Eat a Peach – David Chang (with Gabe Ulla)

Kindle Highlights

On Asian Identity

• “The downside to the term tiger parenting entering the mainstream vocabulary is that it gives a cute name to what is actually a painful and demoralizing existence. It also feeds into the perception that all Asian kids are book smart because their parents make it so. Well, guess what. It’s not true. Not all our parents are tiger parents, tiger parenting doesn’t always work, and not all Asian kids are good at school. In fact, not all Asian kids are any one thing. To be young and Asian in America often means fighting a multifront war against sameness.” Location 143

Early Career Struggles

• “I don’t know what prevented me from quitting on the spot. Pride, I suppose. I’d told everyone that I was going to be a cook. So I showed up for work the next day, and the day after that. In fact, I didn’t take a day off for a year. I worked for free until the magical day, six months in, when Marco sat me down and offered me a paid job.” Location 388
• “In a kitchen environment (as opposed to the golf course), I found a reserve of sheer, stubborn willpower to make up for what I lacked in talent. Here in front of my cutting board, I could see slow but definitive results. It gave me purpose. I would park myself on the couch at home after my shifts, watching recorded PBS cooking shows while practicing my technique. For hours I’d just sit and tournée potatoes, carrots, and turnips. I don’t remember doing anything else for that whole period of my life other than cooking and studying cooking.” Location 392
• Note: Grit reserves to overcome shortcomings in talent
• “I was still so bad at my job. Everyone knew it, yet they showed me patience. I recall crying another time at the restaurant after getting passed up for a position on the hot line—I’d be stuck on garde manger, the cold appetizer section. I was sobbing in the boiler room when Marco walked in to console me. I was good at this, he said, but I needed to get better. He told me I’d be fine. For some reason, I believed him.” Location 401

Mentorship and Learning

• “The result is that he’d become everything a cook should be. I had a lot left to learn. Benno took a special interest in my development. He pushed me out of my comfort zone at every opportunity. Looking back, I realize the huge debt I owe him. In the moment, I just thought he was trying to make my life hell.” Location 408
• Tags: favorite
• “I liked working both prep and service. I never became discouraged by the long hours or the physical toll. It could all be overcome through willpower.” Location 418
• “The reward, if you survived and showed a little verve in the process, was the privilege of working directly with Carmellini to come up with a special. You got to flex in front of your peers, but you’d need to conceive, prep, and have the special ready by the next service, while also taking care of your usual tasks. It’s a common dynamic in high-end kitchens—the better you get at your job, the harder it gets—but it was especially pronounced at Café Boulud.” Location 452

Personal Struggles and Philosophy

• “For me, depression manifests itself as an addiction to work. I work hard to control what I can.” Location 585
• “Like so many impressionable college students, I’d been captivated by Emerson and Thoreau, who helped plant the seeds for American Pragmatism. I interpreted their writing to mean that one’s goal should be to live as an embodiment of philosophy, to test one’s beliefs through one’s actions rather than through study or discussion. Cooking was my way of making that happen. If I wasn’t cooking food I believed in, then what was I even doing?” Location 602
• “On the other, there were far more affordable options serving the cuisines of Asia, Africa, and Latin America in humble settings—a genre that’s been lumped together as “ethnic food” since the 1960s. But as delicious as those places could be, they were usually locked into the traditions and time periods from which their immigrant proprietors first came. There really wasn’t a place where you could find something in between: innovative cuisine that was neither married to France nor fixed to the recipes of the motherland, made with high-quality ingredients, and available for, say, twenty bucks. I could tell that race played a major role in America’s slow uptake on this concept, which only made it more personal for me.” Location 607

Realizations and Business Insights

• “I was scrounging to make ends meet, but I could still eat like a king. That was the real epiphany. I could eat extraordinarily well in places that weren’t punishingly expensive. I don’t just mean “cheap eats.” I’m talking about restaurants driven by technique and respect for ingredients and chefs who were just as devoted to their craft as those in the Western fine-dining kitchens that I had come to think represented the only legitimate path.” Location 637
• “My sole breakthrough was a private one: if nothing mattered—if I wasn’t going to beat this depression and I wasn’t going to make it in the fine-dining world—what did I have to lose? Why not at least try to create a world that worked for me?” Location 673
• “My friend the artist David Choe summarized it best for me: work is the last socially acceptable addiction. I agree.” Location 848

Founding Momofuku

• “When I set out to open Momofuku, I remember being paralyzed by each and every task ahead of me. How do I get a permit? How do I get an air-conditioning system? How do we make noodles? Where can I buy a pasta cooker? Why the fuck doesn’t anybody want to work with me? Every problem was an impossibility. The sensation of gritting my teeth, bearing down, and somehow doing what needed doing gave me a primal high. I crave that resistance, whether it comes from the city, my landlord, my staff, or my own shortcomings. It’s not just helpful, it’s necessary. You think a salmon really wants to swim upstream and die? They have no choice. That’s how I feel, too.” Location 859
• Tags: favorite

