— 5 —

CUTTING THE LINE

One night, Quino and I were at a party honoring several of my mentors. The event was taking place at a restaurant/club in Flatiron where all the tables were beds. It was called—no joke—Duvet. But there was free booze, so we were all in.

A year had passed since Noodle Bar had been born and nearly died. Our last-ditch rush to the ER kept it alive. More than alive, really. Suddenly, everyone wanted to eat at the restaurant and everyone in the media wanted to write about it.

After helping ourselves to the open bar, we approached a woman standing alone. She was attractive and we were meatheads. I introduced myself as Dave and said I was a cook. We launched into the usual restaurant-people small talk about “what you’re liking these days.” She was more interested in discussing what she was disliking.

“Have you guys been to Momofuku?”

Yes, we’re familiar with it.

“I think it’s so overrated. It’s total bullshit and everyone is just eating it up. It’s not just annoying, it’s offensive. David Chang? Give me a break. He’s just some kid with no credibility, no history, and no respect. There are so many chefs in the city doing better work. He’s just the flavor of the month.”

Quino asked if she’d actually eaten at Noodle Bar.

“Yeah, although I wish I hadn’t. My boss Maria Johanna—do you know her?—told me it wasn’t worth it, but everyone has been talking about it. I should have just trusted her. Her husband is Japanese.”

Of course. The woman who had given me that degrading lecture in the early days wasn’t lying when she said she was in the industry. Johanna ran a trade organization that hosts a yearly conference in New York City; they fly chefs into town to demonstrate their coolest new dishes to an audience of insiders. I didn’t really know about her business at the time. I’ve since learned about all the restaurant-adjacent entities that promise to put you in front of the public through events and media connections, in exchange for your time and, sometimes, money. Even if you’re not paying them directly, chefs often go out of pocket in order to honor their commitments to these conferences. The organization offers lodging and a flight, while the chefs foot the bill for ingredients and extra staff to join them, leaving their restaurants shorthanded. We say yes for fear that saying no could mean upsetting the wrong people or passing up valuable exposure for our businesses.

A good chef never forgets that this is a business. All the extracurricular shit we do outside the restaurant *1 should be in service of putting asses in seats. When we do events for the sake of ego, we usually pay the price in cash money. (A good chef also never forgets that awards and events organizations are businesses, too, and that their first concern is their own bottom line.) But that night, we were exhausted. Our defenses were down. Ego won out. Quino and I were 100 percent certain that the woman had never actually eaten at Noodle Bar. She was doing the rounds at industry events, trash-talking us based on something her boss told her. In fact, she was doing it so often and with such glee that she didn’t even realize whom she had stumbled into.

“You know what? Fuck you. We’re on the line cooking every single night at Noodle Bar and you’ve never been there. And I don’t give a fuck if you don’t like my restaurant, because it’s not for you. We don’t cook for people like you.”

Our voices were loud enough to attract the attention of the entire room.

“Fuck you.”

We piled on. She began to cry. Everyone was focused on us, including Johanna, who was also in attendance. I turned around and delivered the same speech to her, only this time I used my middle finger to illustrate the point. It was an ugly scene—the two of us brutishly picking on this person—but I couldn’t pull myself back.

Security ushered me and Quino out of the party and onto the street.

We’d struck a nerve.

On the one hand, I was far from convinced that the good buzz around us was warranted. On the other, I spent a lot of time thinking about all the shit people were talking about us.

But with our backs against the wall of a space ill suited for delivering culinary excellence, Quino and I were coming up with dish after dish of pure magic. We were in a mind meld. I became a ruthless editor, coaxing out Quino’s and my best work while shutting down our less coherent dishes. Ideas collided until we found their tightest and most delicious synthesis.

My belief in Momofuku had been based on two suspicions: (1) The way people ate in train stations, shopping malls, back alleys, and strip malls in Asia was superior to the way we ate in upscale New York restaurants; and (2) cooking was a job that rewarded repetition and grit more than natural talent. Now I had some proof of both. Maybe, I began to think, it was everyone else who was crazy.

I’d never been an overtly competitive person in the kitchen—losing, after all, makes you humble—but with a few hard-won victories under my belt, I felt confident enough to give some credit to our philosophy. We were in a groove, and I didn’t want to risk losing our rhythm. Every day for me was do or die. I expected the same of the team, which by this point included a few new members. A cook named Kevin Pemoulie came aboard. He arrived in the East Village an hour early to stop by the bank before his first shift. His start date happened to coincide with our biggest lunch rush to date. I called him up screaming for him to get his ass to Noodle Bar. In his telling of the story, he could hear my voice from a block away before it reached him on the phone.

“PUT FUCKING MIRIN IN IT!” I instructed Pemoulie after throwing him onto the line. He had no idea what mirin was or where it was supposed to go. I’m sure he considered walking out right then and there, but he stuck around. Down the road, he wound up in charge of Noodle Bar.

