Restaurateur and chef David Chang

Josh Hamilton: I’m Josh Hamilton.

Joe Skinner: And I’m Joe Skinner.

Josh Hamilton: And this is the American Masters podcast where we have conversations with the people who change us. Today we talked to restaurants here chef and media personality David Chang.

David Chang: I don’t want anyone to tell me that I’m some kind of genre. I’ve never said my food’s Korean. I’ve never said that my food’s Asian. I’ve never said that it’s southern. I’ve always said that it’s American food. I look at what America is as food and it’s genuinely everything else. All right it’s not America. It’s literally immigrant food.

Josh Hamilton: Since David Chang first opened Momofuku noodle bar here in New York in 2004 he’s been forging a legacy of food that doesn’t restrict itself to national or cultural boundaries. He’s now opened over a dozen restaurants ranging from the luxury tasting menu at New York’s Momofuku Ko, to the fast casual fried chicken joint Fuku. You can find his restaurants in New York, L.A. and really all over the world.

Joe Skinner: Amidst this growing empire I think David is highly aware of the legacy that he’s building upon. He said that the word Momofuku translates to Lucky Peach. But I think it’s no coincidence that it’s also the name of legendary inventor of instant ramen, Momofuku Ondo.

Josh Hamilton: Chang is also increasingly involved across the media landscape as a podcast host on the Dave Chang show and on Netflix with his newest travel series Ugly Delicious, which explores the evolution of dishes or concepts from regions around the world. Joe recently had a chance to talk with David about these new pursuits and much more.

Joe Skinner: Thanks so much for coming in.

David Chang: Excited to be here.

Joe Skinner: So how do you think food is a vessel for storytelling?

David Chang: Well food is maybe the least. How should I say this. I don’t think people would realize how important food is other than like nutrition and sustenance. But the fact is everyone is eat everyone would rather eat well and it just is like an artifact of culture of both past present and where it’s going to go. So in some ways it’s the best way to talk about some really important very difficult subjects.

Joe Skinner: In Ugly Delicious in the first episode, you eat Domino’s and you talk a lot about how food is kind of tied to memory too.

David Chang: I think you try to associate food at least I do food with good memories growing up. There’s like two kinds of cooking there’s cooking that you’re trying to nourish and feed someone and that’s something I feel like I experience growing up as a kid with my grandmother and mother making me food. And later as a professional cook, I think it’s less about nourishing and more about feeding one’s ego a little bit. And I think there’s got to be a better compromise between those two especially in a professional kitchen. So one is about creating new identity, new memories. And that is the kind of cooking you see in a professional kitchen that wins awards and such not all cooking but the cooking that I’ve learned from. And then you have cooking that is about literally trying to take care of another person. And that is something I feel like has gotten lost along the way at least for myself, can’t speak for anyone else, and I’m trying to get some balance to that. There’s got to be a happy compromise for me to be able to find a way to cook things that I may not have appreciated in the past or seen how important they were. So home cooking to me is always tied with some of the best parts of growing up and nostalgia can be a weird thing. It can be used to cover up some difficult moments in one’s life. But food for the most part when you eat something delicious. It’s very hard to associate that with tough times. And even in tough times when I’ve spoken to people that you know have had very difficult upbringings, oftentimes like sharing a meal is the highlight of their family and growing up. So if you can, as a chef, what I would like to do is find a way to create those memories through new food experiences.

Joe Skinner: Interesting. So is there a food that you were when you were growing up that that kind of triggers all those memories for you besides Domino’s?  

David Chang: Yeah well you know quickly speaking about Domino’s. I think another thing that food can be is about judgment and more and more when I interact with the world or experience new things I’m trying to reserve my judgment on something. And Domino’s Pizza was one of the first pizzas I grew up in eating regularly. Growing up in Northern Virginia. But at that time was sort of just farmland. Now it’s obviously pretty very well developed but I love Domino’s growing up as a kid and I’m not embarrassed to say that and occasionally that nostalgia wins out and sometimes order Domino’s and I think that as a food person and and I think snobbery can be so extreme in food culture. Foodies, though it is a term I don’t love but everyone’s in pursuit of what is the best and the most artisanal and so on and so forth. But a lot of people don’t have means or maybe like for myself like I could easily envision my life where I never left Northern Virginia and it’s quite simply possible that I could think that Domino’s is still the best pizza. It doesn’t make me a dummy, right? Just because I didn’t get to interact with the world and I’ve been very fortunate to actually go out and taste some of the greatest pizza in the world, and I think it’s a very relative pragmatist stance. It’s that just because someone doesn’t know better doesn’t mean that they’re not valid right then they’re their food ideas can’t have weight. So, you know, I don’t even know where to begin, once I go down this road I can never come back.

