In my typical telling of this story, winning a Beard Award is the moment we decided to mature as a restaurant group. We would relocate Noodle Bar to a larger space up the block. Taking its place would be a tasting-menu restaurant called Ko (which means “son of” in Japanese). In opening Ko, we would ask to be measured against the finest restaurants in the country. When I say it like that, it sounds like a pretty solid plan.
What I usually neglect to mention is the major creative influence of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.
I cannot overstate how not in control we actually were. The infrastructure at Noodle Bar had begun to burst apart years earlier. We’d gotten pretty good at keeping pace with the relentless succession of malfunctions and mini-emergencies posed by the pipes, ventilation, drainage system, and general anatomy of 163 First Avenue, but the space could no longer handle the number of people eating and working in there. I’d get messages from Quino saying that the plumber had to come by again because there was “doodoo water” coming out of one of the sinks. There were little things all the time and big things more often than a reputable business owner should accept.
Here’s Quino in an email to the Roundtable during that era:
For the most part, we took it in stride. We tried not to fret over our deficiencies in money, space, and infrastructure. Viewed pessimistically, these were all complications working against us, but they could also inspire creativity. For example, I wanted to serve chicken wings at Noodle Bar, but without a fryer, we needed to come up with another way to cook them. Maybe we could griddle them, I thought. But we can’t griddle them from raw. I guess we can try to smoke them, then confit them first. Where are we going to get all the fat for confit? Well, the pork belly gives off a ton of fat—I don’t see why we can’t use that. Hmm, the confit process yields all this smoky, meaty, gelatinous liquid as a by-product. Perfect, we’ll throw it in the tare for the ramen.
If you looked at our menu, you might easily mistake what we were doing as being bold or visionary, but in fact almost all of it was informed purely by necessity. That dynamic extended beyond menu creation, too. The most significant infrastructure problem at Noodle Bar was that by late 2006, the restaurant had become so popular that we often ran out of electricity for our water heaters. ConEd did not heed our requests for more juice; they didn’t believe that a restaurant of our size could feed as many people as it did. The obvious solution would have been a gas heater. No chance it would fit, and no way to run the necessary gas pipes to our side of the building. As a consequence, and in the most unscientific manner, we figured out when exactly to turn on and shut off certain appliances to make sure we’d have enough charge to survive. We were like a family hiding out in a boarded-up house during the zombie apocalypse, staying ever mindful of the emergency generator.
We managed for months, tempting a power far worse than zombies. It’s hard to express just how frustrating it is to deal with the DOH. Here’s how an inspection works: an agent comes in unannounced and without the slightest regard for whether it’s convenient—say, in the middle of a crammed service with people waiting out the door for a seat. The person on staff with a food-safety certificate must drop everything to accompany the inspector as they check every nook and cranny of the restaurant. They accept no excuses. At the conclusion of the visit, they’ll pull out their laptop right in the middle of the dining room to file a report.
Any violation is counted as “points” against you. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that most restaurateurs are baffled by the arbitrary nature of the point system and how much is left to the inspector’s discretion. An empty paper towel dispenser over the hand sink is ten points, yet rodent droppings are only a five-point deduction. (What qualifies as a piece of mouse shit, by the way, is completely up to the inspector’s mood.)
The specific regulations regarding hot water are laid out in their Byzantine code: “Hot water used for sanitizing must be heated to and maintained at or above 170 degrees Fahrenheit (76.6 degrees Celsius). A numerically scaled, indicating or digital thermometer calibrated to be accurate to plus or minus 2 degrees Fahrenheit (1.1 degrees Celsius) must be used to measure water temperature. Items must be wholly immersed for at least 30 seconds to destroy surface pathogens.”
Without hot water, you can’t wash dishes or hands properly or kill potential pathogens. I don’t disagree with the idea. Not having enough hot water was a big reason why I let myself get completely fleeced by the owner of the restaurant at 171 First Avenue so we could take over his lease and move Noodle Bar a few doors away. (It sucks negotiating from a position of need, and I was begging for my life. He fucked me accordingly.) It’s also why we decided not to turn 163 into a Mexican restaurant where Quino’s cooking could take center stage. We bounced the idea around for a while, but we couldn’t solve the water issue. Any restaurant that intended to serve as many people as Noodle Bar was going to face the same struggle.
