David Chang Wants To Fuku You Up
An exclusive look at how the Momofuku chef is expanding his empire, plus details about his top-secret new project.
BY ROB BRUNNER
It was 9:30 on a Friday morning, and David Chang was already furious.
The Momofuku Group founder was at one of his dozen-plus restaurants, Má Pêche in Midtown Manhattan, for a meeting with chef de cuisine Ian Davis and three sous-chefs. But Chang had arrived a bit early, and he decided to drop in on the kitchen with Davis and the others. Within a few moments, he was clocking mistake after mistake — a cascade of small lapses that, in the chef’s mind, added up to an epic transgression.
The butter was too cold. A whipped-cream-topped waffle sat melting under a warmer. The breakfast-tray setup was all wrong, the salt-and-pepper shakers had gone missing, and a server was handling toast without wearing gloves. Worst of all, a cook at the flat-top griddle was overdoing the eggs. Eggs! Are you kidding me? Chang thought. Whoosh: that familiar jolt of rage. He slid his arm around Davis’s shoulder, gripping hard to contain the fury.
“I was so mad, I couldn’t contain myself,” Chang told the chefs. “But I did.”
There was a time when Chang would have yelled, definitely at high volume and possibly at great length. He would have dumped the eggs in the trash, grabbed the spatula, and just cooked the dish himself, yielding soft eggs, yes, but also hard feelings. Chang would have made a scene, embarrassed his crew, ruined everyone’s morning and possibly the whole day, all without actually addressing the problems that caused the issues in the first place.
But that was the old Dave. That guy was a superstar chef with a growing restaurant empire who was as famous for his standards as his intense flavors, and high-volume freakouts were part of the mystique. New Dave is doing everything he can to keep himself under control. Because these days, Chang is reaching for something bigger: He wants to turn his boundary-pushing restaurants into a global culinary brand. As Momofuku continues to move beyond its New York origins, it will further spread a distinctive aesthetic that has already seeped into the American food scene in ways that diners might not even realize. That tiny, undecorated, no-reservation spot that just opened near you, serving fancy versions of lowbrow dishes made with top-quality ingredients and high-end technique? You can probably thank Chang. Over the past decade, he has helped transform food culture — and especially a certain kind of gritty, back-of-the-house chef sensibility — into a genuine social phenomenon.
Already, Momofuku Group offers diners the Chang experience at restaurants in New York, Sydney, Toronto, and Washington, D.C. (The latest, a high-end, Asian-Italian experiment called Nishi, opened in New York in January.) It co-owns seven outposts of Milk Bar, a popular bakery that’s the vision of pastry chef Christina Tosi, and operates three locations of Fuku, Chang’s casual fried-chicken-sandwich mecca, with more on the way. Chang is also an investor in New York’s booming food-delivery service Maple, and he co-owns (and regularly contributes to) the five-year-old, award-winning food magazineLucky Peach. Chang announced in February that a Momofuku restaurant and Milk Bar will open inside the Cosmopolitan hotel in Las Vegas late this year.
Soon, his bold flavors will tackle even more platforms. In March, he revealed the latest Momofuku project: a meal-delivery service called Ando, which is set to launch this spring in New York and will give Maple lovers a whole new set of desk-lunch options to obsess about.