Advice and Reflections

• “GATHER FROM EVERYWHERE. In my current life, I have the blessing of getting to eat more broadly than almost anyone else on earth. It’s a hugely unfair advantage as a chef. But back then, I hadn’t seen too much more than your average twenty-something American cook. The difference is that I was willing to recognize the value in everything, even places I despised. I was also readily willing to admit to loving lowbrow foods that other people wrote off as beneath them. I wanted to know why people liked what they liked.” Location 976
• “I have no hesitation in admitting to these inspirations, because I give credit wherever I can. My advice to chefs is to be transparent about your ignorance and always honor the source material.” Location 985

Inspirations and Philosophies

• “THE DINING ROOM IS YOUR CLASSROOM.” Location 987
• “I’d have these conversations with myself all the time. Over the course of a week or even a single day, a dish might evolve into something completely different.” Location 994
• “You simply can’t rely on common wisdom in the kitchen. Most of it is built on half-truths and outdated assumptions. Be open to every idea.” Location 1002
• “MERGE. By and large, the most interesting cooking at Momofuku comes from bridging seemingly different worlds. Our restaurant became a place where we would try to replicate the natural merging of ideas, flavors, and techniques that happens when immigrants first arrive in a new place.” Location 1003
• “YOU’LL ALWAYS LOSE WHEN YOU PLAY SOMEONE ELSE’S GAME.” Speaking of Allan Benton, not only was his bacon the catalyst for many of the culinary epiphanies we had at Momofuku, he also personally bestowed me with this nugget of wisdom. And once he said it, I realized Momofuku couldn’t tell anyone else’s story. We got rid of the dumplings and everything else that wasn’t ours. We dedicated ourselves to making people play our game instead.” Location 1018

Business Realities

• “The organization offers lodging and a flight, while the chefs foot the bill for ingredients and extra staff to join them, leaving their restaurants shorthanded. We say yes for fear that saying no could mean upsetting the wrong people or passing up valuable exposure for our businesses.” Location 1052
• “A good chef never forgets that this is a business. All the extracurricular shit we do outside the restaurant should be in service of putting asses in seats. When we do events for the sake of ego, we usually pay the price in cash money.” Location 1054
• Tags: favorite
• “Most Western kitchens function in a brigade system developed by Point’s mentor, Auguste Escoffier. In devising the ideal structure for a kitchen, Escoffier drew on his time in the army. La Brigade applies a military chain of command to the kitchen, with a discrete delegation of roles aimed at encouraging efficiency, precision, and an air of absolutely unrelenting urgency.” Location 1119
• “The result of your labor—the thing you take so much pride in—is shit. Literally, shit. Your work is something that the customer will later flush down a toilet. You may as well be a Tibetan monk who spends weeks constructing an elaborate sand mandala only to sweep it away immediately. (Unfortunately, cooking will not provide you with any of the same spiritual rewards.) To keep going, you must buy into codes that give meaning to your existence:” Location 1128
• Tags: favorite
• “They cut into your heart and brain, and if you ask them later why they did it, they will say that it was for your own good. They were breaking you down to build you back up. Because they care about you. Because it’s how they were taught. Critical thinking, calm communication, rationality, levelheadedness: none of these traits has traditionally been valued in a kitchen.” Location 1144
• “So let me ask again: why would anybody get so mad about food? Because it is just food. And when your co-workers are lazy or inconsiderate or don’t seem to care as much as you—when they treat food as just food—they call your entire worldview into question. They make you feel foolish for believing.” Location 1155
• “Among the many problems with the myth of the model minority is that it erases the nuances of the Asian American experience. It also sows division, both within our community and with others.” Location 1173

Financial Challenges

• “Between the loan and my new rent, I would have a total monthly responsibility of $47,000. I’m not a financial whiz, so whenever I open a restaurant, I try to stick to a general rule of thumb: if I can cover my loans and rent with the revenue from a typical Monday or Tuesday dinner service, it will be fine. Forty-seven thousand dollars was impossible. I was done before we opened the doors.” Location 1188

Innovation and Creativity

• “There were so many ideas on the menu that we’d never seen or tried before. The only unifying thread was that we were nervous about every single dish we served.” Location 1306
• “It’s the velvet-rope effect. If something seems exclusive, nobody wants to feel excluded. We tried to tap into that emotion at Ssäm Bar. While our namesake burritos eventually disappeared from the menu, the pork shoulder we filled them with was too delicious to let go. In its new incarnation, we chose to serve it whole rather than shredding it, with all the fixings needed to make little handheld wraps: rice, lettuce, kimchi, sauces, and fresh oysters. It was our spin on a Korean bo ssam. At first, we just gave it away to friends. Right in the thick of the dinner rush, we’d drop this monstrosity on a table in the middle of the dining room. Just like that, we started hearing the exact question I was hoping for: How do I get that? “Oh, by reservation, and it’s only available at five-thirty or ten-thirty.” And that’s how we filled our restaurant during off-peak hours.” Location 1316
• “By confronting failure, you take fear out of the equation. You stop shying away from ideas just because they seem like they may not work. You start asking whether an idea is “bad” because it’s actually bad or because the common wisdom says so. You begin to thrive when you’re not supposed to. You just have to be comfortable with instability, change, and a great deal of stress.” Location 1328

