— 2 —

A RATIONAL CHOICE

For a short while after college, I worked at a corporate job. It was an entry-level post that you might describe as a stepping-stone to a career in finance, but that’s probably too generous of a characterization. I was a glorified gofer. A friend of a friend hooked me up with the position after every other private wealth-management firm, brokerage house, and investment bank in New York and San Francisco had already rejected me.*1

I can’t recall every one of my specific duties, but they were all menial—sometimes it was cold-calling prospective clients, sometimes it was prepping a meeting room for the CEO, and mostly it was data entry. The job proved to be so soul-sucking that I ended up drunkenly telling everyone at the company holiday party exactly how little I thought of the job and the company and them. I hadn’t even been at the company for very long, but I couldn’t stand it anymore. I’d looked around my cubicle at all these smart, college-educated people being swallowed alive by this place, and I could imagine five, ten, twenty years slipping away from me before I could put a stop to it.

And you want to know what I got for my insubordination? A raise.

I swear to God it was exactly like Office Space. A consultant sat me down for an assessment, and I told him how little effort I was exerting and how much I loathed my job. He told me he appreciated my honesty and implored me to stay. He offered me more money. But I was done. I didn’t have it in me to be any better at what I was doing. I told him I was going to culinary school.

Every one of my friends and family tried to dissuade me. They’d already warned me off of studying religion in college and now I wanted to be a cook? Come on, Dave. I couldn’t argue with them, but anything was better than hurtling toward mediocrity at a desk job.

The restaurant industry had appealed to me even before I’d ever seen the inside of corporate America. During college, I worked as a barback at the local watering hole and then as a busboy at a steakhouse near home. I wanted to work in the kitchen, but that didn’t exactly thrill Joe Chang. Before my interview with the chef, Dad spoke to the owner. I showed up, and they left me to wait in front of the salamander broiler for what felt like an eternity. When the chef finally appeared, I was red-faced and sweating through my clothes.

“The kitchen’s no place for a boy like you,” the chef said through his thick mustache. “We need bussers, though.”

To Dad’s dismay, I was undeterred and applied to Le Cordon Bleu in Paris during my sophomore year. Everybody gets into Cordon Bleu. I did not. After that, I put my culinary ambitions on the back burner for a few years until existential dread about what I was going to do for a living drove me there again.

The Culinary Institute of America was the preeminent culinary institution in the country, but I’d only recently finished undergrad and I didn’t feel up for another years-long college experience. The French Culinary Institute, on the other hand, was located right in Manhattan, and I could be in and out within six months. I had no idea if it was the right fit for me, but I paid my first tuition installment and started immediately after leaving my job at the finance company.

From the first day of orientation, I began to notice a few different types of students. A good number of my new classmates had recently left jobs in tech and were looking for a change of pace. They had money and nothing better to do. Then there were a handful of working chefs in our class, too—people who were running small neighborhood restaurants but wanted more. They would always make a point of saying, “I don’t even know why I’m here.” Quite a few other students were older folks looking to fulfill a lifelong dream. And finally, there were some younger kids like me who were looking to the kitchen for salvation.^*2

Even compared to the other career changers in my class, I was a disaster. What a surprise—the classroom proved not to be my ideal environment. There always seemed to be vegetables flying out of my hands as I fumbled with one preparation or another. My classmates were unamused. At FCI, we were each paired with another student, and my partner already ran two of the hottest restaurants in town. She was attending cooking school so that she could take over the cooking responsibilities from her mom, who served as the restaurants’ chef. As we approached the end of our first term, she requested a change. If she was stuck with me any longer, she told our teachers, she’d rather quit. In the end, she decided that dropping out of school was better than collaborating with me.

I should have quit, too. The last couple of levels before graduation at FCI were basically unpaid jobs in the school’s restaurant. In other words, I was paying them for the privilege of cooking food for customers. (Why anyone would want to go to a cooking school restaurant in the first place is beyond me.) But I was hooked. There was no romantic, come-to-Jesus moment about cooking, but I had at least found something I didn’t hate doing. I became captivated by the industry, talking my classmates’ ears off about restaurants—most of which I’d never visited. In New York, I loved Danny Meyer’s and Tom Colicchio’s Gramercy Tavern. It would be tragic if modern dining audiences only recognized Colicchio from Top Chef. He is an OG, who was embracing techniques like cooking over wood fire long before they were trendy. He helped define the modern American culinary sensibility, and my first preference was to work for him over any Eurocentric chef. I was all in on Americana.

