Momofuku founder David Chang is a Renaissance guy. And his memoir, ’Eat a Peach’, reveals the intense highs, excruciating lows, and continuous growth throughout his career as a chef, restaurateur, and media guy. I read ‘Eat a Peach‘ a couple of years ago, but there was so much I highlighted from the book (full book notes here), a simple copy/paste job just wouldn’t do justice to one of the most thrilling and multidimensional memoirs I’ve come across. Chang’s raw honesty and ideas on work, creativity, living well and more transcends the food world. It contains as much insight as music producer Rick Rubin’s tome ’The Creative Act’, but feels more rollercoaster than zen. Which is why I loved it. Above all, it’s a book for anyone looking to feel what it’s like to hustle like your life depended on it in one of the most intense and cut-throat industries on the planet.
Chang isn’t without criticism. A former employee of his reviewed the same memoir I rave about from her perspective, and, in all honesty, I doubt I would have survived in the kind of work environment he cultivated. He’s tried to acknowledge and apologise for his behaviour both in the memoir and since its publishing, but scars remain in some of his former employees. He’s also had to backtrack on trying to trademark the popular condiment name “chili crunch”, being perceived as a “trademark bully”.
But his career has undeniably made a dent in the food world, and while there are aspects of his style I’d rather not emulate, there’s a lot more inspiration than not. Heck, I’ve never even been to one of his restaurants in the US before, and yet here I am, on the other side of the planet, talking about his projects like I’ve eaten at all of his legendary establishments (note: one day, fingers crossed). So here are some of the ideas, passages and quotes from ‘Eat a Peach’ that I found pretty unforgettable.
Work work work work work
Choose hard, even when you don’t have to.
“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.”
Squeeze out a few more reps.
“In a kitchen environment…I found a reserve of sheer, stubborn willpower to make up for what I lacked in talent.”
”Eat shit”
“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.”
Channel that ‘hard on yourself’ feeling into something good.
“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.”
Don’t be an heir.
“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.”
Be grateful. Really grateful.
“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?“
Alchemy
Believe.
“You need to kill the critics with the strength of your convictions. Do not cook out of fear or shy away from your vision.”
Try anything and everything.
“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.”
Remix everything.
“The most interesting cooking at Momofuku comes from bridging seemingly different worlds.” Innovation often arises from merging diverse influences and ideas, leading to unique and exciting creations.”
Seek the uncool.
“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.”
Experiment like no one’s watching.
“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.“
The worst thing that can happen is you die.
“If the worst possible outcome is death…then nothing else should scare me, whether it’s pain, hard work, embarrassment, failure, or financial ruin.”
Level up, always.
“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?”
Living, David Chang style
Have a backbone.
“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.“
Show, don’t tell.
“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?“
Do it even though it won’t last forever.
“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“
Push culture forward.
“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.”
Light up your space.
“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.“
Don’t forget people make it all worth it in the end.
“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.”
Given how much David Chang has done and continues to do, I’m amazed he found the time to reflect and look back on his life at all, share with a heap of vulnerability and honesty, and write with such oomph. To experience the full, thrilling ride, pick up your own copy of ’Eat a Peach’, and squeeze in a few episodes of his shows ’Ugly Delicious’ and ‘Dinner Time Live’ on Netflix, which embody much of what he says in the book.
Check out all of my book highlights here.
Also published on Medium.
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