Creativity Under Pressure

• “I’ve found that the best moment to start working on a new dish is the hour before doors open, when everyone on staff is rushing to shovel food into their mouths and finish their mise en place; every kind of distraction is sure to present itself. On paper, it’s the worst possible time to try to be creative, but for that exact reason you end up with no choice but to make decisions and stick to them. You print the dish description on the menu and then you make it work. You can refine it later, but the only way to shut out all the unnecessary doubts in your head is to impose a deadline, and five-thirty p.m. is as good a time as any.” Location 1335
• “There were new voices in our organization and much more noise from the outside to tune out. We needed to record and examine what worked for us. At least that’s how I would put it now. This is how I explained it to the staff in May 2007:” Location 1340

Communication and Collaboration

• “The Roundtable, as the email list came to be known, grew to include as many as ten participants and encompass all kinds of discussions. On top of sharing sales numbers and information on ingredients, we’d give play-by-plays of memorable meals we’d eaten around town or talk about cooks whom we might want to bring into the fold. Mentions of hangovers were frequent. Quino and I made an effort to be as open as possible about any opportunities we were feeling out.” Location 1366
• “I could throw my craziest ideas out there and put them to a vote.” Location 1369
• “This digital brain trust was nothing like the top-down systems you’d see at most places, where the leader usually keeps only a few trusted operatives aware of what’s truly going on. The emails allowed us to pause at the end of a crazy night and reset for the following day, equipped with new goals. The ceaseless chain of messages—if you slept in, you’d have to go through at least fifty replies—exemplified the aforementioned philosophy that there’s no idea we won’t consider. Everything is a data point we can use. TMI for most people is never enough for me.” Location 1372
• Tags: favorite
• “I proposed breaking the company into subgroups—seven teams of about four people—each consisting of a leader, a veteran, a rookie, and a prep cook:” Location 1379
• Tags: management
• “Momofuku turned into something between a committee and a commune. The Roundtable was an assembly of yellers and poor spellers—my frequent mistake was referring to green beans as “haircoverts”—where everyone’s opinion was not simply welcomed but mandatory. I may have been the most prolific contributor, because I valued the feedback so much.” Location 1392
• Challenges and Adaptations
• “So, as nice a story as it would have been, we didn’t decide to open Ko so that we could challenge what it meant to serve a tasting menu in America. We did it because we were backed into a corner by a meddling bureaucracy and had to find a way to make money serving far fewer people each night. Momofuku Ko wasn’t a stroke of great ambition or business genius. It was the only option.” Location 1553
• “Tosi needed no time to begin work on our refuge for buffoons. She made herself valuable instantly, fixing a whole lot more than how we documented our pork belly storage. She built out our first office. She helped me organize English classes for staff members who couldn’t speak the language. (Bridging the gap between me and Momofuku’s Hispanic and Latino cooks was foundational in establishing our company’s culture and values.) She identified potential problems in almost every aspect of the operation long before everyone else, and she was never shy about pointing them out. She once ordered new phones for us at Noodle Bar, preloaded with an accompanying message: “You guys need to take care of these new phones better than you do your own busted fucking asses.” Tosi was a total asset for a staff made of people who were more doers than thinkers. She was also, lest I forget, one of the world’s great pastry chefs.” Location 1586
• “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.” Location 1699
• “When the bloggers began eating at Momofuku, I didn’t mind it in the least. 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.” Location 1718
• Media and Publicity
• “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.” Location 1768
• “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.” Location 1771
• Tags: favorite
• “I loved that just when people had decided we were media darlings, we flipped the story to our advantage.” Location 1814
• “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.” Location 1816
• Tags: favorite
• On Motivation and Fear of Complacency
• “I fear the inevitable fall from the top. More than that, I fear what it means for people to think they’ve reached the pinnacle of their profession. What happens to a cook’s motivation when the job becomes about maintenance and not improvement?” Location 1972
• “With a third star, you do everything you can to avoid disturbing the delicate balance you’ve created. No grind. No friction. You’re trapped by your own self-confidence, scared to abandon what you know already works.” Location 1974
• “To thrive in this business, we need the promise of purpose—a reason to tackle the prep list every morning and push to come up with something new and extraordinary. We need hope.” Location 1978
• On Chef Gatherings and the Evolution of Food Culture
• “If they wanted to, chefs could spend the entire year away from their restaurants, attending gatherings and cooking collaborative dinners, usually on the local tourism board’s dime. There was Madrid Fusión and Gastronomika in Spain. Identità Golose in Italy. Omnivore in France. A lot of these events were about making money through corporate sponsors. As chefs grew wiser to the scheme, they would hand the cooking responsibility over to their assistants. The quality of talent got worse. Chefs cried out for something smaller and smarter. Hence, more intimate gatherings like Cook It Raw, MAD, and Gelinaz! These days, everyone just wants a Netflix show. If I sound jaded, it’s because I am.” Location 2006
• “I was invited to participate in Cook It Raw, which was something between a culinary jam session and a Boy Scout retreat. The idea was that every year ten or so chefs would visit a different region of the world together to gain inspiration, shoot the shit, and cook. The trip would culminate in a collaborative dinner inspired by the location. In its early editions, Cook It Raw was one of the purest of all the chef gatherings.” Location 2076
• “My eyes were locked on Barbot, whom I idolized. One of the most polished chefs in the world, he was also a great improviser. Every night at l’Astrance, he risked his three Michelin stars to come up with new dishes on the fly. Here at Noma, he was layering slices of marinated mackerel in a dainty espresso cup with eel, Frangelico, and mushroom purée.” Location 2089
• Tags: favorite
• “There was no one else who understood the staggering weirdness of the opportunities being presented to us. We were the last generation to live through a time before all of this and simultaneously the last generation to benefit from it. In the coming decade, food would become more democratic. More restaurants, more knowledge, less attention span. It would be harder for a chef to stand out as a singular figure.” Location 2127

