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TRUST EXERCISE

“My husband really knows ramen, and this is not ramen.”

The woman approached me one night a few months into Momofuku Noodle Bar’s existence. She didn’t give her name. She introduced herself as Let me tell you and plowed straight ahead: “I’m in the industry, my husband is Japanese, and he and I have spent many years eating around the world together.”

I nodded my head and pursed my lips. I tried to communicate telepathically: Okay, say your piece, so we can both get on with our lives.

She took my silence as an invitation to continue.

“The noodles are awful. Nothing like real ramen or any noodles I’ve had in Asia. If you think you’re making Japanese food, I’m sorry, you’re sorely mistaken. Actually, I have to ask you: have you ever even been to Japan? How can you charge people for this?”

She couldn’t stand the loud music or the uncomfortable stools or the unfriendly service, either.

“Does anyone actually enjoy this?” she asked me.

Sadly, she represented the consensus among customers during Noodle Bar’s first few months. I had set out to open a restaurant where someone who was accustomed to spending significant coin for a fancy dinner would feel just as good or better after dining at our bare-bones place, having paid only a fraction of the price. I wanted to shock people who thought ramen was nothing more than a cheap and dirty means to fill their belly. That was the big idea: leave everyone walking out the door of Momofuku happy and surprised and glad to have spent their money.

We weren’t even close.

On our opening menu were gyoza, a few noodle soups, some snacks, and nothing that could be mistaken for a distinct point of view. Guests filled out sheets of paper with their orders. This was not an affectation but a necessity. Until Quino arrived one week before our opening, I didn’t know that I would have anyone on staff, so I needed to make sure the restaurant could work with only one person, the way ramen shops do it in Japan. Only I wasn’t in Japan and I wasn’t a ramen chef. Were it not for Quino, I’m certain Momofuku would have been dead and buried in the wake of any one of the countless disasters that befell us in those first months. It was a never-ending, real-life version of the Universal Studios tram tour, careening from one calamity to the next.

One night the tenant directly above us got drunk and passed out in his tub with the water running; it took us a month to recover from the flood. On another occasion, in the early hours of the morning, the thermostat broke on our convection oven while we were slow-cooking a batch of pork overnight. Fortunately, someone somehow came to my apartment to alert me that the entire place was going up in smoke.

The risk of catastrophic fire was constant. The electricity would short when the weather was hot and the A/C was running, sending sparks from the circuit board onto the garbage bags lined up against the wall, as well as the grease trap. We shared a sump pump with our neighbors, and we had to clean it out regularly unless we wanted to see the restaurant get flooded with sewage. It was depressing work—worse if it had been raining—but it was necessary.*1

I also found an unexpected adversary in a tree around the block that bloomed a cottonlike substance I had never encountered before opening my own restaurant. I didn’t know what it was, only that it did not agree with our air-conditioning system. Every day I’d have to climb a ladder and then make my way over the gap between two buildings to get to the air conditioner’s compressor and clean the vents. That tree was the bane of my existence.

Then there was the end of service one night, when a man came in asking if we were still open. We weren’t. He walked right up to Quino and clocked him in the face. I chased the perp down First Avenue for a few blocks until I finally caught up to him. My brief high school wrestling career ended with me making a mistake that put our star player out for the season, so I wish my former teammates could have seen me perform a flawless suplex on Quino’s assailant in the middle of traffic. Blood pooled on the white lines of the crosswalk. Quino followed shortly after with a stool held over his head like a WWE superstar taking the brawl outside the ring. The cops showed up. Bambi, my apartment landlord from across the street, spoke to the police on my behalf and convinced them not to arrest me or the perpetrator, who had just been released on parole.

For months, Quino and I survived on Stromboli Pizza and Popeye’s. We simply didn’t have the time to make a family meal. I’ll never forget the day we finally cooked something for ourselves. It felt like the greatest accomplishment of my life. It took so much just to pull it off once.

I had been seeing Dr. Eliot three times a week, but I stopped because I didn’t have the time and it was getting too damn expensive. I wasn’t paying myself a salary, and the healthcare plan we’d signed up for covered only a limited number of sessions. So self-medication took the place of therapy. I’d sit alone in my apartment for hours drinking bourbon and seething. I suspected that we were indistinguishable from any other Asian restaurant around town. We were buying frozen dumplings and serving ice cream sandwiches from the corner bodega for dessert—the former because we couldn’t find the time to make them from scratch, the latter because we had no idea what kind of restaurant we were trying to be.

On many nights, Quino handled dinner service himself, because I was so bad at interacting with our customers. Meanwhile, I’d stay downstairs doing prep or agonizing over our piss-poor numbers. Quino was also great for other, thankless jobs, like sniffing out where we could find our next used appliance. It was nice to have someone in the trenches with me. When I wasn’t drinking alone, I’d drink with him.

We usually stuck to the neighborhood, but with Noodle Bar clinging to life and our money all but gone, we decided one night to spend a significant portion of what we had left on giving ourselves a respite. We headed to a new restaurant that everyone was going wild over. Our dinner was as much a reconnaissance mission as it was a break.

