— 15 —

THIRTY-FIVE

Sometime during Seiōbo’s first year, I turned thirty-five, an age that marked an incredible, unbroken streak of personal and professional horrors that brought out the worst in me. I look back on that time with sorrow, regret, terror. I thought I’d be fine revisiting the period for this book, but I find myself pissed that I have to rehash it. I’m completely stuck. I risk looking unsympathetic if I share what I was truly thinking at the time, but it’s revisionist history if I change it. All I want is to edit this period of my life—not just for you, but for myself. I wish I could have seen and experienced it all differently. I wish I could am going to rewrite this whole chapter.

As Momofuku Seiōbo approached its opening date, we needed one more capable line cook. The first candidate arrived for his trail and almost immediately asked what time he would be able to leave. I told him he could leave right then and there. One of the first things another applicant mentioned to me was that if he worked for us, the schedule couldn’t interfere with his surfing. He would need Mondays and Fridays off. I said he could have as many days off as he needed, because he would not be working for us. It didn’t matter to me what your personal needs were. Any needs were indicative of frailty and I was of the mind that there was no place for weakness in our company. I convinced myself that basic human needs were selfish; ergo, if you needed something beyond the work, you were a bad person. I had conflated my own selfishness with selflessness. I was miserable to work for.

The third candidate was waiting for us when we arrived, and turned out to be one of the best trails I’ve ever seen. He had great flow and worked clean. He watched everything closely, asked the right questions, took notes. His knives were sharp. Around two a.m., as I was getting ready to leave, he was still wiping down one of the counters. I offered him the job.

He said he appreciated my time but that it didn’t seem like a good fit. He was recently married and wanted to have some balance in his life. He politely declined.

I walked in the opposite direction.

“Fuck that guy,” “It kills me when they do this. I feel these rejections like a physical attack. I know it sounds irrational. I will spend years trying to understand it. I don’t actually begrudge him wanting to see his family. I don’t have any reason to hate him. I’m just jealous of him,” I told our chef, tossing my apron into the hamper.

The maintenance man strolled into the restaurant yet again, whistling his tune like Bilbo fucking Baggins, interrupting our serious self-important world with his joyful obliviousness. I stormed toward him like a drill instructor.

I can’t actually recall anything about what came next. I was literally out of my mind. My staff tells me I screamed at the man. Threatened him. They said I had been slicing something on a cutting board and was now gesticulating wildly with the knife. They said it could easily have been interpreted as a weapon. I’m not excusing myself—I simply can’t remember. It doesn’t matter. The guy felt threatened. I should never have come close to scaring him.

The ensuing report to HR nearly got me deported from Australia. It didn’t help my case that he was the most beloved, popular employee in the whole casino. I wrote an apology, but I didn’t really mean it but I didn’t truly know how to apologize. No one took it lightly. I was punished severely, but again, it doesn’t matter. I have lost control too many times and frightened too many people over the years. I will never be able to explain how much I hate this, the spiral I enter whenever it happens, or how desperately I work to change it.

In Sydney, tucked in a hidden corner of a hotel, far from the real world, from Momofuku, from Dr. Eliot, I was free to be terrible. When I wasn’t at work, I’d drink, gamble, and entertain and rub elbows with distract myself by hanging out with the celebs that visited the casino.

Their favorite spot was a club inside the hotel that played the worst music I have ever heard in my life. I drank myself to oblivion every time we visited.

“This is fucking crazy,” I yelled to one former heartthrob turned A-lister over the untz-untz-untz. “You’re as old as me and I get exhausted just watching you. How can you possibly work in the morning? Aren’t you tired?”

I’m not sure how much he heard, but he turned toward me, exhaling a trail of smoke.

“How could I ever get tired of this?”

The following morning I woke up in the janitor’s closet of a restaurant on Bondi. It may as well have been a dumpster.

With the success of the restaurants, women became more interested in dating me celebrity chef David Chang. I was a terrible companion to all of them. I was suddenly desirable immature, selfish, narcissistic, undeserving.

For the most part, I avoided flings. Deep down, I wanted companionship and I gravitated toward smart, sociable, super ambitious women. But none of my relationships made it past six months. It’s not that I didn’t want it—I just couldn’t bring myself to grow up enough to be with someone.

One failed romance in particular really broke my heart. Without giving it much thought at all, I dove deep into another relationship with the next woman I started dating. We got engaged. Asking her to marry me would have been a huge mistake—selfish and unfair to her. I knew we weren’t right for each other. I knew I would be putting her through immense pain for my own benefit, but I was running on autopilot.