Joe Skinner: I mean I’ve been in defense of the handmade pan for years now. And Domino’s, yeah.

David Chang: Pan pizza’s great! And the thing is like if it brings you joy, right? Why should you feel embarrassed about it?

Joe Skinner: Right and I feel like there’s so much conversation now, now starting to happen around privilege and I’m wondering you know is this idea starting to kind of permeate in the cooking world beyond what we’re talking about right now? Beyond just us in this room.

David Chang: Slowly, things happen to change very slowly in the food world. It is I think for the most part and I don’t know the reasons why it’s resistant to change.

Joe Skinner: Do you think ramen is kind of part of this this world? When you think of ramen in New York do you think of expensive or even kind of mid-level, but when you think of it in Japan obviously it’s incredibly cheap often and you know you get it in the subway-

David Chang: Well it can be expensive too, but the thing about ramen and it was in my opinion it evolved because it was of the subculture right? I’m not going to say Japanese culture is sort of rigid and caste-like but it sort of is, particularly when it comes to food. I often joke that the great documentary, Jiro Dreams of Sushi, and what doesn’t get sort of represented is, Jiro Dreams of Sushi because he can only dream of sushi. He’s not allowed to have dreams of pizza or opening up a yakitori spot. You know the die is cast pretty early on when you decide to go down the rabbit hole of whatever path you choose or are allowed to choose. And ramen to me was again, affordable. It’s not always cheap, it’s not as expensive, but it’s affordable for the amount of labor and love that goes into a bowl soup. And it was sort of representative of some kind of counterculture that was very appealing to me when I spent time in Japan. And in America, what I realized when I tried to open up Momofuku Noodle Bar in 2004 was eating great food affordably with great ingredients, weirdly enough didn’t exist in 2004. And the fact, is all of these people that noodle soups… because noodle soup is not new, but the specific genre of ramen wasn’t necessarily new either but the sort of fervor and passion I saw that the Japanese had for ramen is very similar to barbecue regionalism, pizza, fried chicken, all of these things that people love, and I was like this has to be… this feeling has to be sort of universal. So it was a matter of time before I think ramen sort of took off and we’ve been on this sort of 15 year ramen boom since.  

Joe Skinner: And so were these kind of the things that were swimming in your head when you first opened Momofuku Noodle Bar?

David Chang: You know I opened Momofuku Noodle Bar without really any clear idea of what the goal was going to be. I just sort of think… you know in retrospect it seems to be pretty clear to me now. But if I had to put myself back at the age of 26, I had no idea what I was doing. Yeah I think we – when I say we – was probably me and Joaquin Baca at the time, but we were trying to prove people wrong. I think including ourselves and very much looked at the opportunity to run a 600 square foot restaurant as you know what if this goes down in bankruptcy it doesn’t really matter, we’ll find a way to pay it back, I’ll find a way to declare bankruptcy. All of the things that I was sort of afraid of, all of a sudden I wasn’t afraid of anything, I wasn’t afraid of failure. All right. And we failed a lot. And that allowed us to sort of grow.

Joe Skinner: You talk a lot about this iterative process. Can you speak a little to that, has that always been intentional too or do you just kind of like… Once the ball gets rolling kind of thing? Figure it out as you go?