So, as nice a story as it would have been, we didn’t decide to open Ko so that we could challenge what it meant to serve a tasting menu in America. We did it because we were backed into a corner by a meddling bureaucracy and had to find a way to make money serving far fewer people each night. Momofuku Ko wasn’t a stroke of great ambition or business genius. It was the only option.
While we waited for our new home to be ready, Noodle Bar would have to dodge the DOH’s wrath for a few more months. Any shred of confidence I had in our chances of making it out unscathed was rooted in one factor: Christina Tosi. But in order to get to Tosi, first I need to talk about Wylie.
In the late 1990s, Wylie Dufresne did the unheard-of: he opened a serious restaurant on the Lower East Side, at a period in the city’s history when you’d literally have to mind broken glass and other unsavory detritus as you walked down the sidewalk to dinner there. More radical than opening on the pre-gentrification Lower East Side was the unapologetic, forward-thinking creativity of Wylie’s cooking. He wasn’t concerned with pleasing everyone, a form of courage almost completely absent from New York kitchens at the time. His restaurant was called 71 Clinton Fresh Food, and the meals I had there while I was in culinary school changed how I think about food. It was my favorite place to eat in New York.
Wylie spent two or three years at 71 before leaving to open a more polished project. He didn’t leave the block. His next restaurant, wd~50, was another spot that flew over the heads of far too many people who claim to know what they’re talking about. He stuck it out for more than a decade, inventing countless new techniques in the service of dishes as delicious as they were clever. You’d read the descriptions and think, That sounds bizarre, and then eat the food and immediately wonder, Where has this been all my life? I get goose bumps remembering the deep-fried eggs Benedict, shrimp cannelloni (as in pasta made from shrimp) with Thai basil and chorizo paste, aerated foie gras with pickled beet gelée, and mind-bending desserts from pastry chefs Sam Mason and Alex Stupak. It’s agonizing that I can’t taste any of it anymore.
Wylie never compromised his vision for the sake of publicity or even business. His persistence did earn him more praise, but it didn’t keep the operation going for as long as it should have. He is New York’s culinary Prometheus. If people—I’m looking at you, food media—had taken the time to understand what he was doing, New York would be a completely different place to eat.
Before I ever knew him, Wylie was an inspiration—teaching me from afar not to be afraid to fight convention. Over the years, we’ve developed a close friendship, during which he has bestowed many gifts. None was more welcome or needed than an introduction to Christina Sylvia Tosi.
As Wylie and I got better acquainted with one another, I’d complain to him about how our infrastructural headaches were taking our focus away from making delicious food. Floods, leaks, fires, and inspections—plus our ignorance of how to deal with these various catastrophes—were eating up most of our energy. I told Wylie about a recent day when the DOH came by and found that we were storing food in vacuum-sealed bags. I had organized the whole walk-in and Cryovac’d everything from pickles to raw pork belly to a massive shipment of country hams and bacon that had just come in from Allan Benton—probably $10,000 worth of the world’s best smoked pork products. I was incredibly proud of how tight and clean it all looked.
The inspector saw it differently. Apparently, any establishment that uses vacuum bags must develop, implement, and maintain a detailed set of plans for any potentially problematic phases of food production. It’s called a Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP) plan, and we didn’t have one.
The inspector opened all our bags and made me pour bleach over everything, regardless of whether it was shelf stable. It felt like he was telling me to shoot my own kids. I called him a “Nazi.”
Wylie told me that one of his most talented pastry cooks had also done a great job putting HACCP plans in place for him and a bunch of other restaurants and suggested I hire her. Tosi needed no time to begin work on our refuge for buffoons. She made herself valuable instantly, fixing a whole lot more than how we documented our pork belly storage. She built out our first office. She helped me organize English classes for staff members who couldn’t speak the language. (Bridging the gap between me and Momofuku’s Hispanic and Latino cooks was foundational in establishing our company’s culture and values.) She identified potential problems in almost every aspect of the operation long before everyone else, and she was never shy about pointing them out. She once ordered new phones for us at Noodle Bar, preloaded with an accompanying message: “You guys need to take care of these new phones better than you do your own busted fucking asses.”
Tosi was a total asset for a staff made of people who were more doers than thinkers. She was also, lest I forget, one of the world’s great pastry chefs.
