Change is guaranteed, but growth isn’t. In my experience, if you want to grow, you’ve got to want it. In fact, you’ve got to want it so bad that you’ll toss out everything that got you where you are.
No one used to complain about the music being too loud in restaurants. Most of the time, there was no music at all. If there was, it was all classical, jazz, or some innocuous Italian or French soundtrack played at a barely audible volume.
You didn’t really hear music in kitchens, either. When we opened Noodle Bar, Quino and I were in our twenties and music meant so much to us. It was our place, so why couldn’t we listen to music while we worked? We brought in an iPod and a CD player, bought the jankiest speakers available at Circuit City, and set them up on the top shelf. We had never worked in an open kitchen before, so it didn’t dawn on us until the first night of service that if you play music in the kitchen, everyone in the dining room is going to hear it, too.
We listened to the same stuff we listened to when we were by ourselves. Pavement. Silver Jews. Velvet Underground. Yo La Tengo. GZA. Fugazi. Pixies. Metallica. Galaxie 500. Wilco. There was a stretch where we played a ton of country—a lot of Waylon Jennings. Lambchop’s “Your Fucking Sunny Day” was a really important track to me. It’s a great, chill, happy song, but when we put it on the playlist, I thought someone might complain about the profanity. We kept asking ourselves, Are we allowed to play this?
Whoever ran the pass was the DJ for the night. One of the nice perks of working with all the cool, young kids in the East Village was that they would expose us to so much good shit. As a rule, we avoided playing music that people knew too well. My greatest fear was re-creating that moment from Almost Famous when the whole bus starts singing along to “Tiny Dancer.” We played songs and albums that didn’t get a lot of radio play, and we saw that these bands were meaningful to a lot of our guests, too. One day a guy walked up to me in the kitchen and said, “Are you playing The Who B-sides? This might be my favorite restaurant.” Music became a natural filter for the audience we were hoping to serve. It was a nice spiritual complement to the kind of food we were cooking.
We learned to calibrate the volume levels to suit our needs. When you’ve got an empty space at the start of the day, you can’t blast the music. But as the room fills up with sound-absorbing bodies, you have to crank it up or you can’t hear it at all. If anyone complained that it was too loud, our response was always to turn it up.
Playing loud music discouraged people from lingering in the restaurant. I took my cue from the way McDonald’s designed their seats so that you lose circulation in your legs if you sit for too long. When your business depends on maximizing the number of people coming in and promptly getting the hell out, you need to help them along.
You could interpret a lot of our decisions back then as hostile, but I swear we were acting out of necessity. We developed a reputation for being unfriendly to vegetarians, and God knows I talked a lot of shit, but honestly, even if we wanted to accommodate vegetarians, we didn’t have the time or space to prep any extra mise en place. Our opening beverage program consisted of canned beer and $1 bottles of Poland Spring water. We didn’t concern ourselves with serving you dessert or a cup of coffee. We needed to turn tables, and we didn’t want you regaling your friends with one more cool twenty-minute story.
It was clear from Nishi’s poor reviews that we needed to revamp the restaurant, but in the subtext, I saw an indictment of all our restaurants. It wouldn’t be enough to fix Nishi. We needed to show that we were capable of evolving everything about ourselves.
In many ways, Ssäm Bar is the beating heart of Momofuku. It has always won the most praise from both the public and critics. It changed the restaurant game, and no one wants to be the person who screws that up. But whenever there’s been a period at Ssäm Bar where it wasn’t very good, it was because we were afraid to change. This was one of those periods.
Working against our own legacy was a new test for us. I’ve always loved underdogs and I never imagined I’d be anything but one of them. Now, it was as though Momofuku had been traded to the defending Super Bowl champions. There were many long-standing aspects of Ssäm Bar’s operation that we had never questioned because the numbers didn’t support the idea of change. But just because it’s profitable doesn’t mean that it’s right.
Marge spearheaded the transformation, along with Momofuku’s president, Alex Muñoz-Suarez. It had to be them. If I’d learned anything in the past few years, it was that I couldn’t be the person to lead the charge. And while it may not have looked like it to the untrained eye, Marge and Alex completely changed the restaurant.
The songs stayed the same, but we lowered the volume on the music. We added soundproofing, bought new plates and silverware, and installed chairs with backs on them. We put in banquettes, wallpaper, and a wine cave. The menu was now bound in leather.
Max Ng would be the new chef. Max had come to America from Singapore seven years earlier to work with us. He’d spent time at both Ko and Ssäm Bar, but he wasn’t really ready to be a chef. That’s exactly why I wanted him. He knew our ways, but he didn’t know enough to let himself get stuck in the same old tired routine.
