There is an implicit presumptuousness to the writing of memoirs, especially when the person penning the tale has lived to the ripe old age of twenty-three.
If the confluence of his age and ambition is troubling to you, know that it was to me, too: when Ian first came through the doors of Momofuku Ko, I brushed him off. The food world is full of snake oil salesmen and I thought that baby-faced Ian was just a newer model. No one—no single group of people that I can generalize about—is full of more bullshit than luxury food traffickers.
The only way for Ian to prove his worth in this industry was through word-of-mouth. Like most people, when chefs see each other, we gripe about the weather and business, and we relish tales of new scams making their way around town. Tales of the barely legal truffle salesman turned from gossip into something even more rare: whispers about the quality of his product, the reliability of his prices, the fact that he showed up when he was supposed to.
Ian has the savvy to make it in this business; he’s hard as nails when he needs to be and he knows how and why to make a tough decision. But it’s his integrity that will serve him the best, and the quality that has earned him my trust. It’s so easy to take short cuts. Integrity is the thing that keeps you from doing that and is something I’ve learned through this book that he was raised with, something indivisible from who he is.
So once I knew I could trust him, I got to know him. And you know what? He’s a dork. Huge dork. A dork in the best way possible: He has a true, deep expertise in everything he sells—caviar, truffles, fish. He knows the stories that we need to sell the stuff tableside; he knows the facts of the production that help us decide what’s right for our restaurants and our customers. He’s never not had an answer for me and he’s never been wrong when I’ve double-checked him after he left the restaurant. He’s like Luxury Foods Google but with lungs and a tousle of black hair.
I am enamored with Regalis—I like that instead of the tech path, Ian is building a company the old way, through relationships and his personal guarantee, by selling real, treasured items, not some app we’re all gonna forget by next summer.
I think he can disrupt the entire luxury foods market. I think he’s gonna go far. But regardless of the success that I am sure will come his way, I will never not call him Truffle Boy.
—David Chang, 2016