When I turned forty, Grace and I started talking about moving to the West Coast. The plan was to rent a place for a couple of months, acclimate, and search for a permanent home. We figured Los Angeles would be a better place to start a family. For me, the move was as much symbolic as anything else. It would be my effort to embrace new challenges and a new city as part of a healthy regimen, rather than as a distraction from the hurt. I would pick up the pieces of the recent disasters and try to make something new.
I would try to help others grow, too. The true measure of a great chef is how many of their alumni have surpassed them in stature and success. I’ve never done a good enough job of preparing others to take me down. Like many chefs, I’ve been guilty of complaining about how it’s impossible to find good cooks these days, and that young people aren’t motivated to succeed. In private, I referred to it as the Millennial Epidemic.
More recently, I’ve started to see it another way. I suspect that a good portion of the people who work with me do want to get somewhere, but they don’t know how. If they don’t get where they want, it isn’t their failure, it’s mine. This improved attitude won’t fix the affliction that makes me snap when I see something I dislike in the kitchen, but maybe it can make me a better teacher in the times when I’m not impaired by my brain.
And so, even though I had half a mind to quit the business, focus on making TV shows, sell Momofuku, do anything but open another restaurant, I went ahead and did it anyway. I went back on the meds for fear of all the potential triggers that would come with putting on my chef whites. At Nishi, I’d worked on menu development, but I hadn’t played a day-to-day role in the kitchen for years. It was what the situation required.
Maybe it was the lingering effects of Nishi’s poor start, but when we first announced that we were coming to L.A., the food media didn’t seem to take any special notice. In my mind, Majordomo felt like our last stand. About six months before we opened, the staff and I locked ourselves in the LINE Hotel in Koreatown. Roy Choi had recently closed his restaurant there and loaned the space to us to conduct what you might call R&D. What transpired was more like boot camp.
I was terrified to be opening in a place that none of us knew very well with a crew who were effectively strangers to one another. I hadn’t worked directly with our chef, Jude Parra-Sickels, since 2006. I was friends with our chef de cuisine, Marc Johnson, but we had never cooked together. Our GM, Christine Larroucau, was new to Momofuku. I’d worked with our wine director, Richard Hargreave, before, at a few of our restaurants. That was it.
We did almost no cooking in the first month. We spent the majority of our days talking. Where would the restaurant be in five years? If it’s a success, why do people love it? If it’s a failure, why did it fail? What would the criticisms be? We ran through these conversations over and over and over. There were history lessons and homework, discussions about culinary theory and values. What do you believe in and what makes you believe in it?
This time was invaluable. It was a moment when I was able to share how I thought and how I hoped the staff would think. I knew that building a culture was paramount, and that we would have to continue to feed it, protect it from negative influences, and adapt with time. It’s like a sourdough starter. You have to keep it healthy or it’ll die.
A week or two before opening, I noticed a new sous chef doing a sloppy job of labeling his mise en place. I told him he didn’t need to use so much tape, and that even if it was just for his station, he should try to write more clearly.
“Okay, chef. I just didn’t think we were being so serious yet.”
I threw a fit for the ages. It doesn’t matter that we’re not open yet, we’re always fucking serious. If you don’t fucking respect your station it means you don’t respect yourself and you don’t fucking respect your co-workers.
I was shaking. When I finally calmed down to the point where I could speak at a normal volume, I told everyone to stop what they were doing. I delivered a half-hour screed on care and the common good. Had my only goal been to stop people from using too much tape, I accomplished it. But I paid the price in morale and trust. On one end of the spectrum there’s constructive criticism. On the other, there’s this. Destructive criticism.
I’d been afraid of this exact moment. Whatever progress I’d made with Marshall Goldsmith and Dr. Eliot had happened in a vacuum. If I truly wanted to become a better leader, I’d have to deal with my anger in full view of everyone, under the extreme duress of opening a restaurant.
Triggers were everywhere. The first year of a restaurant’s life is unending turmoil, especially when it comes to staffing. People come and go as you try to build a lasting team. Every chef is deeply familiar with the torture of investing time and money into training a new cook, only to have them bail as soon as they’re ready to step up.
One day after we opened, a cook explained that he and his wife had been talking. He couldn’t support his family on a cook’s salary, and it didn’t seem like that was going to change anytime soon. His plan was to pivot, attend community college, find a normal job.
This cook was in his early thirties. I can’t count the number of times I’ve told young people who are interested in this profession to get a college degree instead. But this guy had worked for close to a decade at some of the best restaurants in the country. He was valuable to us and to the industry as a whole. More important, he’d told me that he loved cooking.