Quino and I spent the first part of the meal talking about everything but the food in front of us. We were having a great time away from Noodle Bar. I resisted the urge to ask his opinion of the place: assess a meal in the middle of it, and you risk ruining the night before it’s over.

Quino apparently did not subscribe to this philosophy. He reached his verdict between the appetizers and mains.

“This really isn’t that good.”

I wanted to stand up and hug him across the table.

“Yeah, this sucks!” I yelled over the cacophony of first dates sucking down cocktails and waiting on their plates of whatever was trendy that week. It was the sort of disappointment that’s doubly frustrating because everyone around us was loving it.

This kind of shit-talking typically does not serve any purpose—it’s sport for cooks—but Quino ended up putting a productive point on it.

“Come on, we can smoke these fools.”

I grabbed Quino before he got in a cab and told him that Noodle Bar needed to have a pulse.

In the following weeks, we made some decisions. We had been cash-only from the start because I didn’t want to deal with the extra paperwork to take credit cards. It was time to let go of silly decisions made in the name of pragmatism. We arranged to buy a used Aloha POS system, a device I originally thought would be superfluous for a noodle bar with no waitstaff. Speaking of which, we agreed to look for servers. We drove out to Jersey to buy sturdier flatware that wouldn’t crack at the faintest touch. We would be left penniless, but we were dead anyway, so what was the point in conserving cash?

Maybe that meal was actually better than we thought or maybe we were just making ourselves feel better by shitting on it. Whatever it was, we saw what we needed to see. Noodle Bar was going out of business because I was letting myself get pulled in every direction but the most important one. It was as though I were running around, yanking my hair out on purpose so that I wouldn’t have a free second to stop and face the more difficult questions.

For instance: what the hell is this food we’re serving?

We had been holding back. The concept of a noodle bar didn’t yet exist in the minds of most Americans, yet we were cooking as though diners were coming to our restaurant with expectations. We put dumplings on the menu because I thought people would be looking for dumplings. But that wasn’t true. They weren’t asking for dumplings and I didn’t want to make them, which meant that nobody was really satisfied.

The reason we were still alive was that cooks liked us. Our only regulars were the crews from Per Se, Jean-Georges, and Daniel Boulud’s various restaurants. They all came in, even the people from Café Boulud who I assumed hated me. After work, they would descend on us and gobble down pork buns—honestly, the only item on our menu I knew to be worth eating.

It puts a lump in my throat to think about all those cooks coming to Noodle Bar. That’s the very best part of this business. Deep down, we want to help one another. Daniel would send his dinner guests for lunch, and nearly every other top New York chef dropped in, too, often towing along a member of the New York food cognoscenti.

We were at our best when we were feeding these people who really knew their shit. That realization saved our restaurant. At the last possible moment, we erased the line between what we thought we should be serving our customers and what we wanted to cook for our friends. We threw out anything that smelled of fear, and started shooting from the hip.

I remain apprehensive about spelling out exactly what that means in terms of our cooking because our philosophy is still changing and growing. But I’ll try to explain it as best as I can here.

NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING, SO DO WHAT YOU WANT. The way I grew up eating is more or less the same way as millions of other Asian American kids. A big part of that was hiding our food from white friends out of shame. Of course, I preferred Mom’s kimchi jjigae to pot roast or meatloaf, but I suppressed the hell out of that in order to fit in.

But the impulse to blend in was preventing me and Quino—who grew up in a Mexican American home—from distinguishing ourselves as chefs. No more. We would use what made our families different to guide us. And if what our families ate was different from what other Korean or Mexican families ate, so be it. When I was a kid, for example, my grandfather showed me how to crisp up rice cakes in the Japanese style, an improvement on the boiled, Korean method every other Chang espoused. My mom and grandmother would say, “That’s not how Korean people eat it,” but he liked it crunchy, and so did I. Hence, Momofuku’s stir-fried rice cakes with onions, sesame seeds, and gochujang. Our kimchi recipe was my mom’s, although I added more sugar than she would, and because of food safety regulations, we couldn’t ferment it at room temperature with raw oysters.^*2

GATHER FROM EVERYWHERE. In my current life, I have the blessing of getting to eat more broadly than almost anyone else on earth. It’s a hugely unfair advantage as a chef. But back then, I hadn’t seen too much more than your average twenty-something American cook. The difference is that I was willing to recognize the value in everything, even places I despised. I was also readily willing to admit to loving lowbrow foods that other people wrote off as beneath them. I wanted to know why people liked what they liked.

I wasn’t afraid to cite references from across the culinary universe and adjust them to my taste. I added vegetables and vinegar to our rip-off of Great NY Noodletown’s ginger-scallion noodles. I put slow-poached eggs (onsen tamago) in our ramen in place of hard-boiled ones, because I had once watched enviously as a woman cracked a perfect soft egg into her bowl of ramen while taking in a flick at a movie house in Tokyo. As I mentioned, we learned to appropriate from our own families and cultures, too. Anything that helped us survive or gave us a competitive advantage. If I were better at making terrines and soufflés, I’d be doing that. It just so happened that I’m Asian and have a better view into Asian food.