As graduation neared, I developed a jam-packed schedule: a full slate of classes during the day, a full-time job at Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s Mercer Kitchen at night, and weekend shifts answering phones at Craft, the much-anticipated restaurant Colicchio was opening up. Marc Salafia, my friend from Trinity, was going to be a captain at Craft and recommended me for the job.

My dream was obviously a proper cooking job at Craft, but they certainly didn’t need—or want—my help, so I took a position as a reservationist. At age twenty-two, I felt so behind people who had been cooking since they were sixteen. I was scrambling to get experience under my belt as fast as humanly possible. I was stationed next to the prep kitchen, where I’d gawk at the products coming into the restaurant. Foie. Rabbits. All kinds of mushrooms—hen of the woods, bluefoot, St. George’s, lobster, morels, chanterelles. I marveled as the cooks transformed raw product into mise en place.

When I finally weaseled my way into the kitchen, my real education began.

I showed up to my first shift and was greeted by a crew of heavy hitters: Akhtar Nawab, Karen Demasco, Dan Sauer, Brian Sernatinger, Mack Kern, James Tracey, Lauren Dawson, Arpana Satyu, Stacey Meyer, Ed Higgins, Liz Chapman, and Damon Wise, with Marco Canora and Jonathan Benno running the kitchen.^*3 And then there was me, toting my tools from cooking school to my first day on the job.

“Nice knives, bro,” someone snickered. Evidently the gear the school gave me was bullshit. I was like a kid showing up to the first day of school with his tighty-whities over his jeans. I had no idea what I was doing.

My first assignment, Benno told me, would be to prepare nine quarts of diced mirepoix—three each of onion, carrot, and celery. Perfect quarter-inch cubes, please. For a half-decent cook, it’s maybe a forty-five-minute job. I spent all night. I knew exactly how to handle the task, but I froze up. Psyched myself out like I was taking the SATs again. By one a.m., I’d managed to demolish a couple cases of vegetables to produce one quart of each dice that I thought was usable.

When Benno saw what I’d done, his hand immediately went to his forehead.

“Yeah, we can’t use any of this,” he said, as he dumped it all into a pot of veal remouillage.

I don’t know what prevented me from quitting on the spot. Pride, I suppose. I’d told everyone that I was going to be a cook. So I showed up for work the next day, and the day after that. In fact, I didn’t take a day off for a year. I worked for free until the magical day, six months in, when Marco sat me down and offered me a paid job.

I was always behind, but I relished the opportunity that the kitchen offered to take another swing with each new day. In a kitchen environment (as opposed to the golf course), I found a reserve of sheer, stubborn willpower to make up for what I lacked in talent. Here in front of my cutting board, I could see slow but definitive results. It gave me purpose. I would park myself on the couch at home after my shifts, watching recorded PBS cooking shows while practicing my technique. For hours I’d just sit and tournée potatoes, carrots, and turnips. I don’t remember doing anything else for that whole period of my life other than cooking and studying cooking.

Some time during my first year at Craft, Marco asked why I hadn’t come into the restaurant for a meal yet. Most cooks never dine at the restaurants where they work, because either it isn’t encouraged or it simply feels too awkward to be served by one’s superiors. Here Marco was urging me and I didn’t have a good excuse, so I made a reservation for when my brother was in town. We ordered within our budget, but the kitchen crushed us with extra food. I mean crushed. More dishes than any VIP table ever got. When I opened the check at the end of the meal, I found a handwritten note from Marco: Thank you for all of your hard work. This meal is on us.

I wept like a baby.

I was still so bad at my job. Everyone knew it, yet they showed me patience. I recall crying another time at the restaurant after getting passed up for a position on the hot line—I’d be stuck on garde manger, the cold appetizer section. I was sobbing in the boiler room when Marco walked in to console me. I was good at this, he said, but I needed to get better. He told me I’d be fine. For some reason, I believed him. He left me to get myself together and then Benno came in.

“Garde manger is the place you want to work,” he said. “Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”

Between the years he’d put in at Daniel, The French Laundry, and Gramercy Tavern, no one had spent more time at garde manger than Benno.^*4 The result is that he’d become everything a cook should be. I had a lot left to learn. Benno took a special interest in my development. He pushed me out of my comfort zone at every opportunity. Looking back, I realize the huge debt I owe him. In the moment, I just thought he was trying to make my life hell.