In the past, he would have been dead to me before he could finish saying, “I appreciate the opportunity.” But I was trying to see things differently. He was telling me he needed something that I hadn’t been quick enough to offer.
I suggested that I could be his personal mentor, if he wanted. We sat down in the dining room and plotted out his goals on a piece of paper. I told him that he was young and this was the time in his life to be taking chances, not playing it safe. I offered to speak to his wife and explain my position. I also told him that there are no guarantees in this business.
He returned the following day. He and his wife had decided that he’d work at the restaurant in the mornings and attend school at night.
That’s a best-case scenario, which is more or less useless as a barometer. A better test would be Ricky and Max.
Ricky and Max were friends before they started working at Majordomo, and they had been working with us for less than six months when they told me they were going to leave to pursue a longtime dream.
“We’re going to open a late-night food truck that caters to cooks after service.”
Upon hearing their plan, the last thing I wanted was to help them, which is why I offered to do so. I talked them through the challenging economics of what they had in mind. They remained unfazed.
“Listen, if you stick around here for a full year, I’ll support you,” I said. “You can work part-time while you get the truck ready. You can use our purveyors, store and prep product here. You can open the truck next to the restaurant, and we’ll send customers there. I don’t need to have any skin in the game.”
While they deliberated, I grew more impatient. I had never made a concession like this in my life. I was investing even more in these two, knowing full well that they would ultimately be leaving. I was pissed that they didn’t recognize the value of what I was offering them.
After a few weeks, they announced that they were going to leave. They were rejecting my help.
I delivered a parting message: “Looks like I’m getting into the food cart business.”
I was bluffing, but I wasn’t kidding. If they wanted to succeed, they needed to imagine a hundred people like me breathing down their necks. I told them that they were now my competition, and that their only hope was to outwork me. “Every time you take one of my dollars, I’m going to work harder to put you out of business.” In the old days, I might have actually followed through, opened a food truck, undercut them in price, and outhustled them. So I guess you can count that as progress.
As for the menu at Majordomo, I told everyone it would be like a Korean American Cheesecake Factory. There would be a big menu and large portions. It would be fun, and you’d eat dishes without knowing exactly what they were or where they came from. We would resist the urge to overdescribe our thought process, as we’d done at Nishi. It would require a tremendous amount of thought and planning to create a new food philosophy that fit Los Angeles, but if we did our jobs right, you wouldn’t see that work at all.
Going into it, there were only a few items I knew we’d have on the menu. Both were big, spectacular beef rib dishes. First was a take on the kalbijjim at Sun Nong Dan, an L.A. institution that specializes in a bubbling pot of spicy braised short ribs with a heap of melted cheese on top. The other was a whole smoked plate beef rib, inspired by the meat master Adam Perry Lang. The first time I tasted APL’s smoked ribs, he was simply slicing and serving pieces by hand over a picnic table. No sides, no sauces. Just meat and a little salt. My immediate reaction was that I would have paid any amount of money to eat those ribs. It was event cooking—something I would travel for to eat.*1 At Majordomo, our twist would be to season APL’s ribs with my mom’s kalbi marinade.
I was preoccupied with the notion of celebratory dining. The only reason why Angelenos would fight traffic to get to our restaurant would be if they felt that eating at Majordomo was a special occasion. For our opening night, I suggested we roast a whole animal on the patio.
The team would be cooking for two hundred paying customers for the first time. There was plenty on their plates already. “We’ve got so much outdoor space” and “How sick of a surprise would that be” were the reasons I gave for this dumb, punishing idea. We didn’t even know what permits we would need to cook an animal al fresco. The team groaned.
I’d noticed that as we crept closer to opening night, everybody was beginning to feel comfortable, and that comfort was driving us toward efficiency. It’s understandable. They saw their priorities as dialing in the menu and polishing up service, so that the operation would run as smoothly as possible when the time came. I threw out a second idea for opening night. I told everyone that instead of seating guests at the kitchen counter as we’d planned, we’d use the bar as a literal ssam bar. Guests would line up and help themselves to pork butt and all the fixings. A logistical nightmare.
What I truly wanted wasn’t a roast goat or pork buffet, but for everyone to embrace the paradox of feeling completely prepared and completely unprepared at the same time. By tossing outlandish propositions at them, I hoped the team wouldn’t flinch at an unexpected crisis. They’d be simultaneously loose and on high alert.