Event Cooking Philosophy

• “Here’s my patented approach to event cooking: shoot for 70 percent. My philosophy is based on an apocryphal story I’ve heard about how a large financial services firm used to choose their new analysts. They didn’t hire people who scored 100 on their Series 7 exam. They wanted people who purposely aimed for 70, because it meant you knew the material so well that you could confidently shoot for a C-minus and get it. That’s where you want to be when you’re cooking for events. Not the worst and not the best.” Location 2133
• Tags: favorite, management, creativity

On Team Dynamics and Leadership

• “Speaking of deceptive appearances, on the surface, Tosi was this Brady Bunch–looking character who knit scarves for regulars, but underneath she was a massively creative cook—gifted but never too self-serious. While the rest of us at Momofuku raged and roared, she was an assassin.” Location 2293
• “Most people found Tosi’s dishes to be charming and clever. I thought they were among the most subversive creations in the history of American dining. Tosi grew up in a suburban household in Virginia, feeding her limitless energy with horrendous amounts of Dairy Queen and junk food. While so many pastry chefs devote themselves to mastering the European standards, Tosi did not shun what had shaped her. It helped her stand out. She developed her fluency in Americana into a cheery rebellion at Milk Bar, which started out as a bakery in the back room of Ssäm Bar selling confections like birthday cake truffles and “Compost Cookies.”” Location 2300

Business and Expansion Insights

• “Most management deals are transactional. A property—say, a hotel or a new shopping center—pays a well-known chef to come in and set up a restaurant with their name and a menu of greatest hits. The chef flies in for the grand opening, walks around glad-handing diners in his whites, and departs a few days later, leaving a lieutenant behind. The contract stipulates the minimum number of appearances the chef has to make each year, usually not a heavy lift. Management deals are the bread and butter of many global restaurateurs. The true masters of expansion are able to bottle the formulas to their success and consistently maintain a certain vibe and level of quality across vast empires.” Location 2326
• “With that in mind, when the developers told us we could open anywhere in the complex, I chose the one space they didn’t even bother showing me. I noticed it one night when I was trying to find the bathrooms: an awkward black box far away from the main gaming floor in a lost corner of a reviled casino in a country I barely knew.” Location 2343
• “Australia is home to some of the finest Chinese, Thai, Malaysian, and Vietnamese restaurants in the world and has a knowledgeable dining public that appreciates them. What better place to upend people’s preconceptions about fine dining? It would be a big heartfelt love letter to their country, with a little fuck-you on the side. The imaginary dialogue I had with the city went like this: You think you’re Australian? I’ll show you the most Australian restaurant ever built.” Location 2357

Influences and Theories

• “Here’s the top line of what Friedrich Nietzsche is saying in The Birth of Tragedy: all great art is based on the coupling of the Apollonian and the Dionysian. The Apollonian represents order, beauty, truth, perfection. In culinary terms, it’s a tasting menu. The Dionysian is the unpredictable, the uncontrollable, the extremes of ecstasy and suffering.” Location 2410
• “A moment of messy, porky joy like the one at Seiōbo is only meaningful because it’s happening at the end of a linear tasting menu at a casino restaurant. We are trying to show you both the Apollonian and the Dionysian at the same time.” Location 2414
• “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.” Location 2534