I stayed at Craft for two and a half years, alternating as much as possible between morning prep shifts and dinner service. Morning prep gave me more hands-on experience with cooking in the purest sense of the word. I learned how to make everything in the mornings. I especially appreciated Saturday mornings, because it was just me and Ahktar Nawab working mise en place all day. I’d get in super early, turn on the island, grab all the stockpots and rondeaus. No one was there to fight for space on the stove or prep table. I think I learned more working on those Saturday mornings than any other time in my life. Vegetables, meats fabrication and butchery, vinaigrettes, charcuterie, sauces—all of it during my prep shifts. Dinner service, as anyone in the industry will tell you, is all about execution.^*5 By dinnertime, everything is prepped and ready. Your job is simply to keep up with the constant influx of orders from the dining room.

I liked working both prep and service. I never became discouraged by the long hours or the physical toll. It could all be overcome through willpower.

Willpower continued to keep me afloat when I started working at Café Boulud. I wanted to stay at Craft longer, but my family there encouraged me to work in the kind of French-style kitchen I had always found too intimidating. I was already in awe of one CB dish in particular: poularde en vessie. It’s a preparation that has been around for a century, invented by Fernand Point at La Pyramide. A whole chicken is stuffed with truffles and foie gras, placed inside an inflated pig’s bladder—an ingredient you couldn’t even source in the States—and simmered in a bath of Madeira, Armagnac, and truffle juice. The bladder is sliced open tableside, sending a cloud of chicken-and-truffle-scented steam billowing out. I’d never seen anything like it, and deep down I knew I had to learn how it was made, so I joined the ranks of Andrew Carmellini’s tough-as-nails kitchen.

It was 2003. I was sleeping on my college friend Tim’s pullout couch across Central Park. This living arrangement was fine because I basically never left the restaurant. I’d spend the bus ride home after an eighteen-hour day debating whether I should take a five-minute shower or go right to bed. I get a headache just thinking about it.

New York City was just coming out of the 9/11 daze. People weren’t going out to dinner. But ask anyone who was around and cared about such things and they will tell you that Carmellini was running the best restaurant in the United States. We all certainly thought it was true.

We were a small, spartan team. There were no prep cooks, no commis, no stagiaires, no help. That meant I was in charge of doing all my own mise en place. That might not sound like a big deal, but take the tuna carpaccio as an example. To this day, it remains the most illogically labor-intensive dish I’ve ever made: each morning I’d break down a side of bluefin tuna, making sure that the resulting product was completely devoid of sinew. I’d pound the fish into paper-thin circles that would fit perfectly onto the plate, then confit the scrap and sinew with a sachet of aromatics above the oven. (No matter how busy I was during service, I’d have to keep one eye on it, in case it started to get too warm.) Next, I’d wash the salt-packed capers and fillet a few pounds of anchovies, one by one, and cure them. Then wash the capers again. I’d have to make the bread tuiles: slice frozen bread, form it onto the back of a third pan, and bake the slices so they came out in a perfect U shape. I’d lose maybe half of the little fuckers to breakage. I’d then proceed to slice spring onions and chives into a decorative frizzle and make a “confetti” of brunoise shallots, red and yellow bell peppers, radishes, and Niçoise olives. Have you ever tried to make a perfect ⅛-inch dice of olives? Good luck with that. Oh, and let’s not forget the maddeningly thin slices of baby yellow and green beans. At some point, I’d make a tonnato sauce out of the tuna scraps. And finally, I’d pick greens and make a lemon vinaigrette for a salad that sat in a perfect little nest on the plate. In kitchenspeak, the dish was a fourteen nine-pan pickup, meaning it called for fourteen individual containers of prepped components. It was made all the worse because tuna carpaccio is like catnip for Upper East Siders. I had to be prepped for dozens of orders a night.

There were also the terrines, which were not the rustic blocks of meat that you might get at a casual bistro. At Café Boulud, they were elegantly interlaced layers of smoked foie, potato, and apricot. A gorgeous presentation, as well as a significant pain in the ass. My station also included the oysters, the canapés, and a constantly changing amuse bouche for every guest, plus a separate amuse for VIPs. (Our only directive for the amuse bouche was that it had to be made from scraps, one bite, and incredibly delicious. There was no budget for it.) The hamachi dish. The seafood salad with cantaloupe purée. And those goddamned sugarcane shrimp skewers. Three times a week, I would be greeted by a towering forest of sugarcanes, two cleavers, and a wedge. My first task was to whittle down the sugarcanes to make the skewers.

Café Boulud gave a stodgy clientele the world when they probably would have been just as happy with messy terrines and frozen shrimp on toothpicks. The cook on the hot apps station would have to assemble small lasagnas, layer by layer, to order. It was way too much.