I was juggling two restaurants with a third on the way. The problem was, my formula for winning was based on a simple but bleak-sounding bit of logic: if everything is meaningless, then you have nothing to lose. With nothing to lose, you’re free to risk everything all the time. I attributed our success to this approach. I would triple-down on it by laying everything on the line again for Ko.
I became even more of a neurotic mess. I’d have panic attacks at work and try my best to hide them from the staff. I experienced the nightmare that is shingles and a bunch of other psychosomatic crap. The activities that had always chilled me out—massages and haircuts, mainly—began to trigger episodes of crippling anxiety. Any time that I had to sit still, including when I was at my therapist’s office, I felt a weight on my chest. I couldn’t seem to get enough oxygen, no matter how deeply I inhaled.
“Everything is so crazy right now” is how I started kicking off sessions with Dr. Eliot, whom I started visiting again. “I really mean it this time, this is so fucking crazy, you have to believe me, I think I might break.” He put me on Klonopin for when I was feeling anxious and propranolol for when I was calmer. I didn’t much care for the propranolol, because I couldn’t feel it chilling me out, but I took it anyway. I preferred the Klonopin, at least at first.
In theory I knew how to treat myself without medication. It’s almost too obvious to state: adjust my diet, exercise, find meaningful companionship, slow down, don’t drink more Pappy than water. (And I did try. I started working with a yoga instructor, for instance, but I was still drinking my face off.) I could have taken stock of how much had changed in three years. There was more data for reassurance than any single person should ever need: Look at everything that’s happened. One in a billion.
But that’s not how it works. Momofuku was my identity and it was born of my depression. I couldn’t separate a failure in the kitchen, no matter how small, from a failure of the self. I’d actually come to depend on the emotional and mental instability. I wasn’t beating my illness, or even trying to, really. I had subdued it by redirecting its energy into my own productivity. We were locked together like two judo opponents. It was always there, waiting for me to loosen my grip so that it could flip me over and pin me to the ground.
So I never lightened the load. It may not have been my life’s dream to have a tasting-menu restaurant, but once I decided to open Ko, I knew it would consume me. Noodle Bar and Ssäm wouldn’t lose any of my attention, either. I’d just have to sleep less. More growth, more strain, no stopping.
It fucking hurt, but I started to see the pain as no different from the feeling of soreness you get after working out. It was a good hurt.
When I first started exploring options to finance and build Ko in early 2007, I wrote to one of my contacts at the bank with an explanation of what I thought the restaurant would be. I described it as a “higher-end concept serving contemporary European cuisine.”
I didn’t have any fully fleshed-out plans, so this was the most succinct way to communicate the vision to a person who didn’t care about food. I’ve never been able to label the food at Momofuku, but whenever I’m cornered for an answer, I fall back on “American” as the best adjective for what we do. Second choice is “Asian.” Begrudgingly.
I’ve never rejected Europe, though. Yes, in order to start Momofuku, I turned my back on restaurants that descended from a European lineage, but I am also a classicist at heart. I didn’t have the chance to work in a European kitchen and was very much obsessed with them. I used to rant about how every serious cook, no matter the cuisine they wanted to focus on, needed to have a classical French foundation. I spoke longingly about Marc Veyrat, Alain Passard, Michel Bras, and Marco Pierre White. We had photos of these legends posted on the walls of both kitchens, so that in the unlikely event that they ever stopped in, we’d recognize them and break our no-comps policy to give them everything for free.
At Ko, we were adopting a format most people would associate with fine dining—the tasting menu—and planning to work with foie gras, caviar, and more butter than you’d find at any nominally Asian restaurant. Just as before, we’d be cooking in front of our guests, but this time, they’d see a lot fewer boiling pots and less frantic movements. We’d also incorporate more ideas pioneered by chefs like Heston Blumenthal, the Adriàs, and Wylie. No one could dismiss it as “slinging noodles.”
But I wanted people to eat at Ko and detect a coherent, explosive marriage of influences that could only exist at Momofuku. If you came to Ko and ate a dish you could find at Jean-Georges or Per Se or anywhere else on earth, it would be our failure. The food needed to build on what we’d started at Noodle and Ssäm. More of that je ne sais quoi, but even slicker.
