Bulgeogi pizza? Why not?

Continue Reading »

By Janice Jann

$2: cost of a Kogi taco

9: hours it takes to prepare for a day’s rounds

500: pounds of meat prepared each day

50 to 60: pounds of onions peeled each day

5: minutes it takes to make a Kimchi Quesadilla, the most complex dish

3 p.m.: time the trucks go out for the day

300 to 800: average number of people who wait in line

33,185 (and counting!): Twitter followers

At least one blatant knockoff (that’s you, Calbi BBQ)

By Helin Jung   Photograph by David C. Lee

There are a few things about David Chang we already know.

1. He is built like a house.

2. He has an inhuman ability to split infinitives with the word “fuck.”

3. With his fleet of Momofuku restaurants—Noodle Bar, Ssäm Bar, Milk Bar and Ko—he has taken New York City and whipped it into a frenzy.

It’s only been six years (“Not that long in the real world, but in dog years, that’s like 100 years, man”), and in those six years, he went from being an anonymous line cook to one of the most fêted, recognizable personalities in the culinary world.

David Chang. Dave, DC, Chang, the Changster, the Changbang, ruler of the Momofuku empire, or the Momoverse, or whatever. The guy’s such a big deal that an entire lexicon has been created in his honor. The man is a myth, and most of us are all too happy to keep it stoked.

The trouble is, whatever it is we are doing to Chang (which, to him, amounts to a lot of nonsensical fetishizing) is burdensome.

“I don’t give a shit,” the 31-year-old will say about the heaps of awards, the praise, the television appearances, the requests to participate in every food-related event in the city and elsewhere. “I would just rather not be a public figure. It’s just the struggle with dealing with the fact that, I guess I am.”

It’s strange to him that he has become a celebrity, because basically, he’s just a guy who runs a few restaurants. Right?

***

Let’s take it back to the beginning. 2003. An immovable purpose and a 600-square-foot space in the East Village the size of a “two-car garage.”

It was going to be a restaurant, a ramen noodle joint. Not a terribly complicated idea. It wasn’t supposed to amount to anything, because it wasn’t intended to be anything more than a proof.

“I needed to test myself to see if I could actually put a restaurant together, and I didn’t even think about the food,” says Chang, sitting atop a stool in that space. “I was 26 and it was like, “OK, I’ve cooked for four years, I don’t know that much, I should be cooking more, I should be working at other restaurants, but maybe if I went to graduate school or something, that would cost a whole lot more than opening up a restaurant. I’d rather learn in the school of hard knocks.”

He says he would never do it again, not like that, because it was the hardest thing he has ever done in his life.

Success did not come immediately, but it did come eventually, in a downpour—with an unabated rain of buzz, press and constant, unreasonable wait times. Noodle Bar was an irrefutable hit, which led Chang and his then co-chef and partner Joaquin Baca to open Ssäm Bar, followed by Ko and Milk Bar.

“It was like a single-cell organism, now it’s this massive, Leviathan-like entity,” he says. “To see it grow very rapidly like that, it’s like, ‘What the fuck?’ I guess I’m proud of that? It’s been a lot of people, a lot of hard work, a lot of sacrifice to make that happen.”

***

“He’s as neurotic as he comes across, that’s definitely true,” says Peter Meehan. “I say that in a loving way. He is probably harder on himself in private than he is in public, but I think he’s incredibly hard on himself in public, too.”

Meehan used to write the “$25 and Under” column for the New York Times, profiling affordable finds from the New York City food scene. He reviewed Noodle Bar in 2005, calling it a “plywood-walled diamond in the rough.”

Soon afterward, the critic and restaurateur ran into each other at a Hold Steady concert in Brooklyn.

“I felt this meaty hand slap me on the back. I turn around and it’s Dave Chang,” Meehan says. “He handed me a beer and said, ‘Are we going to pretend like we don’t know each other?’ And that’s how we got to know each other.”

As Chang’s renown swelled and the brand expanded, the cookbook offers started coming. Only if Meehan does it with me, Chang declared (and in typical fashion, he is still conflicted about it—“Nobody thinks that they’re going to do a cookbook one day, you know?”). Meehan accepted the co-authorship, the two friends came up with a proposal and started working on a book.