At its worst, our brief relationship was unbelievably painful, dramatic, disastrous, actually terrifying. It ended, too.

I was on an airplane when I opened an email from one of my siblings. Mom had gone for her annual checkup and found out that she had a tumor in her brain. She’d already dealt with bone and breast cancers.

The same day, Dad’s doctor told him that he had liver cancer.

That month, my friend Alex Calderwood, the founder of the Ace Hotel, died of an overdose.

Then my friend Peggy died in childbirth in Philadelphia.

The core family I had at Momofuku began to leave.

It required my attention, but I still couldn’t stand being in New York. I couldn’t stand any of it.

The cook was seventeen when his parents dropped him off on our doorstep, like an orphan. In my mind, he was like an orphan, but that’s not true. In certain restaurants, the hierarchical structure and the extremely close quarters—combined with the fact that cooks have traditionally been a bunch of outsiders longing for some kind of acceptance—can approximate the sensation of a family. Young people come into the kitchen in need of guidance and structure, and chefs are all too happy to assume the role of parental surrogate. With him, I relished the opportunity. He was as bright as they come.

I took him on as my mentee, a person for whom I had big plans. I wanted him to take over the kitchen at Noodle Bar.

I was invested in him because right away I could see the promise not only in his abilities but his attitude. He never had an excuse. He cared so much—to his own detriment, sometimes. He was funny, smart, loyal.

I set him up with a stage with Sean Brock at McCrady’s in Charleston when it was the hottest restaurant in the South. I arranged for him to spend a season working with Andoni Luis Aduriz of Mugaritz so he could see the most interesting food in the world up close and personal. He came back from each experience energized and grateful.

But now, for the life of me, I could not understand the succession of complaints I was getting from the team. He wasn’t the same person he’d been. Nobody understood why. I was grooming him, and the team knew how much he meant to me. I could sense that they resented the preferential treatment I showed him.

I was in Toronto when I got a call informing me about his most recent episode. I called to scold him and said we’d speak in person when I got back to New York. At the end of the week, I got another call. The police had found him dead in his apartment.

His parents flew up on Saturday. We met in the office of Má Pêche, our restaurant in Midtown. Talking to them about how he’d died—how we’d failed him—was unequivocally the most difficult thing I’ve ever done.

His mom told me he loved working for me. He loved me.

I loved him with all my heart, I said. I told them that I would dedicate myself to making Momofuku a testament to their son and what he meant to me. I’m a father myself now. I know that whatever I said was meaningless.

I was always good at noticing when cooks were struggling in their private lives. I could sniff out drug use—no problem. I didn’t fire people for it, either. I just wanted to know what they were doing, so I could make sure that they knew what they were doing.

He died of an accidental overdose.* For a while, I put the blame on the team at Momofuku. I was so pissed at them. They were supposed to care about each other, to dig deeper when they sensed something wrong with their brother. We were a thoughtful company—the kind that would be able to recognize a co-worker in need. But we weren’t good enough. The fact is, he died on my watch.

I had spent my career obsessing over my own mortality and how suicidal thoughts had led to a breakthrough in the form of Momofuku. I talked constantly about this business as life and death. My head had gone so far up my ass.

I won’t tell you any more about his death. It’s disrespectful to his memory. I’d give anything to be writing instead about all the great things he’s achieved with us.

In the months that followed, I put on fifty pounds. I stopped drinking and smoking pot, but I’d order pizza at three a.m. and eat the whole pie by myself. I couldn’t fall asleep unless my stomach hurt, and I couldn’t exercise because of a back injury. I was immobilized.

Before my mentee’s death, my visits to therapy had mostly been a release. Now I was searching frantically for a way to make things right. We devoted all of our time to discussing his death.

It was a clear line in my head. I was his boss and a big-brother figure and I’d told him he had failed me.

For years, Dr. Eliot worked to convince me that this was an egotistical outlook. He told me that my treatment of my mentee’s mistake had been unpleasant, aggressive, and unconstructive, but that it was not the cause of his death. To think I had the power to kill him meant that I had the power to save him, which was also not true. He didn’t die because of me, but he didn’t die for me, either. He deserves more than to be defined by our relationship. He meant much more to this world than what he was to me.

I’m not supposed to blame myself, but not a day goes by when I don’t think about him or wonder what would have been if I’d gotten on a plane and shown up at his door earlier.

If anyone was supposed to die, it was me. When I signed the ten-year lease for the very first restaurant, I was twenty-six years old. My broker offered an additional five-year option at the same rate, but I declined. I was certain I would be dead within a decade.

Now I was thirty-five and alive. None of it was supposed to matter. I needed to figure out what to do with all this extra life.