I know I sound like the Joker ranting about chaos being for the greater good, but I swear it’s true. When diners walk into a room that’s about to burst with excited energy, they can’t help but feel it, too. Sometimes you’ve got to inject a restaurant with that vitality however you can.
I scrapped both plans before our first service, but the spirit remains central. For example, one of my favorite Majordomo dishes is a whole boiled chicken. We present the bird to the table in a big pot, bring it back to the kitchen to carve it, and then return with a beautiful platter of rice topped with the sliced breasts and two different sauces spooned over the top. Once guests are finished with that, we bring out a soup made from the carcass. It’s so good.
After we opened the restaurant, I had to return to New York for a few weeks. Every night, I read the daily reports from L.A. Here’s what the Domo team wrote in one dispatch:
They had cooked enough services to realize they could improve flow and make things easier on the staff with a little bit of bait-and-switch. A smart decision and common practice. The guest would have no idea that the chicken they’d seen wasn’t the same one they were eating.
I wrote to Jude and the rest of the Domo team saying we would discuss it upon my return, which they accurately interpreted to mean we were going back to the hard way.
It had nothing to do with integrity. I didn’t care about fooling the diners. What concerned me was the precedent we were setting. I worried about the mindset of the server whose job it would be to parade a stunt chicken around the dining room. I was terrified of our culture stagnating. The dish was meant to be a difficult pickup that required constant coordination between the front and back of house. That was what made it great. If they wanted to sandbag it, they needed to figure out how they would make up for the lost energy elsewhere.
Hugo was supposed to be born in L.A., but he ended up a New York baby. After a complication with the pregnancy, Grace felt more comfortable being close to her doctor in New York. It wasn’t what we intended, but we made our way back to the East Coast, where we had an apartment and a community of friends. For once I couldn’t just force a plan to happen simply because I thought it would be good for work. I had a family to consider.
Hugo is my totem. I look at him, and I am grounded. My son. The purest love I know, and my greatest responsibility. I’m worried about how I’ll provide him with the friction he needs to grow into a strong, self-possessed person. My instinct is to spare him every ounce of potential pain, but I know that what he needs is to feel the hurt of heartbreak and rejection. He needs to fall down, so he can learn to get back up. He’ll have it easier than I did, and I’m nervous about it.
I think about Hugo all the time at work. I wonder if being a good father and a good leader are the same thing. Every day at Momofuku, I’m confronted with the temptation to tell people how to spare themselves some frustration or pain, but I know that’s not going to make them better.
A year after Majordomo opened, some of the staff began to burn out. That place is a beast. It’s one of our busiest restaurants and Momofuku’s first foray into the West Coast. The creative and operational demand is extraordinarily high. Not that anything terrible was happening. The team there is too talented and conscientious to allow much to fall through the cracks. But in some ways, that was the problem.
For instance, the chefs were looking to spend more time with their families. I did some quick math and told them that they could probably save more than fifty hours a week if they trained someone else to expedite. In case you aren’t familiar, expediters are the air traffic controllers of the kitchen. They keep track of all the order tickets coming in and keep the various stations coordinated. Usually, the person expediting is the executive chef or one of the sous chefs, but I’ve begun to see that as a total misuse of time. Sure, in a small tasting-menu restaurant, the chef can stand in the center of the kitchen and have their eyes on everything. But at a place as large as Majordomo, I’d much rather see my chefs wandering the kitchen teaching young cooks, ensuring quality across the board, than hunkering down at the expediter station.
Expediting is exhausting, unrewarding work that chefs only embrace because it’s something they know they can control. It’s a classic behavior. You get put in a position of leadership and suddenly you gravitate toward what you hate most—paperwork, expediting, inventory—because you know how to do them and it gives you some sense of security.
I proposed that if they could give it up and focus on the bigger picture, they could be home every night. I suggested that they try giving some young cooks a shot at expediting for a couple of hours each night. Or train some front-of-house people to do it. Or just hire expediters.
A few weeks later, I asked how it was going.
“We tried, but it didn’t work.”
I asked how many times they’d tried. Once.
At first, it made me crazy. I’d given them what seemed like a direct path to more time, but in my opinion, they’d given up way too early. I want them to have life balance, and I thought I’d provided them with a direct path to finding it on their own. But the fact is that their only sin was wanting to soldier through and do things correctly. If it was anyone’s failure, it was mine as a leader. I’m asking them to walk a near-impossible line.
As another example, after we opened Majordomo, I tapped Eunjo Park to head the kitchen at our next restaurant, Kāwi. We were opening in Hudson Yards—a megadevelopment in New York that everyone in the city was apprehensive about. It was a huge mall and—you may be sensing a theme here—the last place anybody would be looking for an interesting dining experience.