Navigating Media and Public Perception

• “I tried to think of chefs who had successfully branched into television without tarnishing their credibility. I reached out to the ones I knew to ask how they’d avoided becoming dancing monkeys. From their answers, I cobbled together a set of criteria for considering media projects: It must be educational. It must fund the creative efforts of the restaurants. It must reflect what I stand for and depict the industry in a fair light. These remain my yardsticks to this day.” Location 2554
• Tags: creativity, favorite
• “What truly made me happy about Lucky Peach was how much harder it made life for everybody else. It wasn’t enough to be a chef with a TV show or a cookbook anymore—now you needed a magazine to tell your story properly. And although we never came close to the circulation of Bon Appétit or Food & Wine, I think we pushed the big brands to be smarter and work harder.” Location 2614
• “Ying brought on an eighteen-year-old kid named Walter Green as art director. Every fourth issue, they completely redesigned the magazine—a signature move inherited from McSweeney’s. If you want to understand Walter’s impact, just have a look at how other food magazine covers evolved between 2011 and 2017.” Location 2626

Integrity and Team Values

• “You can believe me or not, but Momofuku has never been about getting rich. I don’t mean we’re a nonprofit. What I’m saying is that I’m proud that I’ve never let the threat of losing everything—or the prospect of making more money—get in the way of doing what I think is right. I’ve leveraged everything I have for the business. I want to take care of the people who work for Momofuku, in terms of both their well-being and their freedom to be creative, and I have made insanely irresponsible financial choices to do so. I put off making and saving money for myself, so that we could win as a team.” Location 2637
• “Dr. Kim told me that just as people have trainers to help them get in physical shape, he had a trainer who kept an eye on him at work. What I needed, he said, was an executive coach. He asked if he could recommend that his friend take me on as a client—pro bono.” Location 2717
• “Eating shit meant listening. Eating shit meant acknowledging my errors and shortcomings. Eating shit meant facing confrontations that made me uncomfortable. Eating shit meant putting my cell phone away when someone was talking to me. Eating shit meant not fleeing. Eating shit meant being grateful. Eating shit meant controlling myself when people fell short of my expectations. Eating shit meant putting others before myself.” Location 2769

Personal Growth and Transformation

• “The restaurants changed all of that. When I started Momofuku, I killed the version of me that didn’t want to stick his neck out or take chances. Even in its larval stages, when it was more theory than restaurant, Momofuku was about carving out some form of identity for myself. It would be my way of rejecting what the tea leaves said about me. Work made me a different person. Work saved my life.” Location 2847

Embracing Creativity and Authenticity

• “In any creative pursuit, you expend most of your younger years chasing a distinctive look or sound or approach. Think about the great visual artists. They all have a recognizable style, even if it only represents a small fraction of their artistic output. Warhol and his prints. Bacon and his triptychs. O’Keeffe and her flowers. Koons and his balloon animals. Kahlo and her portraits.” Location 2921
• Tags: favorite
• “There were Momofuku facsimiles all over the world. I wish I could say I was flattered, but having copycats meant that we had something that could be copied. I knew that changes had to be made, and not just for the sake of pride or ambition. I needed to subvert people’s culinary expectations within the context of making prudent business decisions. Where was the intersection between making money and making trouble?” Location 2931
• Tags: business, favorite

On Influences and Cultural Commentary

• “The realization came when I met the Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, whose best-known pieces are interactive experiences. He’d cook curry or pad Thai in a gallery, sometimes getting mistaken for the caterer. Rirkrit told me he’d chosen pad Thai because it was the only noodle dish in Thailand that had not descended from China. He chose to cook in electric woks, because they were chintzy approximations of the real deal, and he wanted to comment on the commodification of Asian culture. Every move was intentional. All of it was designed to breathe life into what people too easily wrote off as quotidian or worthless.” Location 2989
• Tags: favorite
• “We started to line the walls with framed posters: Oddjob from Goldfinger, Gogo Yubari from Kill Bill, Uli from Die Hard, Lo-Pan from Big Trouble in Little China, Chong Ki from Bloodsport, and Mickey Rooney’s bucktoothed Mr. Yunioshi from Breakfast at Tiffany’s. All the ugly stereotypical Asian sidekicks and villains from cinematic history—the painful, humiliating images that somehow continued to go unchecked in American culture.” Location 2997
• “You see, Chick-fil-A was only one in a long line of fried chicken–related miscarriages of cultural justice. For starters, the mere act of selling fried chicken in the United States is something originally popularized by the newly freed black slaves—mostly women—of the American South. They rarely get the appropriate credit. I feel strongly that the history warrants mentioning, even if our recipe took most of its inspiration from Asian traditions. The main culinary reference was Hot-Star Large Fried Chicken in Taiwan.” Location 3020

On Culinary Theory and Deliciousness

• “I was now close to defining my life’s work. My brain was on a quest to uncover the underlying systems in the cosmos and then bring that knowledge back to the dining room. I really thought this. The ideas came quickly and were all over the place, I could see that even then. But let’s not confuse being manic with being wrong. It was around this time that I wrote a piece for Wired magazine with the obnoxious headline David Chang’s Unified Theory of Deliciousness.” Location 3096
• “What we consider to be the objectivity of our senses is actually tied deeply into our frame of reference, which is always moving.” Location 3111
• “Cultural conditioning can convince a person to recoil from a dish that’s exactly like one of their own staple foods. Scientifically speaking, sauerkraut and kimchi are basically identical. That conditioning can also force us to cling to notions that prevent the evolution of deliciousness (and society).” Location 3119
• “Only recently have I learned that the vertical spit used to cook al pastor, the trompo, originated in Lebanon. It’s the same exact device that gave us the shawarma, the döner kebab, and the gyro. Lebanese immigrants brought the vertical spit with them to the Americas, where the technology met new ingredients and people, yielding fantastic results. It shouldn’t have come as a shock to me. Deliciousness is a meme. Its appeal is universal, and it will spread without consideration of borders or prejudice.” Location 3125