The reward, if you survived and showed a little verve in the process, was the privilege of working directly with Carmellini to come up with a special. You got to flex in front of your peers, but you’d need to conceive, prep, and have the special ready by the next service, while also taking care of your usual tasks. It’s a common dynamic in high-end kitchens—the better you get at your job, the harder it gets—but it was especially pronounced at Café Boulud.

I once watched with a mixture of admiration and longing as a line cook—a Harvard grad, I should note—walked out in the middle of service. She left her sauces to burn on the flattop, took off her apron, and went out through the back door.

Chefs of an older generation will scoff, “This is nothing compared to what we had to endure in Europe.” And, yes, I know how much of the chef-memoir library is full of descriptions of heinously complicated dishes. Regardless, I struggled every day I was there. Six months into my tenure at Café Boulud, my tenacity began to fall short. I’d always gone blindly and full speed into every situation, knowing I could hack it as long as I was ready to work and work and work some more. As long as I could embrace the numbing repetition of the kitchen, I could keep everything else in my life at bay. But doubt leaked into my psyche, and the lines between the kitchen and the real world began to collapse.

Mom was sick. During college, I’d taken the fall semester of junior year off to look after her after she developed breast cancer. Now it had returned. I’m convinced the relapse was a psychosomatic response to an ugly business dispute between my dad and my brother Jhoon. Everyone was acting like a jackass. It was a very shitty time that broke the Changs apart and confirmed what I had always suspected: even your loved ones will let you down.

I tried my best to support my mom in my scant free time. At work, with my defenses down, I began to get acquainted with some thoughts that I had always batted away. Why am I cooking this food? It isn’t what I want to eat, and it all feels so unnecessarily over the top. And even if I stick with it, where will I end up? There was one level left to unlock, Thomas Keller’s Per Se, which was set to open in a big, shiny skyscraper on Columbus Circle with a legendary kitchen team. Benno was going to be the restaurant’s chef de cuisine. He actually offered me a position, which I declined.

I knew I wouldn’t make it in a kitchen like Per Se. There was a long line of better cooks ahead of me, and many of them would be eaten up by the business before they made it. Meanwhile, my mom was sick and my family members were calling on me to take sides in the fight between Jhoon and my dad. Through the haze of doubt and confusion, one thought began to surface repeatedly: I wanted to die.

With the benefit of many years of consultation with a professional therapist, I can tell you that what I was experiencing toward the end of my time at Café Boulud was my first full-blown experience with the depressive phase of bipolar disorder. As simply as I can put it, bipolar disorder is characterized by dramatic swings between high (manic) and low (depressive) states.^*6 This particular low lasted for several months and was the longest and most intense I’ve ever endured. But again, I can only tell you that in hindsight. At the time, all I knew was that everything felt shitty and I couldn’t pinpoint a specific reason. I felt dislodged personally and professionally. Things I could always count on, like my palate, were failing me. It didn’t seem normal to feel this way.

High school was where I first noticed that something was off. I’d spoken to the in-house therapist a few times, but I stopped because I didn’t really feel comfortable spilling my guts to someone who had lunch with my teachers seven days a week. Instead I wrote about everything going on in my head. One day, my roommate dug through my computer and mocked me mercilessly for what he found. I saw another counselor in college. It took him two minutes to pull out the prescription pad and prescribe me Paxil. I never took it and I never saw him again.

I was embarrassed. I didn’t feel justified in seeing a therapist or taking pills. For one thing, I didn’t know any other Asian people who saw therapists. A lot of my friends had shrinks in college, but their situations were different. They were wealthy kids with actual bad shit going on at home in Westchester or whatever northeastern enclave had produced them. Rich kids are always the most fucked up. I didn’t recognize my issues in anyone else.

At Trinity, I grew acutely aware of my otherness. The girls at school were mostly white and therefore off-limits. I’d seen how my parents reacted when my siblings had tried dating non-Koreans, and it wasn’t pretty. Not that it would have mattered. The white girls at school were explicit in their pronouncements that they would never be seen with an Asian man. And so, aside from random drunken hookups, I never dated anyone in college. For years, any kind of meaningful relationship I had was one I found during the summer or while traveling abroad. I simply felt more comfortable somewhere else.

For a minute, I thought I’d attend divinity school after Trinity, but my grades weren’t good enough to get me into a graduate program, much less one of the cushy jobs that my classmates were landing in New York. I didn’t know what else to do with myself, so I showed up to a postgrad career fair and signed up to teach English in Japan, because the booth was closest to the door. I’d come to think that my problems were in America, and I wanted to live the life of an expat. Being away from home would be a fresh start, a chance for reinvention. I fled the States with the intention of being gone for good.

