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KO-BOOM

“Be careful with the bloggers.”

That was the general sentiment among the industry’s veterans. At first, the Internet had been a curiosity to most chefs, who were flattered by the interest from this new, ultra-passionate audience. But once the bloggers started taking a critical stance, flattery turned to extreme suspicion. Chefs that had been playing the publicity game for years did not trust the blogs at all. According to them, the only outlets worthy of respect were the major print ones, organizations with history and journalistic integrity. These chefs had come up when The New York Times, New York magazine, Gourmet, and Food & Wine held all of the power in food. To be mentioned, let alone praised, in the printed pages of one of these publications meant everything.

Tuesday night was sacred in the New York restaurant community. That’s when you could go to the Times building and get your hands on a copy of their weekly food section. When I was at Craft and Café Boulud, the food world moved to the rhythm that the Times set every week. If you wanted to know who mattered and what was next, the answer was right there. The night after the first Times review of Noodle Bar was published, I had dinner at Casa Mono. Liz Chapman (now Benno), who was cooking there at the time, said, “Your life is about to change.” It didn’t matter that the review had been in Peter Meehan’s $25 and Under column—the paper’s de facto “ethnic cheap eats” feature. It was still the Times.

On the other end of the spectrum were the websites that most old-school chefs detested. As the Internet supernovaed into the global consciousness, more and more voices were elbowing into the discussion. Communities formed around the subject of restaurants, in primordial corners of the Web where no detail was too small or too dorky to discuss in excruciating detail. Their members had the passion and obsessiveness of cosplayers and Comic Con attendees.*1

There were different subsets of the new media: news and gossip blogs, like Eater; single-author sites from independently wealthy foodies who spent their time and money flying to restaurants all over the world; and message boards, like eGullet, Mouthfuls, and Opinionated About Dining, where fanatics compared notes about chefs and meals.

While chefs of the previous generation weren’t hot on these developments, I was stoked. To be a curious chef had always been a gigantic inconvenience. In order to gather information about the culinary arts beyond New York City, one had to rely on conversations with people who had worked abroad, or at least traveled more broadly than you. I’d ask friends who were doing stages in Spain or France to send me letters describing their experiences. Some people view it romantically as the last totally analog era. You really had to want the information to get it. But it was also frustrating to be so far behind. Cookbooks were the best resource for an American cook who wanted to know what was happening in Europe. (Good luck if you were interested in Asia or Africa or South America.) Sadly, I can tell you with certainty that cookbooks cannot give you the full picture.

All of a sudden I could stay in my underwear and visit some dude’s blog to see pictures of every single dish from the latest menu at Pierre Gagnaire in Paris. Not all of the bloggers knew what they were talking about, but some of them were even more knowledgeable than writers working in the New York bubble. “But the writing is so bad” was a common complaint. So long as there were pictures of the food, it didn’t matter to me.^*2 It was a giant leap forward.

eGullet was amazing through and through. I would spend hours on its forums reading about people’s experiences at restaurants outside the Times’s purview. I read opinions about different writers and trends, browsed ideas for recipes, looked up reviews of kitchen appliances—everything, all in one place, organized into discrete categories.

When the bloggers began eating at Momofuku, I didn’t mind it in the least.^*3 These proto-foodies were showing intense interest in something that most people found frivolous. I can still go to eGullet and see every post about Noodle Bar, Ssäm Bar, and Ko. It’s a very strange artifact.

Here’s a post that was published a month after we opened Noodle Bar, from a user named snausages2000:

The cooking at Momofuku is done under your nose at the noodle bar. Every detail of the kitchen’s operation is easily appreciated. Last night, the presentation was wildly inappropriate. The culprit was the restaurant’s owner, David Chang.

About two minutes after sitting at my stool, I was distracted from reading the menu as Mr. Chang reprimanded his dishwasher, ordering him to speak-up when he passed through the kitchen, to say more loudly, “Behind!” I felt bad for the dishwasher, whose English was broken, and spoke with little confidence, let alone volume. But, fair enough, in a narrow cooking space the staff needs to be vocal to avoid the danger of collision.

After placing our order, the sole line cook began preparing the ramen. Almost immediately Mr. Chang, a large, physically intimidating guy, began to scold the cook, leaning over his shoulder, ordering him to be more on top of things, more efficient, essentially telling him everything he was doing was wrong. Chang was not yelling, but in such a small space every word was audible. Rattled by the public humiliation, the cook went more and more into a shell, and the more he tensed up, the more Chang rode him. Regardless of whether or not Chang’s criticisms were valid (we hadn’t noticed anything wrong with what the cook was doing and our food was served within 5 minutes of ordering), he brought his cook to the verge of tears, told him he was going to be fired, and thus made it impossible for me or my girlfriend to enjoy ourselves, or the food, the quality of which, ironically, so concerned Chang.