The person I tapped to be Ko’s chef was well suited to the task. Peter Serpico had worked under David Bouley, the Tribeca chef known for his nuanced marriage of French and Japanese influences. Serpico and I set about framing our approach. At Ssäm and Noodle, guests chose haphazardly from categories that didn’t follow the typical appetizer-main-dessert organization. They ordered a mix of stuff without much guidance, and the food would arrive as it was ready; if the guests ordered well and we happened to be doing our jobs right, the meal would make sense. At Ko, we’d have to orchestrate a more deliberate progression. We’d have to consider flow. We’d be taking you on a ride and dictating the stops, mixing quiet moments with louder ones. It couldn’t drag on, like so many of those special-occasion meals that end up feeling more like an examination than a celebration. Every move needed to count. Each dish needed to be a hit on its own but work in the service of the greater goal: offering a seamless experience where the pleasures blur together and you remember not the particulars but the whole, like a good set list.
Our contractor and designer, Swee Phuah and Hiromi Tsuruta, were going to update the space from a casual noodle joint to a more refined experience, but the stools and general absence of ornamentation would remain. We were never going to hang a chandelier in 163. I characterized the look we were chasing as “wooden box.” We would continue our chef-centric approach, using as few servers as possible and putting most of the onus of explaining and serving dishes on the cooks. (I originally wanted no servers at all, until I realized that was both stupid and impossible.) Because the cooks would work inches from the diners, they wouldn’t be the only ones feeling the heat of the stoves. The guests would feel it, too, sometimes to the point of discomfort. As ever, we would implement no dress code.
We would strip away as much unnecessary shit as possible so we could deliver value and make a statement: we hide behind nothing here.
Later in the summer there were two significant developments. The new Noodle Bar was going to be delayed, and the DOH and DEP—the Department of Environmental Protection—were now really on our case. We finally got cited for a critical violation because of the insufficient hot water. If they were to find the same problem the next time they came through, it could put us out of business.
I was overwhelmed by my paranoia, convinced we were too far gone. Knowing that the inspectors were set to make a return visit, I decided to make one big bet before skipping town.
According to health code, your sinks need to run hot for at least thirty seconds. The safe play would have been to rely on the cooks to conserve hot water, but I wanted the inspector to turn on a faucet and witness a deluge like he’d never seen in his life. I had a hunch about which sink he would test, so I told Swee to hire a welder to direct all the hot water to that faucet. Then I left.
I got a room at one of the casinos in Atlantic City. Quino might have come with me. I honestly can’t remember. I know you’re thinking that this sounds incredibly irresponsible. Why abandon the restaurant at this crucial moment?
Well, I’d made my play. We were going to bet it all on one faucet. There was nothing else to be done, so with our fate entirely in the hands of Lady Luck, I decided to face her head-on at the tables.
I hadn’t even made it to New Jersey when I got a call from Tosi.
How did it go?
“It was like Old Faithful,” she said.
The inspector picked the right faucet. The stream was forceful and scalding. As far as he was concerned, Momofuku Noodle Bar could run hot water nonstop for weeks. I got to AC, drank and played blackjack for a day, then cut my Jersey exile short to return home and plan a restaurant.
Had the inspector simply picked another faucet, the DOH would have shut down Noodle Bar. But we needed the income from Noodle Bar to fund the construction of the new space. If that went south, we’d also have lost Ko as a result. I’d have had to lay off a bunch of staff. Ssäm Bar would have had to become a huge moneymaker—but even then, the loans needed to be paid off. I needed everything to fall into place in sequence for any of it to work. My apartment was on the line, as well as my dad’s businesses. Plus the world would think we were filthy and unprofessional.
I had hit on sixteen with the dealer showing an ace, because it was the only move I could make. The odds dictated that I put my faith in that one sink. The dealer busted.
This kind of deus ex machina moment will likely sound familiar by now. I often have trouble figuring out how much of Momofuku’s history really happened the way I remember it. How can things simply work out so often? These escape acts seem too improbable to be luck, but I’m too blasphemous to deserve divine intervention. And when I retell the story, it feels too tidy to be true. It sounds like magical realism.
I often wonder aloud to my friends if I’m living in a computer simulation or cosmic reality show. It honestly sounds more logical than the unbelievable string of luck I’ve had. Perhaps my memory is editing the most hectic moments of my life so that they’re easier to digest. Or maybe I’m just a bullshitter.