Cut to the cross-country track behind the high school in Izumi-Tottori and the largest Asian man within thirty miles running around and around and loving it: my first encounter with the highs of a manic episode, and the other side of bipolar disorder. I had boundless energy. I felt invincible. At night, I read dense Russian classics, plowing through the entire canon. I finished War and Peace in a couple of days.

I had originally requested an assignment in cold, northern Sapporo. The company sent me to this steamy town in Wakayama Prefecture instead. Imagine Jacksonville, only hotter. At night, I would hear wannabe yakuza riding their dirt bikes and motorcycles around the rice paddy that was my backyard. Most of my students were either the wives of organized criminals or kids prepping for college entrance exams. Once they realized that their English grammar was better than mine, they started using my class as an opportunity to nap. I lived in an apartment with my boss, next to a dorm for Jehovah’s Witnesses, and I don’t think I had a full night of sleep the entire time I was there.

I’d hoped to find something in Japan—a sense of belonging, maybe. No such luck. The women in Japan were no more inclined to date me than the women at Trinity. All the Japanese girls seemed to be paired up with a white guy. If not, they certainly weren’t going to stoop to dating a Korean.

I did a little traveling while there, and saw that many of the Koreans living in Japan were downtrodden or wrapped up in gambling and shadier professions. Finding vandalism on the monuments to Koreans who died in Hiroshima was an early lesson in racism’s ubiquity.

I’d always assumed Japan was a country of extraordinary punctuality, but the train would sometimes be late in Izumi-Tottori. I learned that the delays were caused by people jumping on the tracks, even though the government did everything it could to prevent it. They announced that they would fine the families of the deceased. They painted the station a calming pastel yellow. None of it seemed to have an effect.

Between Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, I read Camus. I spent a lot of time mulling over his famous quote about finding an “invincible summer” within himself. I wondered about the car crash that ended his life, when he took a ride with a notoriously bad driver. When they examined his body, they found a train ticket in his pocket. Did he maybe want to get in that accident?

I don’t know if all suicidal people fixate on suicide, but I did. I saw myself in Mel Gibson’s character in Lethal Weapon, waking up every morning to a solitary game of Russian roulette. I’m aware of how stupid that sounds, but I’m saying it anyway. That’s how it was for me.

It couldn’t look like a gesture. As pointless as it is to worry over what people would think of me when I was dead, the last thing I wanted was to burden my parents with the dishonor of having a son who killed himself. There could be no drama, no note. I’d make it look like an accident, or just put myself in enough cars with shitty drivers.

When I returned to New York from Tokyo, I started my dead-end job at the financial services company. I would ride my Gary Fisher bike all over Manhattan, weaving in and out of traffic and blowing through stoplights as if I were the only person on the street. I once went skiing with friends who had to tell me to cool it because I was getting too close to the trees. I defied them and completely obliterated myself in the foliage. One day I stepped off the curb in Central Park as a bus was backing up; it hit me and it hurt a great deal.

There was a New Year’s Eve party in 2000 that began with Valium, speed, pot, this, that, and the other, washed down with around twenty drinks, and ended with my falling through a giant glass table. Blood everywhere. Shards of glass embedded in my wrists. The ER doctors said I narrowly missed an artery. I wonder if my recklessness was a cry for help disguised as youthful indiscretion, or if maybe I was hoping that at the bottom of a bottle would be the courage to step in front of the train.

I didn’t want to feel like this. I had no morbid curiosity about killing myself. I would rather have spent my time doing anything other than obsessing about death and trying to manifest it. Eventually I tried to approach the matter rationally. Step one was to ask myself if I really wanted to die. I’d decided the answer was yes, but could a professional talk me out of it? If they couldn’t, step two was obvious.

The only reference points I had for therapists were Frasier and Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting, and some light reading I’d done on depression and mania. (Camus was my first source. Later, I came to love William Styron’s Darkness Visible and eventually read everything by the psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison.) My main takeaway was that I didn’t think Freudian psychoanalysis was for me. I didn’t want some dude with elbow patches and a tweed jacket alerting me to the fact that I had a difficult dad. I certainly didn’t want someone who would try to graft a “tested” approach to my case.

I scrounged together a stack of New York magazine issues to find the psychiatrists listed in the Best Doctors inserts. If you’ve lived in New York at some point over the past couple of decades, you probably know what I’m talking about. But I couldn’t tell what distinguished one shrink from another. It was all so vague. I probably would have gleaned more information about each doctor’s expertise and style if I hadn’t hung up on every single one of their offices as soon as they got on the line.