I didn’t know how to teach or lead this team, but I was getting good results. My method, if you can even call it that, was a dangerous, shortsighted combination of fear and fury. My staff was at the mercy of my emotional swings. One second, we were on top of the world. The next, I would be screaming and banging my fists on the counter. I sought out and thrived on conflict. My arrogance was in conflict with my insecurity. Our restaurant was in conflict with the world.

Before we even opened, City Hall didn’t want to let me name our restaurant Momofuku, because they thought it sounded lewd. I spent days building a case by gathering a list of all the existing businesses in New York with Asian names that could be misinterpreted as swear-words in English. The EPA tried to shut us down because they were getting complaints of pork smells emanating from the restaurant, which is not an uncommon grievance leveled against Asian establishments in gentrifying neighborhoods. PETA picketed the restaurant on the few occasions that we served foie gras. When we started getting complaints about the noisiness of our HVAC unit, I swear it was the vegans trying to bleed us dry. We spent thousands changing the fan belt and proving that the noises coming from the exhaust were inaudible to human ears.

We were often in conflict with our own customers, as well. A man came in one afternoon and ordered a crawfish special. A minute or two after the dish landed on his table, he asked for the bill. As he signed it, he told Eugene,^*2 one of our first waiters and still the general manager of Noodle Bar, that we should serve the crustaceans without the shells.

“It’d be much more appealing if you did that,” he said.

Eugene delivered the feedback to the kitchen, and Quino instructed him on how to respond. Genie chased after the customer down the street and said in his bone-dry-but-always-cordial tone, “Sir, the kitchen doesn’t appreciate your comments. Furthermore, they kindly ask you to go fuck yourself.”

Conflict was fuel, and Momofuku was a gas-guzzling SUV. Let’s say, for instance, I’d eaten somewhere new and enjoyed it. I’d come back the following morning and tell the crew that the meal I’d had made us all look like amateurs, knowing full well that the cooks couldn’t possibly work any harder. Or maybe I’d read about an interesting technique—Andoni Luis Aduriz’s edible stones, for instance—and if the guys didn’t already know about it,^*3 I’d lay into them rather than take the time to explain the concept.^*4

I never resolved any conflicts between staff. On the contrary, if I heard that two cooks weren’t getting along, I’d see to it that they worked together more closely. That was one surefire method, I told myself, to ensure that the place had a pulse. You could feel our anger the second you walked through the door, and that was exactly how I wanted it.

Why would anybody get so mad about food? It’s worth stopping for a second to ask the question.

On one of those lonely nights when I was living on a futon and working at Café Boulud, I was reading about the French chef Fernand Point. At the end of each service at his restaurant La Pyramide, in Lyon, Point would instruct his staff to throw out every ingredient and pour every sauce into the sink, so that they would have no choice but to start completely fresh the following morning. Nothing would be repurposed, no matter what. Considering this was 1930s France, I’d imagine that this was a great deal of sauce.

Stories about chefs and their capricious ways are a dime a dozen. The Point detail isn’t even that outlandish, but the gesture stuck with me. At the time, I thought it was badass how far he was willing to go to be the best. But take the thought a little further down the road and you wonder what else Point was throwing down the drain in his fanatical pursuit of perfection. It wasn’t just sauce. It was the time and energy of his cooks, time they would otherwise be spending outside the kitchen. It was time taken from their outside lives. It was their lives.

To this day, most Western kitchens function in a brigade system developed by Point’s mentor, Auguste Escoffier. In devising the ideal structure for a kitchen, Escoffier drew on his time in the army. La Brigade applies a military chain of command to the kitchen, with a discrete delegation of roles aimed at encouraging efficiency, precision, and an air of absolutely unrelenting urgency.

The stress level in a restaurant is already outrageously high without the severe framework of the brigade system forcing everyone to think they’re at war. Statistics show that most restaurants fail within a year. You’ve probably heard this before. In order to survive, you need to tame and harness the mercurial beast that is creativity, while also appeasing the one or two people or entities that can make or break you. I can’t help but think of the chef Bernard Loiseau, who killed himself in 2003 after hearing it was possible that his restaurant would lose one of its three Michelin stars.

I don’t want to sensationalize the cooking profession or draw comparisons to all the other very difficult jobs in the world, but as a cook in an ambitious restaurant, you are expected both to make an enormous time commitment and exert intense physical effort every day. The result of your labor—the thing you take so much pride in—is shit. Literally, shit. Your work is something that the customer will later flush down a toilet. You may as well be a Tibetan monk who spends weeks constructing an elaborate sand mandala only to sweep it away immediately. (Unfortunately, cooking will not provide you with any of the same spiritual rewards.)

