Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook (22 page)

There was sorbet. Then quail. A Long Island striped-bass “shank.” I had a riff on the legendary butter-poached lobster while my wife ate softshell crabs. All good and lovely to look at.

A pasta course presented us with tagliatelle on the one hand and spinach rigatini on the other, both absolutely heaped with truffles by our waiter. Again, I wanted to say, “What the fuck are you doing? It’s
too much
!” but I sat mute as my delicately flavored pasta disappeared beneath a blanket of aromatic fungi. I was again kind of hurt—this time, personally—feeling suddenly like a stripper you drunkenly throw money at in the mistaken belief she’ll like you better.

There was a flawless and impeccably sourced hunk of veal and then a much-welcome and—once again—thrilling shock.

A large, decidedly un-Kelleresque single plate (not four plates nesting on top of one another) covered with beautiful slices of heirloom tomatoes, a rough mound of stunningly creamy burrata in the middle, a drizzle of extraordinary-quality olive oil. The simplest, most ordinary fucking thing imaginable—particularly for my wife, who came over from Italy only a few years back. It was a course as “foreign” to my expectations of the Laundry or Per Se as could be. It was also the best and most welcome course of the meal. Both wake-up call and antidote to what preceded it.

There were desserts, a lot of them. And, for the first time, I had no difficulty making room for at least a taste of each. It’s worth noting that it’s always the pastry chef at degustation-style restaurants who gets fucked—which is to say, neglected—as the customers usually hit the wall long before that department gets its opportunity to shine.

What did I make of all this? I’m still asking myself this, the next day, still trying to come to grips with my feelings. Playing the whole meal through again in my head, trying to separate out what percentage of my reactions comes from being a jaded, contrarian asshole and what might be “legitimate” or in any way “meaningful” criticism.

Maybe I should think about Thomas Keller like Orson Welles. It doesn’t
matter
what happens now—or what he does, or what I may think of his later projects. The man made
Citizen Kane
, for fuck’s sake! He’s cool for life. Un-deposable. He’s The Greatest. Always. Like Muhammad Ali. Why nitpick?

Fact is, I
love
Keller’s more casual restaurant concept: Bouchon. I like that he’s expanded his empire—that he’s successfully moved on, loosened his reins on any one place. I think it’s good for the world and, I hope, good for him personally.

The more I think about last night, the more I keep coming back to that mortadella, and that coppa, then that gleeful kick of that plate of tomatoes and cheese—and let me tell you, that was some pretty good motherfuckin’ cheese and some mighty good tomatoes.

As it should be with all great dining experiences, as I’d felt throughout those first, golden hours at the French Laundry, it seemed, all too briefly, that someone was talking to me, telling me something about themselves, their past, the things they loved and remembered.

Maybe this was Jonathan Benno, intentionally or not, saying: “This is what I’m going to be doing next. After I’m gone.” (It’s worth noting that shortly after this meal, he indeed announced his own new venture, into high-end Italian.)

Or maybe I’m just too thick and too dumb to figure out what was going on.

Was this meal a harbinger of anything? A sign of the apocalypse? Meaningful in any way? Or not? I don’t know.

What I know for sure is that they comped me—and I feel like an utter snake in the grass.

If I didn’t love that meal at Per Se, if I can’t “get” what Grant Achatz is doing, does that mean anything at all?

Which brings me to David Chang. Whose relatively recent arrival on the scene—and spectacular rise—I’m pretty damn sure means a fuck of a lot.

Build, therefore, your own world.

—R
ALPH
W
ALDO
E
MERSON

W
hat 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.