Confronting Culinary Racism

• “Let’s say a Chinese chef uses four times as many ingredients and spends three times longer making a bowl of noodles. Even the cultured foodie still expects to pay no more than eight or ten bucks. False cultural constructs tell us that pasta can be expensive, while noodles have to be cheap. The same dichotomy exists between almost any Asian (or African or Latin American) dish and its Western analogue. To me, there is literally no other explanation than racism. Don’t even try to talk to me about how the price differential is a result of service and decor. That shit is paid for by people who are willing to spend money on safe, “non-ethnic” food.” Location 3171
• “Our customers would order an Italian dish, something they’d eaten hundreds of times. If all went according to plan, they would love our version more than any other, only to learn that it was made from ingredients that sounded more like a recipe for lo mein than amatriciana. It would be a Trojan horse that upset people’s biases not only in terms of what they liked, but why they liked it.” Location 3177
• “We didn’t want to force dishes together. That’s fusion. We wanted to encourage natural convergences that would predict what food will look like down the road. I thought about the pasteis they sell in the markets of São Paulo, empanada-dumpling hybrids that developed through interactions between Europe, Asia, and South America. I thought about the culinary blending of Asian and Latin influences in Los Angeles. It was too logical not to be inevitable.” Location 3181
• “I could understand the Bolognese reference when I tasted it, but thanks to the starchy gumminess of rice cakes and the liberal use of chili oil, I also thought of mapo tofu. The dish was more than the sum of its cultural parts. It derived its magnetism from the tension between the familiar and the foreign—the diner could decide which was which—and was firmly committed to both.” Location 3194

On Change and Growth

• “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.” Location 3428
• “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.” Location 3458
• “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.” Location 3503
• Tags: favorite
• “The human equivalent of not wanting to molt is trying to make life easy, refusing to grow or be self-reflective.” Location 3514
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• “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.” Location 3524

On Customer Service and Empathy

• “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?” Location 3551
• “Marge spoke about fearing apathy and embracing empathy, which has become our central tenet.” Location 3553
• “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.” Location 3576
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• “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.” Location 3655
• “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.” Location 3658

Parallels Between Leadership and Parenting

• “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.” Location 3685
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Confronting Cultural Boundaries

• “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.” Location 3722
• “I considered my mortality and reached the conclusion that if the worst possible outcome is death and we’re all going to die anyway, then nothing else should scare me, whether it’s pain, hard work, embarrassment, failure, or financial ruin. So long as I’m not hurting anyone else, there’s nothing to stop me from doing anything I want to do.” Location 3763
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On Integrity and Personal Philosophy

• “I always liken it to being a Jedi. It’s easier—and probably cooler—to give in to the dark side. The only way to be a Jedi is to do the hard thing and reject your base instincts.” Location 3795
• “I can never understand the experiences that shaped my parents, how it felt to come to America without speaking a lick of English, the racism they must have endured, the violence they’d fled, or the sense of longing they felt for their homeland. It’s why Asian parents want their kids to study unambiguous subjects like math and science, be good at golf and violin, and avoid liberal arts like English or philosophy or political science or cooking—anything subjective can be taken away from you. If I could stop being so angry, maybe I could understand my dad.” Location 3868
• “But then, all at once, something occurred to me: these facts were only obvious because of Alice. She was the most radical, confident American chef of the past one hundred years. She put figs on a plate at a fine-dining restaurant and said, ‘This is cooking, because I am a chef and I said so.’ Was it really that long ago that I’d been unable to see it?” Location 3896