I respect Chang’s obsession with his product, and his CIA and Craft background were evident in the kind of attention-to-detail, always-prepared kitchen philosophy he was dictating, but he demonstrated complete ignorance in one culinary aspect: the customer’s experience.

Chewing out a sub-standard cook may be a necessary instructional tool in a kitchen, but when diners are sitting a foot away, and the owner never even acknowledges the situation, or apologizes to the diners for the ugly scene, he is showing utter lack of respect for anyone eating in his restaurant. We left a bit traumatized, and I was angry at myself for not having said anything to Chang, but then remembered that it’d be better to let you, a potential customer, know.

I don’t recall this person being in the restaurant, and to be clear, I attended the French Culinary Institute, not the CIA. Otherwise, I’m sure his or her account is accurate and could have been written about almost any night I was working service.

We’d built no separation between the kitchen and the dining room at 163 First Avenue—Noodle Bar’s original home and Ko’s soon-to-be new digs. Everything we did was within full view of anyone who walked in our doors. With the megaphone of the Internet, any mistake we made was a public one.

In the early days of Momofuku, I took pride in our fuck-you attitude toward diners who didn’t fit the mold of our ideal customer. I’ve bragged about it and been celebrated for it. I rejected snausages’s criticism for years. What did they know about the pressure I was under or what the restaurants meant to me?

Recently, I’ve started to see this particular incident for the lesson it was. Blame it on insecurity, depression, bipolar disorder, whatever. The simple fact is that I was contradicting my own belief that the only thing that matters is how the diners feel when they walk out the door. Because we were in such tight quarters, when you came to Momofuku, you were eating dinner with me. And nobody wants to eat dinner with a dick.

Except for the Deathwatch,^*4 I liked Eater. They swam in the minutiae, talking about the industry like it was their favorite sport, and like most sports fans, they didn’t mind prodding their heroes. The press hated them just as much as many chefs, which was quite an achievement. By claiming that they were dealing in rumors, Eater could share potential news that hadn’t been announced yet. If it was completely wrong, it didn’t matter. By the next day, the story would be buried under twenty more posts. But if the information was correct, it would mean scooping the Times and a food section that had been developing the story for weeks, in addition to all the investors and PR reps who were orchestrating a splashier announcement.

For a while, I even wrote a column for them. Well, not me so much as Meehan. After reviewing us in the Times, Meehan kept coming to Noodle Bar and, over time, became an active participant in all matters Momofuku. He could listen to my ramblings and know precisely what I wanted to say. (Sometimes he would have to explain it to me.) I’m not a bad storyteller, but writing is a challenge. I tend to jump around from thought to thought, and then painstakingly figure out how to piece it all together later. But Peter’s prose was full of whimsy and knowledge; reading his reviews somehow reminded me of listening to the lo-fi bands we both loved. He contributed to every column or op-ed with my name on it. He would tune up comments I sent to journalists and look at memos I wanted to share with the staff. He adopted a voice for me that was far more lucid and consistent than the real-life version. He gave me swagger. “David Chang” was our culinary Tony Clifton. Whenever he made an appearance in print, nobody could be sure if it was Andy Kaufman or Bob Zmuda under the prosthetics.^*5

As they did for many restaurant openings, Eater implemented a tactic of “flooding the zone” with Ko coverage, posting anything and everything related to the restaurant: a story about our community board meeting, a photo gallery of our storefront completely blanketed in brown paper like a sad Christo and Jeanne-Claude installation, murmurs about the menu.

I said yes to media requests primarily because I was afraid of what would happen to business if I said no. I had no publicist, no social media, no other way to convince people to spend money at Momofuku. I’d like to think that the food itself was our best form of advertisement, but as long as people were interested in me, I would milk it for as much commercial value as it would yield.

In the summer of 2008, Larissa MacFarquhar profiled me for The New Yorker. It was a detailed snapshot of the work Serpico and I were doing behind the scenes as we prepared to open Ko, how we planned each dish and debated every possible choice. A profile of a chef in The New Yorker was still an anomaly at the time.

Eater reblogged it, to which a commenter responded:

This is beyond ridiculous—hero worship of a guy who serves a few hundred meals a day? How about a press blackout for a few months so people can actually get in the restaurant and judge it on its merits, not on a cult of personality build up by the media?