The cookbook, titled Momofuku, which comes out in October, will serve as a record of the past six years. It will likely be a blockbuster, if internet chatter is any indicator of success. It will include recipes, but it will also be about the stories from the restaurant—the people behind them, the challenges they faced in getting the restaurants off the ground, the philosophies that serve as cornerstones of the food.

The first proposal started out differently. It was going to be Momofuku via David Chang, the origin story, “starting in Virginia with his family, jajangmyeon, galbi, and all that O.G. Korean shit that he grew up on.”

Meehan sees the book’s evolution as having happened in the same way that every other David Chang project has evolved.

“For Dave, there’s always a malleability from the outset,” Meehan said. “Noodle Bar was supposed to be a Japanese-style ramen bar and it turned into the fusional weirdness that it is now—vaguely American, vaguely Asian. Ssäm Bar was supposed to be burritos, and now it’s the 31st best restaurant in the world. There’s always flexibility in terms of design and outcome, as long as you’ve got your eyes on the goal.”

***

The goal, as Chang will say to you time and again, was never to be famous, or to be dripping in James Beard awards. The goal was just to make good food and do it with integrity. He scrolls through the who-knows-how-many messages on his Blackberry, that LED light just won’t stop flashing for a goddamn second, and lets out a haggard sigh.

“I can’t work the line anymore because I get so fucking worked up that I literally just can’t,” he says, rapping anxiously on the countertop at Ko (which eventually took over that two-car garage that used to house Noodle Bar). “I want things to be right all the time, even though it’s not an environment that’s set up to have these expectations.”

One of the commis is taking off too much on a head of lettuce. “Yo, dude, don’t throw out so much of that end,” Chang chides affectionately. “Look how much you threw away, dude.” I still love you, but try to get it right.

“Do I want us to be successful? Do I want us to be busy? Do I want us to have great food? Do I want us to take care of our cooks? Yes.” Rat-tat-tat go his fingers. “I was not aware that it came with all the baggage and the clichés and the bullshit.”

A huge part of the bullshit, for Chang, is the internet. The chatter on blogs gives him agita. Take, for instance, the news that the actor Alan Cumming had been kicked out of Ssäm Bar. Cumming blogged about it himself. “f you momofuku,” he wrote, after describing a scene that involved him and his mother joining a few friends who were already seated and eating.

Chang, who was not present during the incident, is still pissed off about this.

“He fucking cheated,” he says. “Who cares about some movie star? Is he going to impact your life, my life? No. What he did was he fucking cut in line, so he can get the fuck out.”

There he goes again, he thinks the internet is saying. Mr. Dickhead throws a fit. It bugs him. He says he doesn’t give a shit, but he does, because the only thing he’s doing (and it wasn’t really him, anyway) is staying consistent.

“Regardless of who you are, this is how it is. We’ve made it abundantly clear: The only people we’ll take care of are cooks and chefs, that’s it.”

***

Growing up Korean seems to have done quite a number on Chang. To start, there are the overwhelming insecurities and expectations that spasm occasionally, uncontrollably. “I wasn’t destined for this” is one of his mantras.

“Who gives a shit about the fact that I grew up Korean? There are expectations, sure, but I didn’t live up to any of them.”

Since he won’t really talk about his family or his childhood, you only get tiny bits of information. Chang is the youngest of four siblings (“I was an accident”). He played golf when he was younger, football in high school. He wasn’t an exceptional student, and didn’t go to an Ivy League school. His parents were immigrants. His mother still speaks to him in Korean, which he doesn’t speak very well. His father was a businessman and one-time restaurant owner himself, and as a result, was hardly ever around.

“My parents have guilted me so much,” he’ll say when he talks about his last remaining duty as a filial Korean son: marrying a Korean. “I’m so brainwashed that I have a feeling that if I married a Korean girl and had a Korean child, my parents would die. They would be like, ‘OK, we can die now.’

“There are certain things about Korean culture in America that I find disagreeable,” he says, though he does his best to avoid and ignore any explicit associations with his Koreanness. “I avoid Koreans like the plague.”

Chang emphasizes that his restaurants—the food, the philosophy—are American, not Korean, not Asian, not “Fusion.” It’s a sign of the times that the public has accepted his categorization as such, that a menu which includes kimchi, pork belly, ramen and rice cakes is digested unquestioningly as American, or not even categorized at all.

Wylie Dufresne, the chef/owner of wd~50, another one of this city’s inventive and touted restaurants, is one among Chang’s many admirers, colleagues and friends.