As things were getting rougher at Café Boulud, I decided to call on a therapist on the Upper East Side. When I arrived at the appointment, I found a gentleman with silver hair and—you guessed it—elbow patches. A dead ringer for George Plimpton. Immediately after the first session, I was convinced he wasn’t for me. I kept meeting with him for a few weeks anyway, trying to muster the energy to open up. I’d decided on a plan, and I needed to see it through.

“How is this supposed to work?”

I’d landed in the office of another doctor I found online. He’d attended a small liberal arts school for undergrad and a southwestern state university for med school—the kinds of colleges I wished I’d gone to. More stuff I liked: he had done a lot of work on children’s suffering and PTSD, and he had just completed his residency, so I knew he was only a few years older than me.

I emailed him, he got back to me quickly, we hashed out the finances, we set up an appointment. Simple and efficient.

Our early sessions were uncomfortable. He barely spoke at all and I barely said anything of substance. I kept asking how the sessions were supposed to be structured as he stared at me blankly. No matter how hard I forced the issue, I’d get no response. I was smart enough to know that he was leaving these silences for me to fill in, but back then, articulating the most basic sentiment—I’m not even talking about feelings, I’m talking about stuff like ordering off a menu at a restaurant—took immense effort.^*7

But the few words Dr. Eliot did say at the end of our first session made me want to stick around.

“Hey, I’m really concerned about you. I think we should get into a rhythm here in my office and consider starting you on some medication.”

It was a dry, almost mechanical expression of worry, but it felt entirely new. I had never really confided in family or friends before. It actually blew my mind to know that someone was willing to listen to me, and that he had detected the possibility that I could hurt myself.

What I wasn’t ready to do was start medication. Partly, I was afraid that once I started taking meds the only way to be healthy would be to become an artificial version of myself. It’s a common source of hesitation. But mostly I just thought meds were for pussies.

In any case, Dr. Eliot wanted a rhythm, and a rhythm is what I delivered. In those first three months, I unloaded on him. I talked very slowly—that didn’t change—but I was able to tell him what he needed to know. It was in that room that I started to figure out how to articulate what I was experiencing, which was as morose and cheaply dramatic as it was deeply felt. I’m happy to give you a taste:

My depression morphs and adapts. There will be periods when I think it’s gone, only to discover months down the line that it was actually pulling the strings with more intention than ever before. There are days or weeks that I look back on and realize I was manic and had no idea. Sometimes the depression will be obvious and oppressive, and other times it’ll just simmer. It is a constant ache, a constant agony. The complete and utter suffocation of anything positive. Stimuli that should cause joy induce the opposite. Anything and everything in life is a reminder of the absurdity of existence. Depression plunders my confidence but somehow also boosts my ego, a very dangerous set of fluctuations that makes it feel as if everything around me is rotten and that everyone is aware of my plight and actively working to make it worse. My threshold for sadness is insane, because sadness is the only solace.

I spent a lot of time resisting Dr. Eliot’s questions about my childhood, but it all came out eventually. There was the fear of abandonment, generated from being left alone so much as a kid. There was the toll of constant exposure to my dad’s intensity and conflict with my mom. The God stuff came up a lot, especially how and why I took it so seriously. And there was the most consistent theme of not fitting in: not in my family, not among other Koreans, not in a WASP-y high school or college, not in the kitchen. I told him that I felt inadequate when I stood next to blue-blooded white Americans or in a French-style brigade.

I talked about 9/11 and my classmate who killed himself with his dad’s pistol in third grade, and the three friends I’d lost right after college—one to suicide, one to an overdose, one to a freak accident. I felt surrounded by death.

I talked about always being a person to whom things were done. I told Dr. Eliot that at Georgetown Prep, I’d learned about the type of people who get what they want in life, and it wasn’t anyone who looked like me. I couldn’t stop thinking about how stupid and arbitrary life seemed. Even if I was outwardly a wallflower, I was angry at the entire world. I felt lied to or let down by everyone. I was insufficient, unnecessary, and I hated how much it all affected me.^*8

Dr. Eliot’s office was the place I first actually said it out loud: the only thing that could possibly make the situation better is to turn it all off.

For me, depression manifests itself as an addiction to work. I work hard to control what I can. Thus, my conversations with Dr. Eliot weren’t restricted to abstractions. We talked about restaurants—a lot. I floated opinions that had been bouncing around my head for a few years. I’d always been somewhat nervous about discussing them with anyone because I didn’t want other cooks to laugh at me. Don’t get me wrong, I thought the ideas were brilliant. I was an egomaniac with low self-confidence.

