brought the blogosphere to heel and mesmerized the press like so many dancing cobras. The great chefs of France and Spain—not just great ones but the cool ones—make obligatory swings by his restaurants to sit happily at the bar, eating with their hands. Ruth Reichl treats him like a son. Alice Waters treats him like a son. Martha Stewart adores him. The New Yorker gives him the full-on treatment, the kind of lengthy, in-depth, and admiring profile usually reserved for economists or statesmen. Charlie Rose invites him on the show and interviews him like A Person of Serious Importance. Throughout the entire process of his elevation to Culinary Godhead, Chang has continued, in his public life, to curse uncontrollably like a Tourette’s-afflicted Marine, rage injudiciously at and about his enemies, deny special treatment to those in the food-writing community who are used to such things, insult the very food bloggers who helped build his legend—and generally conduct himself as someone who’s just woken up to find himself holding a winning lottery ticket. If there was a David Chang catchphrase written on T-shirts, it would be “Dude! I don’t fuckin’ know!”—his best explanation for what’s happening. He continues to flirt with—and then turn down—deals that would have made him a millionaire many times over by now. His twelve-seat restaurant, Momofuku Ko, is the most sought-after and hardest-to-get reservation in America. He is, inarguably, a star.

“He’s not that great a chef,” says one very, very famous chef with no reason, one would think, to feel threatened by Chang. Chang just hasn’t been around long enough for his taste. From his point of view, and from his hard-won, hard-fought place on the mountaintop, the man just hasn’t paid enough dues. “He’s not even that good a cook,” says another.

Both statements miss the point entirely.

Things are going well and yet Chang is characteristically miserable. “I continuously feel like I’m a fuck. When is this going to end?”

Love the guy, hate the guy, overhyped or not, the simple fact is that David Chang is the most important chef in America today. It’s a significant distinction. He’s not a great chef—as he’d be the first to admit—or even a particularly experienced one, and there are many better, more talented, more technically proficient cooks in New York City. But he’s an important chef, a man who, in a ridiculously brief period of time, changed the landscape of dining, created a new kind of model for high-end eateries, and tapped once, twice, three times and counting into a zeitgeist whose parameters people are still struggling to identify (and put in a bottle, if possible). That’s what sets him above and apart from the rest—and it’s also what drives some other chefs crazy. Describing David Chang as a chef does both him and the word “chef” a disservice. David Chang is…something else.

In the unforgiving restaurant universe, having a good idea is one thing. Executing that idea is harder. If you’re skilled enough and lucky enough to succeed in realizing that idea, the challenge becomes keeping it going, maybe even expanding on it, and ultimately (and most vitally) not fucking it all up somewhere along the way. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about David Chang’s growing empire is that he did fuck it up. Twice. And that fucking up was—in each case—absolutely essential to his success. His first restaurant, Momofuku Noodle Bar, was supposed to be just that—a joint selling noodles. His second, Momofuku Ssäm, was a far more knuckleheaded concept—a place intended to sell Korean burritos. It was only when Chang and his team, looking certain doom in the face, threw up their hands and said, like a baseball team sixteen runs down in the second inning, “What the fuck…let’s just do the best we can. Let’s try and have fun,” that he twice backed into the pop-cultural Main Vein. Noodle Bar got famous for everything BUT the noodles. And nobody orders the burritos at Ssäm.

He’s famously consumed by his restaurants—and where the whole circus is going. See him on TV and you’d think the man shell-shocked, an impression he reinforces with shrugs and a guilty, confused-looking “who, me?” smile. But somebody’s keeping the train on the tracks. And somebody’s cracking the whip, too. He is subject to notorious rages. People who’ve seen them for the first time have described them as “frightening,” “near cataleptic,” and seemingly “coming from nowhere.” These episodes often culminate with Chang punching holes in the walls of his kitchens—so many of them that they are referred to, jokingly, by his cooks as design features. He suffers periodically from paralyzing headaches, mysterious numbnesses, shingles—and every variety of stress-related affliction.

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.

We arrived early, because they don’t take reservations before seven at this traditional, Japanese-style yakitori joint—and because they tend to run out of the good bits early: chicken heart, chicken ass, chicken “oyster,” chicken skin. You don’t want to miss that stuff. We’re drinking beer and talking shit and I’m doing a very bad job of what everybody else is trying to do—which is to figure out what David Chang is all about.

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.”

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 French 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 their 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.”

As Chang’s answer has almost everything to do with work and little with play, a few days later I ask Peter Meehan what he thinks makes David Chang really and truly happy—if the wheels can ever stop turning, he relaxes, takes a deep breath of free air, nothing on his mind.

“I’ve seen it,” Meehan says. “It’s there. But he doesn’t pursue it. His happiness is not a priority in his life. It’s an incidental benefit, but he’s not dead to it. Maybe, if someday he realizes that happiness can help him achieve his goals, he’ll give a shit about it.”

The waiter at Yakitori Totto comes over and reminds us we have to be out by seven. They need the table. Chang looks out the window, then back at me. “My great regret is I can’t get drunk with my cooks anymore.

“I’ll die before I’m fifty,” he says, matter-of-factly.