“Dave’s importance is that he serves delicious, really well-executed food at a great price point,” Dufresne wrote in an email. “A lot of people espouse locally-sourced American ingredients, but Dave is doing it in an unpretentious and approachable way. He doesn’t hit you over the head with it, which makes the whole idea more attractive.”

***

“I consider David a brother,” says Cory Lane, a partner and general manager of Ssäm Bar and beverage director for all of Momofuku. “I would do anything for him. I know that he would do the same for me.”

This is the kind of loyalty that Chang cultivates. As a Trinity College classmate of his would tell it, “Over the years, he has gotten more famous and met lots of interesting people, but he’s just collected more friends, more good friends, and hasn’t abandoned any of the old ones. He doesn’t forget where he came from.”

He is a guy’s guy who is passionate and funny and blunt, and not incidentally, really into the Redskins. He drinks and he cusses and will likely call you a lying sack of shit, but only if he likes you. He knows how to cook and knows how to run a business. You’d be stupid not to want to be his friend.

As a boss, he will take care of you. He will provide health care, pay you more in wages, make you part-owner and give you a platform to do whatever your heart desires (as long as it’s not embarrassing).

That, you’ll find, is the thing he’s most likely to accept. Your friendship, your loyalty, your devotion. The thing he’s still working on, though, is the success bit.

“I finally understand what it’s like to be an A+ student, when in the past, I only understood from having known or dated girls that were always the best,” he says. “I never understood the pressure of success. How does one cope with that?”

The cookbook is coming out in a few months. Those pesky press inquiries are banging down the door. Meetings, appearances, Copenhagen, and then the question of whether or not there will be more expansion, or a television show, or who knows what else?

Mark Bittman, most recently the author of Food Matters, was one of Chang’s earliest supporters.

“There are a lot of very smart, very good chefs out there who don’t get to the point that David’s at now,” Bittman says. “He could probably find backers and support for doing pretty much whatever he wants, and I’m sure he’s capable of doing whatever he wants. It really just has to be defined by where he wants to go.”

Chang’s answer to that is most often, “I don’t know.” He will sometimes expand that to say that he wants to throw away his Blackberry and travel for a year. Go to Costa Rica, his safe place and retreat, and read some Hindu texts or books about the Civil War.

“I don’t know how much longer I can do this,” he says. “I would much rather be working with food, and that’s becoming more and more difficult because I have to wear a hat as the face of this company. We have something that works. I’m proud that we have a place for people to express themselves. It’s been one hell of a ride, and if it all ended tomorrow, I think I’d be pretty stoked about what happened.

“But I don’t see that end in sight.”

SoHui Kim

Executive chef of The Good Fork
Age: 38   City: Brooklyn

When Sohui Kim and her husband quietly opened The Good Fork in 2006, they served about 30 guests—mostly friends and folks in the neighborhood. “It was literally just me in the kitchen with a dishwasher,” says Kim, “and Ben hosting and bartending.”

Weeks later, the little restaurant in Red Hook, Brooklyn was quickly vaulted to culinary fame after glowing reviews appeared in major publications, including the New Yorker and the New York Times. The eatery, which offers Korean-inflected comfort fare, was suddenly feeding more than 100 mouths a night. Kim wondered, “Where are all these people coming from?”

Kim is the executive chef of The Good Fork, and co-owns the restaurant with her husband, Ben Schneider. They live near the biz with their “cute as heck” one-year-old daughter, and are expecting a second child in a few months.

In 2005, Kim was ready to open her own kitchen—envisioning a neighborhood, mom-and-pop bistro. She wanted to work with Korean ingredients, while offering a menu of Italian fresh pastas, French-style sauces and a hefty burger to boot.

Yet Kim emphasizes that her food is not fusion, a type of cuisine that she dubs “confusing, stupid and the dumbest thing ever.” Rather, her cooking offers a twist (or rather, a kick). Take her signature dish: steak and eggs à la Seoul. It’s a skirt steak marinated overnight, spiced with gochujang, then grilled medium rare to tender and moist perfection. “Then I top that sucker with a fried egg,” says Kim.

Other tasty delights: crab cakes, dumplings, and yes, that burger. “It’s a huge honker that’s served on a potato onion roll and served with tempura fried onion rings,” describes Kim.