And so, I may have only whispered it at first, but I definitely said it: “I think the underground in food can become overground.” It had happened before in music, art, fashion, in Europe and Asia. Why not food? Why not here? I couldn’t relate to the people I was cooking for. At the time in New York, dining out was still the domain of the rich and privileged. That was definitely how my friends saw it: whenever I suggested going out for a nice dinner, they’d look at me as though I’d suggested we put our cash in a paper shredder. But in Asia? Man, it was the polar opposite. From the grocery stands and yakitori joints in Japan to the stalls along the hutongs of Beijing, enjoying food was foundational. Dining out was attainable and affordable, a crucial part of daily life. Even in Virginia lower-middle-class Asian families would go out to dinner once a week at a Chinese restaurant. The idea that people with less money could not appreciate better food was a fallacy.

I told Dr. Eliot that I wanted to walk away from the traditional chef’s path, but not because I was afraid of failing. I had already failed. There had to be another trajectory for me. I had nothing to gain from cooking in fine-dining restaurants and I had nothing besides cooking to live for. When I left Café Boulud, I wasn’t trying to save myself. I was ready to die, and I had something I needed to get off my chest before I did.

I’d become a cook because it was the only job available to me. Somehow, my grades and disposition had landed me—a former golf prodigy with a liberal arts education—in the same place as the other misfits, ex-cons, alcoholics, and newly arrived immigrants that the kitchen tends to attract. At the same time, I’d also become a cook because it was real, honest work that I could understand and control. Like so many impressionable college students, I’d been captivated by Emerson and Thoreau, who helped plant the seeds for American Pragmatism. I interpreted their writing to mean that one’s goal should be to live as an embodiment of philosophy, to test one’s beliefs through one’s actions rather than through study or discussion. Cooking was my way of making that happen. If I wasn’t cooking food I believed in, then what was I even doing?

Our culinary memory is short and we live in a very different food world now. Chances are you won’t remember the late nineties as a time when restaurants were basically inaccessible to most Americans, but it was. Our dining culture was, by and large, bifurcated. On one side, you had prohibitively expensive, mostly French-inspired restaurants with excellent service and comfortable dining rooms. On the other, there were far more affordable options serving the cuisines of Asia, Africa, and Latin America in humble settings—a genre that’s been lumped together as “ethnic food” since the 1960s. But as delicious as those places could be, they were usually locked into the traditions and time periods from which their immigrant proprietors first came. There really wasn’t a place where you could find something in between: innovative cuisine that was neither married to France nor fixed to the recipes of the motherland, made with high-quality ingredients, and available for, say, twenty bucks. I could tell that race played a major role in America’s slow uptake on this concept, which only made it more personal for me.^*9

People often hear that I spent time in Japan and then came back to New York to start a noodle bar, and they fill in the blanks for themselves. I may have helped that narrative along in the Momofuku cookbook, implying that I was certain from day one about my desire to open a ramen shop and that I went to Japan specifically to study ramen. Yes, in that hellish town there was a ramen-ya, but I actually only managed to eat there once.

I passed by the shop every day, watching it longingly, carefully. People were eating well for cheap and they were having a good time. There was no pomp and circumstance, no smoke and mirrors. There were no barriers to entry, none of the artifices that make restaurants so difficult to run and so expensive to enjoy. The working stiff could sit next to a billionaire and neither of them would feel out of their element. The food would be carefully and thoughtfully prepared, while everything else—the decor, the plating, the service—was about fun and comfort.

I went back to Japan for a second time between my stints at Craft and Café Boulud. I wanted another crack at it—my first stretch there had ended too soon, I thought—so I scored a visa and my dad hooked me up with a Christian Korean missionary named Paul Hwang. Paul picked me up from the airport and brought me to a dingy old office building in Kudanshita, in Tokyo. The seventh floor held the ministry and church. Floors three to six were a blend of offices and living quarters for the homeless.^*10 The first floor had been converted to an izakaya, which was run by a Japanese chef who was married to a Korean woman, a union that was still deeply frowned upon. The other head chef was schizophrenic. The whole building was a haven for broken people for whom there were very few resources in Japan. Their skill level was unbelievable, and the food they cooked was absolutely delicious.

For a hot second, I worked at the filthy ramen shop next door, but I quickly moved over to the izakaya. I slept in the back of Paul’s office on a beanbag pillow and a single tatami mat. I enrolled in Japanese courses at the same university that my grandfather had attended during the Japanese occupation of Korea. I would get 2s, 3s, and 4s on my exams. Out of 100. Needless to say, my Japanese needs work.