Advice for Aspiring Chefs

• “Rule 3. Study Shakespeare instead. Even if you’re 100 percent sure that you want to be a chef, I would still urge you to go to college over culinary school. Culinary technique makes cooks. If you want to be a chef, you need a far broader set of skills.” Location 3938
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• “Learn about Asian, European, African, and Latin American history and pay attention to how culture evolves around the world. Study the Medicis, the Ottomans, Genghis Khan, the Aztecs, Jared Diamond, Darwinism. I was a religion major, and studying the Bhagavad Gita changed my life. So did studying logic and Gödel’s incompleteness theorems. Join the debate club. Practice piano. Write for the college newspaper. Take an interest in your fellow classmates and their stories.” Location 3941
• “Pick a state school with low tuition in a vibrant food city like Austin, Houston, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, or New York, and get a job in a restaurant or a bar. Give them twenty hours of your time a week, and don’t just work in the kitchen. Work as a busser or server, too. You will get a sense of the atmosphere and the rhythms of a hospitality operation. Most important, in getting a college degree while working at a restaurant, you’ll test your ability to follow through on your commitments. Plus, a bachelor’s is a way better safety net than a culinary degree.” Location 3945
• “Rule 4. See as much of the world as humanly possible.” Location 3950
• “You need to be surrounded by people and understand why cuisine happens the way it does. Eat everything you can. Take it all in—not just the food, but all the beauty, heartache, wealth, poverty, struggle, racism, history, and art you can find. It’s going to help you empathize with people, which is the most powerful tool at a chef’s disposal.” Location 3954
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• “Rule 5. Fight for the job you want. When it comes to picking a place to work, aim for a restaurant with a kitchen that will push you beyond your skills and comfort zone.” Location 3957
• “All My Favorite Singers Couldn’t Sing. Don’t worry if you lack talent or skills. Tenacity is all you really need. Rule 6. Come prepared.” Location 3965
• “Rule 7. Everything is mise en place, including you.” Location 3983
• “But the idea of mise en place extends more broadly to a sense of readiness (and can apply to life as a whole).” Location 3986
• “Rule 8. Develop a new relationship with time. Be the first one to work, not only because it shows your commitment to the job, but because you’re going to need all the time you can get, especially in the beginning.” Location 3994
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• “Remember that you don’t actually know who these people are or where they’re coming from or why they’ve come in search of nourishment at such a late hour. You don’t know anything about them, and you need to assume the best. Imagine that every guest has chosen to eat their last meal with you.” Location 4002
• “Rule 9. Learn by doing. Volunteer for every available task, regardless of whether you know what the hell you’re doing.” Location 4004
• “Work the morning shift, where most of the prep gets done, not just dinner service. Learn how to make everything on the menu from start to finish. Know every aspect of a restaurant.” Location 4009
• “Rule 10. Make great family meal. One afternoon, I walked into the kitchen at Craft to find our sous chef Akhtar Nawab making samosas. It was a strange sight. We had never served anything even vaguely Indian before. ‘Samosas on the menu today, chef?’ I asked. He told me that they weren’t for guests; they were for us. Akhtar had come in early to make family meal. Every successful chef I know approaches family meal with deadly seriousness. After all, if you don’t care for the people you work with, how will you ever care about the strangers coming into your restaurant?” Location 4011
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• “Rule 11. Choose the harder path. You’re in the basement doing prep, and you realize that there are multiple ways to approach the task, including one that will be much quicker than the method your chef has called for. Chances are, no one will be the wiser if you take the easy route. But you still choose the more arduous path. Why? Because you realize that you’re not cheating the customer or your chef. You’re cheating yourself. You are cheating yourself out of practice and cheating yourself out of building the kind of fuck-you mentality that is vital to your survival.” Location 4018
• “If you’ve got your station down pat, it’s up to you to make things more difficult. Don’t be jealous of your friend who’s already a sous chef while you’re stuck on garde manger. Garde manger is the coolest job and teaches you the most skills. You’re in this to be the best, not just climb the ladder.” Location 4024
• “As you find success, buy new equipment, pay yourself and the staff better, make life easier where you can. But know that the struggle is what gives you and your restaurant life. For everything you make easier, make something else more difficult. Buy yourself some time so you can spend that time pushing yourself in new directions.” Location 4037
• “Your survival instinct tells you to work faster, harder, messier. It may take you years to come to this realization on your own, but when you’re in the weeds, the only thing you can do to save yourself is to stop. Take a step back. Breathe. Assess. Organize your thoughts and your station. Then calmly get back into it. It will go against all your default settings, but it is the only way to survive.” Location 4046
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• “I’ve found that the cooks with the brightest prospects are the ones who are hardest on themselves. The trick is to direct that dissatisfaction to your advantage. Every day as a cook can be a fresh start. There are no lingering effects from the previous bad service. Yesterday’s mistakes are gone. Resolve to be better today. Just know that in three or four months’ time when you move to a new section, it’s all going to feel freshly impossible again.” Location 4053
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• “Twenty years ago it was ramen for me. That was the subject I loved that most other Americans didn’t care about yet. But if I were starting out today, I’d move to Hunan province or study Keralan cuisine or consider the possibilities presented by tired dining sectors like shopping malls. You’re looking for anything that’s been written off as cheap or ignored because it’s not cool. Cool is your enemy. Whatever you decide, make sure to do the homework. If improv is the equivalent of creative cooking, then the best chefs are improv actors who have also studied serious technique.” Location 4068
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• “Sometimes when you’re sure a certain idea will be a failure, you end up surprising yourself and it turns out better than you thought. But I promise that if you take the idea as far as you can and try as many ways of getting there as possible, at some point you will learn something that makes it worthwhile. I see so many young chefs who dismiss a thought without first seeing how it turns out.” Location 4078
• “Rule 20. Start a cult. Whether you’re trying to get more business in the door or raise money for your own restaurant, you need dedicated followers. I’m not talking about fans; I’m talking about believers. You need to move diners with your cooking to the point that they will support you when the rest of the dining room is empty. You need investors who will put money into your restaurant with no expectation of return. You need to kill the critics with the strength of your convictions. Do not cook out of fear or shy away from your vision.” Location 4099
• “People, whether critics or diners, will respond to someone who approaches their work as a life-or-death proposition. They are not accustomed to it, and they will be drawn to it. Therefore, most important of all, you need to believe more deeply than anyone else. You build a cult by showing everyone that you are willing to go further than all of them to see out your vision. You can’t ask everyone else to swallow the Kool-Aid if you’re not going to take the first drink.” Location 4105