With her family, Kim moved to the Bronx from Seoul when she was 10. Coming from an academically-driven Korean household, she was law school-bound (natch), but then decided instead to put her nose to the cutting board at Peter Kump’s New York Cooking School (now called the Institute of Culinary Education). Since, she’s worked with a set of renowned chefs that includes Michael Anthony, Dan Barber, Peter Hoffman, and Anita Lo.

As expected, food was a focal point in Kim’s family. “Cooking was in the blood,” she says. Her mother studied culinary arts in Korea, and her late paternal grandmother, who was a devout Buddhist, taught Kim to be frugal, to waste nothing. “I have memories of being with her, gathering crazy weeds, funky fungi, barks and roots,” recalls Kim. “Just eating off the mountain.”

Today, her mother helps Kim make the kimchi served at The Good Fork, and together, they’ll spice up about 60 heads of cabbage at a time. The hubby makes kimchi, too. “I swear,” says Kim, “he was an old Korean woman in a former life.”

When asked why Korean food is so popular these days, Kim says, “Because it tastes so damn good. It tickles all the senses, it’s sweet and salty, and oh my goodness, it’s zingy. And minus the sodium, it’s very good for you, too.”

—Kai Ma

Debbie Lee
Caterer and contestant on The Next Food Network Star
Age: 39    City: Hollywood

Debbie Lee’s culinary creations are what you get when East meets … South?

That’s right. The vivacious kitchen whiz coins her cooking style Seoul 2 Soul: “It’s a little Korean, a little Southern—basically, my life on a plate!”

When her parents emigrated from Korea to the U.S., they happened to land in Jackson, Mississippi, where they learned how to whip up comfort favorites like black eyed peas and grits. That’s what Lee was raised on as a kid in Arizona, where they later settled.

A budding chef from the start (“When my mom would take me to the bookstore at 5 or 6 years old, I always went straight for the cookbooks,” she recalls), Lee was drawn to all different types of food, but felt a particular connection to Korean fare. Her grandmother, barely knowing a lick of English, taught her how to concoct basic staples.

“She’d teach me by using sign language,” Lee explains. “If I’d add the right amount of pepper, she’d say ‘yah.’”

Through these impromptu lessons, Lee gained confidence both in and out of the kitchen.

“Growing up as the only Asian at my school, food led me to like myself,” she says. “Whenever we invited people to our home, we’d have mandu. People were like, ‘Oh, they’re like wontons.’ Food allowed me to engage with my culture and realize I’m not so different from anyone else.”

Lee attended the New England Culinary Institute and after working for established companies like LaFolie, the Ritz Carlton and Marmalade Café, she started her own catering business in Hollywood. Her specialties? Kimchi mashed potatoes, Mama Lee’s chicken and sesame dumplings, bulgeogi burgers. “I’ve come full circle,” she says.

Now, every Sunday night, you can watch Lee compete to become The Next Food Network Star, meaning that if she wins, she’ll get her own cooking show. But for this soulful chef, it’s more than just about the exposure.

“I’m sending a message out there to the Korean community,” Lee says. “You’re American when you land here. Be proud of who you are. This has definitely been a road for me. I don’t want to be anything other than who I am.”

—Michelle Woo

Kelly Choi
Host of Bravo’s Top Chef Masters
Age: 33    City: New York

What does it take to make it as a host? Kelly Choi may be a good case study.

She’s a former model, a Columbia Journalism School grad and a self-described foodie. She’s hosted a series of shows focusing on New York lifestyle, and is now the host of Top Chef Masters, a spinoff of Bravo’s Top Chef.

“That’s my dream job,” she says. “They called me, and I just up and died. Beyond joy. Truly, truly amazing.”

The new show, which premieres June 10, pits established chefs against each other in a series of challenges similar to the type seen on the original show. Television viewers can watch renowned culinary artists sweat over, say, making a palatable dish with $20 of food from a gas station. Opportunities for schaudenfreude abound.

“It takes so much guts to come onto the show,” she says, “because [the chefs] are ridiculously successful already.”

Food has always been Choi’s primary avocation, which she attributes to its important place in Korean culture. She was born in Seoul and grew up in Virginia. After attending journalism school, she began her hosting career on a series of local news and lifestyle shows in the New York area. Choi broke out with Secrets of New York, on NYC-TV, the city’s acclaimed public television station. The show won several regional Emmys and became a hit for the network, garnering enough attention to be syndicated for public television       stations nationwide.