Max wanted a Michelin star. He wanted to be number one on the World’s 50 Best list. He wanted accolades and awards, and he wasn’t going to let the limitations of our space prevent him from reaching his goals. I loved that Max wanted to chase all that stuff. Just because the restaurant didn’t look the part of a world-class establishment didn’t mean we couldn’t aspire to be the very best of the best.
I told the team to kill our existing menu and do whatever they wanted. They didn’t disappoint. The first efforts were unbelievable. Belacan-rubbed skate cooked in a banana leaf. A caviar bun with bacon-ranch dressing. A taiyaki, the fish-shaped Japanese waffle cake, stuffed with foie gras instead of the traditional red bean. I was thrilled with where we were headed. With time, I thought, it could be something truly great.
Wells had only visited the restaurant a handful of times since he’d taken over as the Times critic. Then one night, I was putting in a shift as expediter—something I rarely do. In walks Wells. He sat right by me at the pass. I felt less confident about the meal we served him than anything we’ve ever done.
We had changed the very identity of the restaurant, killed the old Momofuku. I didn’t know which way was up or down anymore, and there wasn’t any time to figure it out. I was convinced that Wells would demote us from three stars to two. That may not sound like much to you, but coupled with his spurning of Nishi, it would cement the perception that Momofuku was old news.
Wells returned a couple months later, and then his review came out.
Three stars.
I’ve never been so happy about maintaining the status quo. This review from a critic who had only recently questioned our relevance was a validation of our efforts. I set aside my misgivings about criticism in general and enjoyed the first victory of the new era, and the first piece of evidence that we were on the right path.
I want to say a little bit more about Marge. When Nishi first opened, Marguerite was among the very few people on staff to speak up with her concerns. Since she joined us as an intern in 2011, she’s always been incisive and vocal. Is there a reason the service is subpar? Why do we still have no backs on the stools? Why can’t we have an overarching vision while treating each restaurant differently in terms of food, service, and mission?
Marge not only helped revamp Ssäm Bar, she led the Nishi rescue mission as well. We closed for a renovation and relaunched in October 2017, just before the re-review of Ssäm. At Nishi, Marge pulled off the same magic act. What’s more, she did it with almost zero resources. She remodeled the dining room and rethought how we communicated with diners. We started telling people it was an Italian restaurant, for one thing. Thanks to Marge, people could read our menu and feel like they were visiting a restaurant and not solving a math problem. Without ever asking Pinsky to overhaul the menu, Nishi got better and busier.
It all confirmed what I already knew: I am the wrong person to operate Momofuku. The irony of us growing up as a company is that we needed to get younger to do so. By the time we made it official, I’d already been delegating much of my responsibility to Marge. She took over as CEO right before her thirtieth birthday, in 2019.
We set her up with an executive coach to help her ease into the role. After one meeting, the coach told me that giving the keys to a twenty-nine-year-old was a huge leap of faith. She said that Marge was not very communicative, and that when she trained fifty- and sixty-year-olds, they had much more to say. I nearly exploded.
Who was this stodgy suit to tell me Marge wasn’t ready? I chose Marge specifically because she wasn’t a jaded stereotype. I was tempted to pull her out of training right then and there. I decided against it. It would be better for her to go through the process and see for herself what she was up against. Marge’s moral compass is stronger than that of anyone I’ve ever met. I had no reason to fear that she would be deterred or discouraged by this poor judge of character.
I’m not betting on Marge being perfect tomorrow. I want her to make mistakes. I don’t want a CEO who thinks they’ve already seen and done everything. I want someone who’s just as eager to be right as they are to be proven wrong.
There’s an old myth that lobsters are immortal.
What leads people to believe this is the fact that lobsters show no signs of getting old. As they age, lobsters don’t stop growing or reproducing. They can grow back limbs. There’s no limit to how big a lobster can get. They don’t slow down until the day they’re cooked and eaten.
Lobsters grow by molting. They shed their old shell to reveal a new, soft shell that will eventually grow and harden around them. By the time they’re done, there’s no sign of the lobster they were. It’s an exhausting, dangerous process. It takes a tremendous amount of energy and leaves them exposed and vulnerable while they’re in the middle of it.
Want to know the only sign that a lobster is dying?
It stops molting.
I had happily killed a lot of lobsters before I learned this fact. Suddenly the lobster became Momofuku’s unofficial mascot. Never again would we fear the grueling work of breaking ourselves down and gluing ourselves back together again. That cycle of building and destroying and rebuilding is not something to overcome. The human equivalent of not wanting to molt is trying to make life easy, refusing to grow or be self-reflective.
I can’t say if it’s healthy or normal to be so concerned with growth, but I know for sure that it makes Momofuku a hard place to work, especially because our definition of growth isn’t restricted to a straight arrow on some financial projection. Sometimes our obsession with learning and improving can actually be to the detriment of the bottom line. Marge is with me. She gets it, but not everybody does right away.