Business Savvy and Transparency

• “I’m forgetting many, many other dialects, but the point is, you need to know all of this horrible nonsense if you’re going to survive. Otherwise, you’re almost certainly going to be taken for a ride by someone. There’s no substitute for burying your head in the minutiae.” Location 4114
• “Be transparent. Most journalists are smart enough to detect when you’re bullshitting them, and even when they’re not, there’s no use in bullshitting yourself. Here’s a better strategy: stick to your moral compass, give everything you have to doing good work, and speak honestly.” Location 4130
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• “It’s a devastatingly effective way of communicating what you’re about without giving away the whole store. Just be explicit when you request that something be off the record.” Location 4135
• “You never know who’s going to hold the keys to the castle. It’s tempting to think you’re too important to speak to the young intern who’s been sent to interview you or the blogger who only has fifty followers. But if they approach you respectfully and earnestly, you should never be so stupid and arrogant as to dismiss them.” Location 4144
• “Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, it’s because I orchestrated it. I want to see how people react under duress. I want to see who remains calm and collected. We have this one chance to push ourselves with a safety net. Why not use it?” Location 4160

Leadership and Empowerment

• “You will not be the best at everything you do. Accept that as quickly as you can, so you can adapt. Most chefs are control freaks who feel compelled to have a hand in every decision. But if you want to build something sustainable, you need to learn how to step aside and empower others.” Location 4162
• “Trust the people you hire. Don’t be intimidated if they’re better than you in certain areas. You want employees who feel empowered. They may not always make the same choices as you would, but that’s really the best result you can hope for. You’re trying to build the best team, and no team needs ten quarterbacks. You need players with different strengths.” Location 4165
• “Rule 26. If a fast-food manager can control their temper, you can, too.” Location 4168
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• “I was watching the staff as they tried to keep up with the onslaught of orders from stressed-out travelers. Things were getting a little hairy. The cooks were losing control. Even though it was a McDonald’s, any chef on earth would immediately recognize this situation as a crew in the weeds. I turned my attention to the manager, expecting to see him lose his shit. But he didn’t. He remained calm. He slowed down and organized his troops. He’d seen this before and he knew how to get out of it.” Location 4170

Staying Humble and Innovative

• “Rule 27. Reject prior success.” Location 4180
• “If you or your staff come to work feeling like you deserve all that recognition and praise, you’re fucked. Entitlement and complacency are your enemy. It’s equivalent to the struggles of inherited wealth. Customers can smell it on you, and believe me, they will disappear the second they get a whiff. When you feel the job getting easier, your task is to find a new challenge. Not for some puritanical reason, but because it’s the only way to make it in the long run. The day you stop making mistakes is the day you stop growing. The only mistake is not to learn from your errors.” Location 4183
• “Rule 28. What worked in the past won’t work in the future. The more successful you become as a chef, the further you will be taken away from what you’re good at. It begins with your first promotion to sous chef or chef de cuisine. You were the fastest, most adept cook in the kitchen, but suddenly your days consist of all these new responsibilities that have nothing to do with cooking.” Location 4189
• “Think of it as a video game. As you progress, you have to learn new moves, fight more difficult bosses, navigate more challenging levels. It’s supposed to get more difficult or else it wouldn’t be interesting or rewarding to play. How boring would it be to play the same level over and over again?” Location 4194
• “Once you’ve learned to be a good communicator, other people failing to communicate will become the bane of your existence, which means that you’ll need to develop a complementary skill set: forensic science.” Location 4199

Financial Wisdom

• “Generally speaking, restaurant people are underinformed in all manners pertaining to business. Like a wildebeest at the watering hole, you’ve got to be on high alert at all times for lions in the tall grass. Study all the jargon and legalese that’s designed to confuse you—waterfalls, pro rata, super voting rights—and learn about investor strategy. Do your due diligence on potential partners. See if they have a winning track record. If the deal seems too good to be true, it is. Don’t trust anyone who reaches out to you once you’re successful. And I’m sorry to say, but almost zero partnerships between chefs work in the long run.” Location 4211
• “General rules: (1) The only surefire way to win is to own your own real estate. (2) You will never make money selling your restaurant unless you have something scalable.” Location 4217
• “As you become successful, you will see that the only path of any value is to stop short of the peak and make sure you’re not alone at the summit.” Location 4243
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