In its early days, the Eater comments section was a haven for anybody who thought the other boards were too civilized. You could log on anonymously and write anything short of a death threat, and it would stay untouched. I learned quickly that any update on Momofuku would inevitably incite a mini-referendum on me.

Umm Eater, you have chang batter running down your chin it’s time to wipe it off.

i think dc forgot to put “eater.com will be press, partner of momofuku”

I got to say #29 that is pretty gay. The comment on D-Chang being best chef in NYC, putting him in the same catagory as Adria and Gargniere is crazy talk.

It seemed that there was a growing perception that the media was in Momofuku’s pocket. All right, then, I thought, we’ll make eating at Ko as egalitarian as humanly possible.

Ko had only twenty-four seats—two turns of twelve—available each night. With all the attention on us, we’d certainly open with thousands more requests for reservations than we could handle from civilian diners, friends, family, and press. If we showed any favoritism, we’d be feeding the perception that we were elitist or nepotistic.

I decided early on that we’d build our own bookings portal for Ko on the Momofuku website. Every morning at ten a.m., reservations would open for the evening one week out. Diners could log in and see a simple grid of times with green checkmarks denoting available spots and red Xs signaling that all seats had been taken. No special requests. No back doors. Let the people sort it out for themselves.

This would have the added benefit of streamlining the reservation process and all its bullshit ambiguities. It always struck me as illogical for restaurants to pay reservationists. I had seen the inefficiencies firsthand. My first job at Craft, you may remember, had been answering the phones. I suppose it’s nice to talk to someone live, but at a busy restaurant, that person’s job is basically to say, “No, sorry.” I also cringed at the juggling act that restaurant reservationists had to perform to keep seats available every night for surprise VIPs. (When a restaurant says to you, “Sorry, we’re fully committed this evening,” they mean that while there are technically seats available, they’re not for you.) At Ko, if there were no tables, that was it. No conversation necessary, no special treatment—just a red X.

Eater reported on the new reservation system under the all-caps tag KO-BOOM. They wrote about the server crashing under the number of requests we were receiving; about tables intermittently popping up; about people scalping tickets; about two women who had secured a four-top and put an ad on Craigslist looking for two potential suitors to join them on a blind date.

Momofuku’s magic had always been based on underselling and overdelivering. The risk for Ko was raising expectations too high. It was such a hard seat to get that diners who got lucky would inevitably be let down or, worse, convince themselves that the experience was greater than it actually had been. When people spend a bunch of money on something or go through a prolonged hassle to get it, they tend to do all sorts of mental gymnastics to convince themselves it was worth it. Otherwise, buyer’s remorse can sink in and you can’t brag about it to your friends.

Instead of talking about the menu, the critics were writing about how they had to enlist legions of interns to try to get them in, and how they still failed. No plan of attack worked. The risk was that if the critics couldn’t reliably get into Ko, they might not be able to give the cooking a fair shake. The rule of thumb for food criticism is that you eat at a restaurant three times before assessing it.

Adam Platt, the grumpy critic for New York magazine, broke protocol and wrote his review after only one visit. Bruni came in all three times.

They ate it up.

The James Beard Awards Committee nominated Ko for Best New Restaurant, and we won.

You’re pretty far into this book now. I haven’t been patting myself on the back too much, have I? I think I’ve been a sufficiently Debbie Downer–like narrator when it comes to my own achievements. Well, listen, I’m not afraid to tell you that I was proud to be right about this one. Not the reviews or the awards, necessarily, but the insurgency of it all. I loved that just when people had decided we were media darlings, we flipped the story to our advantage.

The only benefit to tying your identity, happiness, well-being, and self-worth to your business is that you never stop thinking about it or worrying over what’s around the corner. If I have been quick to adapt to the changing restaurant landscape, it is because I have viewed it as a literal matter of survival. I have never allowed myself to coast, or believed that I deserve for life to get easier with success. That’s where hubris comes from. The worst version of me was the one who, as a preteen, thought he had what it took to be a pro golfer. I believed my own hype, and I was a snotty little shit about it. The humiliation and pain of having it all slip through my fingers is something I’d rather never feel again. And so, I choose not to hear compliments or allow myself to bask in positive feedback. Instead, I spend every day imagining the many ways in which the wheels might fall off. This book itself is a source of near-constant uneasiness. I’m afraid that the people and restaurants and accomplishments I’ve commemorated in writing will all have disappeared by the time it’s been published. If you hold on too tightly to what you have, it’ll only hurt more once it’s gone, and from an early age, I’ve had an overwhelming fear that it can all be taken away. Around every corner is another threat.