The average episode featured Choi, dressed in trademark vinyl full-length trench coat and stilettos, delivering tidbits of historical information from, for example, the top of the Chrysler Building, or the inside of a subway tunnel. She became a bit of a local celebrity, with New York’s                 blogosphere fueling her fame with comments about her vampy outfits.

After the success of Secrets, Choi says producers from NYC-TV approached her about doing a restaurant-themed show. She jumped at the opportunity.

“I would always be watching the Food Network,” she says. “Then when they asked me if I wanted to create a restaurant show, I couldn’t believe it.” Choi now produces and hosts Eat Out NY. Each episode features a different New York City chef, with whom Choi cooks a meal and comments on its yummyness.

Now that Top Chef Masters is airing and the shooting for the show is complete, Choi is back on NYC-TV, taping more episodes of Eat Out NY. And though we may not have an answer to the question of what makes a successful host, Choi has certainly become one.

—Sung-Min Yi

Suzay Cha
Executive chef at Cicada
Age: 50   City: Los Angeles

A meal made by Suzay Cha is like an expedition on a plate. Her inspiration comes from all parts of the globe.

Born in Seoul and raised in Japan, Cha immigrated to the United States when she was 14 and made herself at home in the melting pot of Los Angeles.

The first English sentence she learned was, “I want to be your friend.” From then on, she spent her life making new friends—and tasting their food. One friend introduced her to the flavors of Puebla, Mexico. Another turned her taste buds onto Jewish cuisine.

“Eating food is like celebrating your senses,” Cha says. “Food has a welcoming spirit. It’s a beautiful feeling.”

Her travels didn’t stop there. She studied French in Paris. She journeyed to northern Japan to learn a special type of cuisine called kaiseki. She headed to China for training in Beijing-style cooking. She was part of an exchange program in Germany.

Wherever she went, she loved inviting people over to enjoy a good meal.

“To me, luxury means creating something for your friends,” she says. “You don’t need to live in a palace to entertain. You don’t need a lot of ingredients to make something special.”

Once Cha settled back in California, she opened a restaurant in Orange County called Mondu Suzay, which specialized in Korean dumplings. Diners could choose from different dipping sauces like chipotle, lemon vinaigrette or miso with honey.

Eventually, a friend introduced her to the owner of Cicada Restaurant in downtown Los Angeles, where she now creates the sophisticated Northern Italian menu. Specialties include the muscovy duck with orange gremolata and grilled jumbo diver scallops.

Whatever Cha makes, she makes with passion.

“Food tastes better when you put your heart in it,” she says.

—Michelle Woo

Corey Lee
Chef  de cuisine at The French Laundry
Age: 31   City: Yountville, Calif.

Since KoreAm last spoke with chef Corey Lee of The French Laundry in Napa Valley, California, he has gone on to win a  prestigious James Beard Foundation honor and been recognized as a rising star chef by the San Francisco Chronicle. But the 31-year-old apparently hasn’t let the recognition get to his head.

“I think you need to find greater and more meaningful ways to calibrate your success and validate your work,” a philosophical Lee told KoreAm last month. He added that while the honors have been flattering, the most important criteria for the restaurant’s success is “pleasing our guests and keeping our staff motivated and inspired.”

If it sounds like Lee has taken a page out of the book of legendary French Laundry founder Thomas Keller, known for his collaborative work style, that’s because he has. And after almost five years as chef de cuisine and eight years working at the French country-inspired restaurant where reservations must be made two months in advance, Lee will be leaving in August to create his own a culinary collaboration—a restaurant in San Francisco.

“It was an ideological decision more than anything else,” says the Seoul-born Lee, who previously worked at top-rated restaurants in London and Paris. “I wanted an opportunity to run a restaurant and offer a style of cuisine and service that truly resonates with me.”

During his time at The French Laundry, where he started as a low-level chef at age 23, Lee says he certainly developed his own personal style, but was always conscious of maintaining the identity of the Michelin three star-rated restaurant—known for its nine-course tasting menu—and of chef/owner Keller.

“My next venture will free me of that responsibility and allow me to express something more personal,” Lee says. But what he won’t discard on this new journey is this lesson: “that a successful restaurant is truly about collaboration, and bringing out the best in your staff.”

—Julie Ha