I was in a Fuku board meeting recently when someone told me that I was the worst businessperson they’d ever met.
Fuku is supposed to be our scalable fast-food concept, but I was suggesting we make more items to order and diversify the menu; I was saying we should slow down a fast-food business. I know how dumb it sounded, but I had seen pretty clearly that the key to a successful QSR (quick-service restaurant) business was hospitality. People want to see their food being made. I’m not just talking about scooping it out of a steam table into a bowl. Let’s not treat people so cynically.
No one liked my ideas. I’d surrounded myself at Fuku with smart people with business degrees and proven track records, so I deferred to them.
On the other hand, when we had the chance to open a small, standing-room-only restaurant on the third floor of the Time Warner Center down the hall from Thomas Keller’s Bouchon Bakery, I vowed to do the exact opposite of what a Harvard business study would tell you to do. We were opening a full-size Noodle Bar next door, which would be our main source of revenue. In the adjoining postage-stamp-sized space, we would be free to take a chance on something we’d never done before.
At the time, we were also busy working on pre-production for the second season of Ugly Delicious. Among the subjects we were exploring was one I’ve mentioned before: the vertical spit and its various uses around the world, from shawarma and gyros to al pastor. Wherever this ingenious meat-cooking device lands on earth, a culinary tradition seems to develop. It all feeds into this universal human compulsion to wrap meat in some kind of bread.
We’d been working on our own flatbread recipe based loosely on both Chinese and Korean traditions—a yeasted dough that we would roll out to order, griddle on a flattop, and call bing after the Chinese term for flatbread. The idea of making cooked-to-order flatbreads in a mall flies in the face of traditional reason, which is why I immediately loved it. At Bāng Bar (bang means “bread” in Korean), we would serve a hybrid creation: made-to-order bings wrapped around spit-cooked Korean barbecue.
The pushback from the kitchen came hard and fast.
We won’t be able to make enough bread!
“Well,” I said, “we’ll just make as much as we can.”
Next, I told them to try putting mortadella on the spit.
It looks so stupid. And the fat all renders out!
First of all, I couldn’t care less about it looking stupid. Secondly, there was no shortage of pork fat at the restaurants. Why not cure some of it into lardo and layer it between thick slices of mortadella? We did, and it was awesome.
I want Bāng Bar to be completely antithetical to common sense. I want it to be a safe haven for working stiffs in an upper-crust shopping center. The food is cheap—much cheaper than anyone at the company thinks is smart. But if we can do it, why not? Most of all, I want everyone to eat there. It’s the restaurant where we’ve emphasized hospitality more than anywhere else. While you’re waiting in line at Bāng Bar, we do our best to keep you fed with snacks. Potatoes roasted under the spit. Congee. Just a little something to tide you over, served on proper plates with silverware. I tell the team that I’ll be happy when we get complaints about how many blue-collar people we’ve brought into a fancy shopping complex.
We recently held our first company-wide leadership conference. After a period of rapid expansion, we needed to pause for a moment to help the company feel more like one entity and less like a bunch of splinter groups. So we called all the managers and leaders of the restaurants and flew them to Asbury Park, New Jersey, for two days of discussions and team building. The team at headquarters came up with the idea and made it happen. I was just there to do my best impersonation of a motivational speaker.
In my welcome speech, I talked about prizing vulnerability over perfection. It’s better, I insisted, to admit that you don’t always know the answer. It’s okay to ask for help. I also pointed out the problem of prior success: You may, for instance, find yourself dreading another busy night of service at the restaurants, but can you snap out of it and see how privileged we are to have customers? Can you remember to treat every guest as though their business will make or break us?
Marge spoke about fearing apathy and embracing empathy, which has become our central tenet. She cited Neil Young and Rust Never Sleeps, his album of live recordings made during a tour in which he forced his band to do something different every night, lest the act get stale. She addressed life balance and “saving something for the swim back.”* In speaking about the importance of team culture, she borrowed the line “The score takes care of itself” from the great NFL coach Bill Walsh. If we invest in one another, she said, success will follow. She handed out little booklets codifying Momofuku’s philosophy, as well as printouts of David Foster Wallace’s “This Is Water,” the late author’s commencement speech about identifying and challenging one’s inherent biases.
Over the course of the two-day retreat, there was bowling, karaoke, a beach bonfire, a crockpot-cooking competition, and a screening of the mountain-climbing documentary The Dawn Wall.
There’s no way to know how each Momofuku leader will take what they heard at the retreat. I hope they’ve internalized what was said and can see a way to translate it into tangible, sustained action. I hope they know it’s not all supposed to change overnight. The company we want to be is still theoretical, but we have to start somewhere.
* It’s a reference to the movie Gattaca, which we talk about all the time. See rule 33 in the appendix.