Jo is one of the most talented, tough, honorable, and caring young cooks to ever come through our doors. She also has a ridiculous résumé that reads like a foodie’s bucket list. Everyone at Momofuku respects her. But she had never been the chef of her own restaurant before. She’d never even been a sous chef. By all traditional metrics, she was too green for the job. Nevertheless, I was certain she would go on to be an important chef who could, under the right conditions, single-handedly change what it means to cook Korean food in America.
The glaring inconsistency about Momofuku has always been that I’m Korean, but the restaurants have Japanese names and serve more nominally Japanese food than Korean. (I got away with it because many Americans don’t care to distinguish between Asian cultures.) My preference for Japan can be at least partially explained by my grandfather, who, as I’ve mentioned, basically grew up thinking of himself as Japanese. There’s also the fact that Korean culture tends to be extremely wary of outside interpretation, whereas the Japanese will freely incorporate whatever influences come their way. Even as a Korean American who is more or less an outsider to my mother culture, I’m constantly fighting off the impulse to protect Korean traditions.
Years ago a friend invited me for a meal put on by a Korean chef at a private supper club in Tokyo. I can’t remember the chef’s name, but I remember her celery kimchi.*2 I hated it. It was so delicious and so offensive to my traditionalist sensibilities. For days I thought about that meal and the liberties the chef had taken with Korean cuisine. There’s no way she would have been able to do what she did in Korea, but in Japan, she was free to explore her own cuisine. I began to understand that what holds us back from culinary progress is often some cultural roadblock that we honor in the name of preservation—the kind of arbitrary roadblock that says, You’re not supposed to do that with kimchi.*3
I spent a good portion of my career avoiding the perception that I was messing with Korean food. For many years at Momofuku, we buried any sign of Koreanness under other influences and disguises. While cooking has enabled me to fight battles and explore subjects that I’m too scared to approach in real life, I couldn’t overcome the shame and anxiety I’d felt about Korean food since I was a kid.
I’ve slowly become more comfortable exploring my heritage. After all, if you could buy gochujang-flavored potato chips on American grocery store shelves, maybe it was safe for this gyopo to cook Korean food, too. Over the last few years, I’ve begun to feel an urgency to see what Momofuku can do with Korean cuisine.
While we didn’t serve banchan or bibimbap or tofu stew or any other obvious Korean signifiers, Majordomo had actually been our most Korean restaurant to date. There were more Korean names on the menu than ever before, more Korean spirit to the service, more Korean design touches. The goal was to keep asking hard questions about cultural truths, specifically what makes a Korean restaurant Korean. I looked at what we were doing as a form of appropriation, with the appropriator being me, an Asian American man.
At Kāwi, I wanted Jo to take the idea even further. With the opening more than a year away, I flew her to Los Angeles to spend a few weeks living with me and Grace. Every day she was in town, I gave her the same assignment: cook her version of a traditional Korean dish.
Everything she brought to the table was too polished. Too European and overly technical. Jo knew how to cook this food in her bones, but it was being filtered through years of training and learned habits. When I asked her what she wanted to say with her food, she said she wanted to change people’s perceptions. She wanted to capture the joy of the food she ate growing up. But it wasn’t showing up on the plate. I know it sounds maniacal. If I knew what she was doing wrong, why didn’t I just tell her what to do?
Finding a point of view and expressing it through one’s cooking is a near-impossible task. I could see the hurt that was in store for her and all the other young chefs at Momofuku. I could see them all grappling with the same issues I had wrestled with, and I desperately wanted to step in and do it for them.
For the next twelve months, Jo struggled. There were tears and sleepless nights, disastrous test dinners, whole menus scrapped. She inched her way forward, day by day. When she opened Kāwi, I was ecstatic for her and the team, but the fight is far from over. She’s still finding herself. I’m so fucking proud of her.
*1 There’s a very short list of dishes like this, and in my mind, Peking duck is at the top.
*2 For many years, dating back to my pre-Momofuku days, I kept handwritten journals with detailed notes about almost every restaurant meal I ate, and stored them in the basement of Ssäm Bar. During Hurricane Sandy, the basement flooded, and I lost all of it, as well as my entire collection of rare cookbooks.
*3 I think the reason why minority chefs in America find cultural appropriation so upsetting is that we feel obliged to uphold these arbitrary proscriptions, while white chefs do whatever they want. We’re following the rules and they’re not. Most of the time, they didn’t even bother to learn the rules. I decided that I should just start playing the same game.