To keep going, you must buy into codes that give meaning to your existence: You are part of a centuries-old continuum that you must honor and preserve at all costs. Every action in a kitchen, every job, every recipe, is the next line in a story that connects back to the previous dinner service, and to the chef who used to work your same station, and to another chef across the ocean, probably long dead, who was the first to figure out how to slice that vegetable in the manner you are now called upon to re-create. Every service is an opportunity to respect that previous contribution and expression and to potentially interpret it in your own way, adding a new pattern to the fabric of culinary history.

You have this in mind as you work while your friends play, as you miss birthdays and decline wedding invitations. You have few relationships outside your job. You don’t have time for reflection or exercise or doctor appointments. You may not even have the time to study the material that would improve the quality of your work.

In the best cases, all this pressure can lead to decent behavior, to professionalism. In many other instances, it encourages unchecked insanity and abuse. All manner of hazing is fair game when it’s done in the name of making sure the person next to you is part of the same fellowship. There’s physical punishment—impossible assignments, sabotaging mise en place, kidney punches—and there is psychological torture. Astute chefs keep a running log of all the insecurities they detect in a subordinate, so that they can exploit them later. In a calm, unthreatening voice, they’ll say, “Hey, I don’t understand what’s going on with you. I’ve seen a lot of less talented people do better at this station.” Or, more bluntly, “Don’t tell anyone you work for me.”

They cut into your heart and brain, and if you ask them later why they did it, they will say that it was for your own good. They were breaking you down to build you back up. Because they care about you. Because it’s how they were taught. Critical thinking, calm communication, rationality, levelheadedness: none of these traits has traditionally been valued in a kitchen. Or maybe they were, but we weren’t listening. It’s not so different from a locker room, where viciousness and anger are glamorized as part of a winning culture.

Personally, I don’t know whether this behavior actually pushes others to do their best, or if it’s purely the release valve for a broken system. All that stress and fear and negativity have to go somewhere.

Either way, as a cook, you absorb it. “Make it happen” is the standing order, and “Yes, chef” is the only response.

For the person who is able to withstand the emotional pummeling—or who just can’t find any other work—it can end up being a manageable environment. You learn the language and thrive. I did. Two decades of being scolded and shouted at by parents, teachers, and coaches prepared me reasonably well for restaurant life. But if you’re very young and impressionable, as most who enter the profession are, it’s easy to spend five or ten years in that basement ecosystem thinking there is honor and dignity in working under these conditions, only to find out later that your growth has been stunted and that there is no promise of success at the end of the road.

So let me ask again: why would anybody get so mad about food?

Because it is just food. And when your co-workers are lazy or inconsiderate or don’t seem to care as much as you—when they treat food as just food—they call your entire worldview into question. They make you feel foolish for believing.

When you were young, did you care deeply about a job, a project, a person, a writer, a band, a sports team? Did you ever have someone laugh in your face and tell you that that thing you loved was dumb? It’s just a game—why do you care so much? You wanted to punch them in the face, right? It’s something like that, multiplied by a thousand.

I’m telling you this and I believe it to be true, but it doesn’t really explain me.

I came from a decent family and had the benefit of a college education. For the most part, I was trained by mentors who were even-keeled, forgiving, and invested in my growth. I also walked away from the cycle early to do something in opposition to tradition. Yet throughout my career, I’ve always been angry. Once I had my own restaurant, the slightest error or show of carelessness from a cook could turn me into a convulsing, raging mass. The only thing that could snap me out of my fits was punching a wall or a steel countertop, anything to cause me some kind of physical pain.

I’m tempted to blame han. Throughout this book, I will argue against the validity of various cultural truths, but I believe in han. There’s no perfect English-language equivalent for this Korean emotion, but it’s some combination of strife or unease, sadness, and resentment, born from the many historical injustices and indignities endured by our people. It’s a term that came into use in the twentieth century after the Japanese occupation of Korea, and it describes this characteristic sorrow and bitterness that Koreans seem to possess wherever they are in the world.^*5 It is transmitted from generation to generation and defines much of the art, literature, and cinema that comes out of Korean culture.

I will not deny that there are benefits to being part of what is often described as a “white-adjacent” or “model” minority. I grew up trying my damnedest to integrate into white society. But among the many problems with the myth of the model minority is that it erases the nuances of the Asian American experience. It also sows division, both within our community and with others. Now, if you will forgive a little bit of self-directed racial discrimination, I am what you might call a “twinkie.” Yellow on the outside, white on the inside. There are various factions within the Asian American population, and I definitely reside in the one that looks Asian but lives like a white person. When I visited Korea as part of a program with students from multiple colleges, I found myself excluded from all of the Korean-born, Korean-speaking, and generally more Korean social groups that formed. Then, once we landed in Seoul, the locals knew immediately from my size that I was a gyopo, or foreign-born Korean, so I gravitated to the other twinkies. I didn't yet know how to embrace my Korean heritage, which, ironically, only deepened my experience of han.