I have no hesitation in admitting to these inspirations, because I give credit wherever I can. My advice to chefs is to be transparent about your ignorance and always honor the source material.

THE DINING ROOM IS YOUR CLASSROOM. Our first summer, we began serving a dish of corn sautéed with miso and Benton’s bacon. From my place in our open kitchen, I had a front-row seat on humanity, and I would notice different reactions from our diners throughout the season. I learned to see ingredients as living entities. To keep up, I had to adapt recipes on the fly. As the corn became starchier and less sweet, I would see fewer people devouring it with zeal. Maybe it needs more butter or more miso, which means it could use more pepper. Maybe it could use less bacon and more pork stock. Maybe I should reduce the sauce more. Maybe I should add pickled red onion. Oh, that works! People are eating it up. More important, I learned something about the value of acidity in a dish like this. Now how far can I push it? What’s the right level? Maybe I can incorporate even more acidity if I up the fat? But now I need chili pepper. I’d have these conversations with myself all the time. Over the course of a week or even a single day, a dish might evolve into something completely different.

At Noodle Bar, I also learned that Asian people drank the ramen broth. White people only ate the noodles. If we served the soup lukewarm, Asian customers would complain. If it was too hot, the white people wouldn’t touch it until it cooled down. By then, the noodles would be soggy. As a cook, you’re in a never-ending dance with your diners.

FORGET EVERYTHING YOU THINK AND EMBRACE WHAT YOU SEE. Quino and I also made improvements to the menu that were grounded as much in chance as in creativity. We’d been braising pork in stock as we’d been taught to do, but it took ages and wasn’t all that good. One day I made the error of blasting the pork belly at 500°F. It ended up nicely browned on the outside, but undercooked and swimming in rendered fat. I lowered the temperature and let it continue to cook in the oil, like a confit. The process was quicker and the result was far superior. You simply can’t rely on common wisdom in the kitchen. Most of it is built on half-truths and outdated assumptions. Be open to every idea.

MERGE. By and large, the most interesting cooking at Momofuku comes from bridging seemingly different worlds. Our restaurant became a place where we would try to replicate the natural merging of ideas, flavors, and techniques that happens when immigrants first arrive in a new place. It wasn’t much of a stretch to see Quino and myself as fresh arrivals encountering one another in the Noodle Bar kitchen. Our goal was to encourage the dishes we knew from our childhoods to evolve with new ingredients and interactions.

Quino ate hominy and fried eggs as a kid, while I was accustomed to eating grits. His Mexican forebears ate tamales in the morning, and mine liked jook. The result of our conversations was a dish of shrimp and grits that looked like something you’d find in Charleston, but upon first bite, it only made sense at Noodle Bar. We used dashi as a flavor base but made it with ham instead of the traditional katsuobushi (dried bonito flakes), because I had been reminded of the latter when I first smelled the intoxicating waft of Benton’s smoked pork in the kitchen at Craft. On another day, the collision of acidity with richness in a classic caprese salad became a dish of cherry tomatoes, soft tofu, and sesame vinaigrette. We realized that everything can be Korean or Mexican or Japanese or Italian, and that American food can be anything. Nothing we cooked was authentic. It was neither here nor there, which made it ours.

Obviously we didn’t come up with the idea to mix cuisines, but during that era in American kitchens, whenever a chef tried to mingle Asian and European culinary ideas, one of two things tended to happen. If a French-trained chef added a stalk of lemongrass to a soup, the result would be deemed “French food with an Asian accent.” In the reverse case, whenever a little thyme made its way into an Asian dish, it was called “fusion.” I hated the way that the Asian side was always subsumed by the Western one.

“YOU’LL ALWAYS LOSE WHEN YOU PLAY SOMEONE ELSE’S GAME.” Speaking of Allan Benton, not only was his bacon the catalyst for many of the culinary epiphanies we had at Momofuku, he also personally bestowed me with this nugget of wisdom. And once he said it, I realized Momofuku couldn’t tell anyone else’s story. We got rid of the dumplings and everything else that wasn’t ours. We dedicated ourselves to making people play our game instead.

By the time we started writing the Momofuku cookbook, other restaurants were already copying our recipes. I was shocked, both by the fact that people were taking our cooking seriously and also that anyone would choose imitation as a strategy—a surefire path to mediocrity. I knew that doing a cookbook would accelerate the process, so I took the opportunity to mess with any potential copycats. In Momofuku, there’s a recipe for the aforementioned roasted rice cakes, tossed in what is essentially gochujang (fermented chili sauce)—only we don’t call it gochujang. In the book, it has the absolutely awful and ridiculous name “red dragon sauce.” I knew that lazy people would copy the recipe without bothering to check whether “red dragon sauce” was a real thing. To this day, I’ll see it show up on menus from time to time. It always makes me laugh.