I’d met a well-known physician in New York, and he took me under his family’s wing in Tokyo. His nephew ran a soba shop. It was the only job I ever truly wanted and the only job I was ever fired from. Next, my old bosses at Craft helped me get a position at the New York Grill, the restaurant at the top of the Park Hyatt Hotel. We cooked American food with Japanese products, which provided me with a solid bit of evidence that labels are empty and that deliciousness is universal.

But amid all those gigs, the most eye-opening eating experiences took place in homes, on the street, and at McDonald’s (which was cheap and consistently great). After paying rent at the ministry and tuition at school, I was scrounging to make ends meet, but I could still eat like a king. That was the real epiphany. I could eat extraordinarily well in places that weren’t punishingly expensive. I don’t just mean “cheap eats.” I’m talking about restaurants driven by technique and respect for ingredients and chefs who were just as devoted to their craft as those in the Western fine-dining kitchens that I had come to think represented the only legitimate path. Why didn’t I see this in New York? Even Europeans had embraced Asian-influenced egalitarian dining at restaurant chains like Wagamama. Why hadn’t the majority of people in America bought into this way of eating?

In general, Asian role models were hard for me to come by. I loved Bruce Lee, and in the sports world, I worshipped the golfer Jumbo Ozaki and the football player Eugene Chung, who was the first Asian American to be selected in the first round of the NFL draft.

With such limited and disparate options, I didn’t know where to look for direction. At home, there were my brothers, but the only trait of theirs that I wanted to emulate was their size. I was obsessed with catching up to them. For five years I drank a gallon of whole milk every day and consumed meat like a starving bear.^*11 Sophomore year of high school I sprouted four inches and gained a hundred pounds. (Part of the reason my golf game fell apart and I started playing football was that the growth spurt completely derailed my swing.)

As I imagine other big Asian boys can probably attest, there’s a faint promise that separating yourself from the cliché of Asians as small, meek creatures will somehow make it easier to fit in with white America. But being big doesn’t actually get you any closer to blending in. If anything, it further separated me from my own kin. My relatives began to look at me like a monster, while continuing to ply me with food, as is the Asian way. In the same breath they would tell me I was getting fat while imploring me to eat more of whatever homemade Korean dish they’d put in front of me.

Once I started cooking, I didn’t recognize myself in the chefs I admired, either. Then I heard about a Chinese American man, Alex Lee, running the kitchen at Daniel Boulud’s flagship restaurant. It was almost unfathomable to think that someone who looked like me could stand at the helm of one of the finest French kitchens in the world. Through word of mouth, I learned about what a serious and monomaniacal figure he was. He was the kind of chef who made it to the top the old-fashioned way: by sheer grit. One of my life goals was to work for him.

The day Lee quit Daniel and headed for the suburbs to run a country club kitchen was a monumental moment for me. He wasn’t even forty yet, but he was done. Word on the street was that he wanted a better life balance, to take care of himself. By that time I was also coming to the end of my time at Café Boulud. I was never going to be Alex Lee. His story—a badass Asian chef who outcooked everyone around him, regardless of skin color—was never going to be mine.

To be clear, there were other Asian chefs paving the way as well. By the time I opened Momofuku, Anita Lo was already doing something truly special and personal with Asian food at her restaurant Annisa. (She has never gotten enough credit for her accomplishments.) But she lived in the high end, as did Patricia Yeo, who earned three stars from the Times at her eclectic Asian restaurant AZ. To a miserable cook with dim prospects like me, there was an undeniable appeal in the idea of opening an American restaurant that didn’t bother with fanciness.^*12 By relaxing certain conventions of dining, we could bring more cooks and diners into the fold and make restaurant culture more like it was in Asia. Maybe this could be my contribution to the world. I was becoming ever more distrustful of and angry at mainstream America, and if I could somehow show that everything I had been told about American dining was wrong, perhaps I could disprove some larger cultural fallacies, as well.

I had a feeling, I told Dr. Eliot, that humans aren’t all that different as you move around the world. What worked in Asia could work here, too. Someone just needed to give it a place to breathe.

Talking through these ideas with Dr. Eliot felt productive, but I hadn’t had any overt aha moments about my depression. I didn’t really feel any better. Going over the facts of my childhood didn’t seem to be making a difference. My sole breakthrough was a private one: if nothing mattered—if I wasn’t going to beat this depression and I wasn’t going to make it in the fine-dining world—what did I have to lose? Why not at least try to create a world that worked for me?

Thoreau said, “I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.” I took that very much to heart as I contemplated suicide. Elevation through conscious endeavor. Work toward something. Open a restaurant. If it doesn’t pan out, there’s always the other path.