This all leads me to question whether kitchen custom created my personal brand of rage. I think the job—the fear, the stress, the habits I’d learned, the culture—unlocked what was already roiling inside me.

Opening Noodle Bar had been a last-gasp attempt at finding my place in the world before giving in to darker impulses. What I hadn’t considered was what I would do if things worked out. The restaurant was a success. I felt like one of those doomsday crazies who predict the apocalypse, only to watch the appointed day come and go. With lines forming every day outside 163 First Avenue, the pressure mounted to open a second location, a facsimile, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I still saw myself on a one-way street, and my only option was to drive faster and more recklessly.

I secured a loan for a million dollars to open a new concept, leveraging Noodle Bar and everything I had.

Between the loan and my new rent, I would have a total monthly responsibility of $47,000. I’m not a financial whiz, so whenever I open a restaurant, I try to stick to a general rule of thumb: if I can cover my loans and rent with the revenue from a typical Monday or Tuesday dinner service, it will be fine. Forty-seven thousand dollars was impossible. I was done before we opened the doors.

I can now say with complete certainty that I was trying to sabotage my own career. Not a day went by without my asking, How do I make this all stop? At the same time, I can also say that I absolutely wanted the second restaurant to work. I wanted it to make money and to ensure that I didn’t drag any of my family down into financial ruin with me. I know that these two aims seem incompatible, but they were both equally true. The only solution to the contradiction was to back myself into a corner. I would have no choice but to work as hard as humanly possible to climb out of an impossible situation.

But the day I met with the loan officer to sign the paperwork I noticed a discrepancy. The monthly payment had dropped to $14,000. I asked the officer—a business associate of my dad’s—why the amount had decreased by more than $30,000. He told me that my father had taken a lien out on his own businesses to lower my payments. He did it without telling me. Dad stepped in front of the train.

And how was I planning to pay him back? With a restaurant idea that I can effectively describe in two words: Asian Chipotle.

I was never interested in doing anything fancy. Even Noodle Bar was dangerously close to being too refined for my taste. What Steve Ells, Chipotle’s founder, was doing to bring higher-quality food to the masses was almost more impressive to me than Ferran Adrià’s innovations at elBulli. A business like Chipotle touches many, many more people than a little restaurant overlooking a Catalonian cliff (and makes much more money). I worship Ferran, but I was never going to be an Adrià. But if a guy like Ells could change how the world eats by making Mexican food for white people, I wanted to give it a try myself. I mean, literally, I wanted to serve burritos.

Momofuku Ssäm Bar, I always tell friends, is the craziest restaurant to happen in the history of the world. They don’t believe it and surely you won’t, either, but here’s one example of how improbable this restaurant was. After signing the lease for 207 Second Avenue, I discovered that the building did not have a certificate of occupancy. The city told me that there was no record on file, meaning that to the City of New York, our restaurant was not legally occupiable. The building had been constructed in the late nineteenth century as a carriage house and, in its most recent incarnation, had pulled double duty as a Chinese takeout spot and a basement brothel. The previous tenant was unresponsive to my many emails and calls asking for their occupancy paperwork.

I went down to the Department of Buildings and found the filing office, a brown, dusty space that reminded me of an evidence locker. Behind the desk was an older woman who looked friendly but was not friendly.

“If I can’t get my hands on the permit, I can’t open this restaurant,” I pleaded. “If I can’t open this restaurant, I’m going to lose all my money. I have a lot of people who are depending on me.”

That wasn’t an exaggeration. The money was spent. I was paying cooks, construction was under way. And all of it was leveraged against my dad’s lifework.^*6 The clerk gestured behind her toward the endless stacks of filing cabinets. Somewhere in that imposing mass of unsorted paperwork was the key to my salvation. Maybe.

“I can’t find it in my records,” she said. “It might be here, but you tell me how I’m supposed to get it.”

I left, but returned the next morning.

She was there again and waved me off immediately, a PTSD flashback to the brothers at Canton Noodle Corporation shooing me away whenever I stumbled into their business looking for kansui like a harried gorilla.

I went back the day after, and it was no different.

When I walked into her office on the fourth consecutive day, it was because there was nowhere else for me to be and nothing else to be done. It was a special kind of dejection. I held out a minuscule hope that the woman would be gone, replaced by a fresh face with some new idea of how to help me. Or better yet, a digital kiosk holding a catalog of every building record in New York City history.

There she sat. Before I could speak, she walked over to the cabinets and, annoyed, grabbed a random piece of paper.

“What do you want me to do? Just pull it out of nowhere for you?”

She handed me the paper and I flipped it over. I was stunned. She was stunned.

It was a certificate of occupancy for my building.