David Chang: It’s funny I talk about this ideation quite a bit with my younger cooks and chefs and when I say younger I’m talking about like years of experience, you know, in the kitchen. Because there’s something about having an idea in your head that I’ve learned over the years doesn’t work if you edit it in your head like I’m not a genius. I don’t think anyone can truly be a genius in the craft that we do. People are certainly more talented than others but you’re not born as this perfect prodigy. Cooking is literally the definition of screwing up over and over and over again. Some people will screw up less. But for me I think I learned pretty early on that when I was going to start this restaurant that no one was going to teach me anything else, that I had to learn it on my own accord. And the idea that I was sort of free to make mistakes in a very transparent fashion because we had an open kitchen everything was right in front of everyone that warts and all had to be. It’s just, there was nowhere to hide. So I was very vocal and very open about the mistakes that we’d made, literally from burning myself to making a bad dish. I had nowhere to hide and what I learned along the way, and I don’t think I would have done this had I had a closed kitchen or had a larger budget to work with, was if I make a mistake it’s only a mistake if I leave it there. Right? And I don’t know exactly what the end goal is gonna be. We all have an idea of where we would like to be. So I am sort of goal oriented and very competitive with myself and I sort of have a feel… I know how I want to feel about a dish, I know how I think I want a customer to leave our restaurants feeling something and that feeling is what I’m trying to reverse engineer. How do I get there. I’m open to anything and everything. And the more I sort of close myself off to potential avenues I tend to screw it up. I sort of phrase it as don’t edit your idea in your head. And I think part, there’s a lot of reasons why people would do this if they’re making a dish they don’t want to be seen as someone that’s sloppy or dumb or someone that makes a mistake because there is an air of, “I have to look like I’m better than everyone else.” Two, people are sort of just lazy right. Like they don’t want to screw it up and they feel like, “Oh if I just eliminate this step and I just do this,” and they do this in their head right? Let’s just say whatever dish they think they can edit version 10-20 in their head and I don’t think they realize that if they actually go through every version of every iteration and really critically think through all the mistakes as to why it didn’t work and they’re just tenacious to get to that goal. Two things either happen: one is they don’t get there and it’s just something they have to shelve for a later date, which happens all the time. Or, what happens more often than not at least myself, is you get to a point and you’d never thought you were gonna get there because you had no idea what kind of mistakes you were gonna make. And as long as you keep that like a living breathing organism and it’s, I guess the best way you describe it is like driving a car. And anytime you make a decision that is binary, that’s an either or proposition, you screwed it up. And that’s like turning into like a closed neighborhood. I want to constantly be going into different highways and in different avenues that lead to more and more different doors. And that’s a crazy thing to tell a young aspiring cook. Wait a second you’re telling me to screw up. What! That doesn’t make any sense. And even if you don’t follow any of your intuition when you’re doing every iteration, if you’re thoughtful about it really prepares you for future moments. Right? It’s like watching game film per se in sports. So it’s a weird way to think about the creative process. But again for me, it’s been about making as many mistakes as possible and learning from them.

Joe Skinner: Well it feels like an honest way of thinking about the creative process. Fighting back against that idea that you just kind of come out of the womb with talent or with this perfect idea. It takes time to develop it. So you developed a really clear way of talking about this idea. Is this something that you’ve talked about a lot with chefs that you’re mentoring when you’re opening up a new space?

David Chang: I talk quite a bit with my chefs. Anytime I can sort of mentor them and honestly I think this is a lot of my conversations with my shrink.

Joe Skinner: You know our series is called American Masters. I feel like you’re kind of talking about what it means to be a master at something. I can’t remember the Japanese term for…

David Chang: Shokunin.

Joe Skinner: Shokunin. So what do you think it takes to be an American master?

David Chang: That’s funny though because I know I’m here for the title series of American Masters and it’s not a humble brag it’s just maybe some distortion in my own ability to see myself, but I don’t think of myself as a master of anything really. Like in, especially in the culinary world, you know I’m not a precision chef. I’m not technically an expert. I’m proficient at a lot of things and I’m not on that pure actionable level better than a lot of my peers. And I think that’s frustrating to me and to my peer group. The only thing that anything I’ve gotten to be good at as mastery is to not give up. All right. And I somehow found the perfect medium that’s perfect for my sort of stubbornness to never stop. Like to constantly iterate. It’s a really painful process. But every time I fail I have to pick myself up and just throw myself at it again and again. If that’s mastery, it doesn’t sound very romantic. It just seems quite frankly foolish.

Joe Skinner: Well I’ve been to Ssam Bar and you know the skate taste more than proficient, and I’ve been in Momofuku a few times too – it’s little more than proficient.

David Chang: But a lot of that is the group of people that make up Momofuku. I get way too much credit for a lot of the dishes. Like that skate dish, that’s Max Ng’s, and he’s been with me almost eight years. But you know, can I take credit for bringing him on board and like helping him mature? But when he came in Ssam Bar I said, “Listen like I’m going to put you here and you’re going to figure out your own voice.” But more specifically it’s not about cooking anymore, it’s about learning how to communicate, it’s learning about being a leader, you know having a strong moral compass. Somehow along the way, he had a lot of ideas and that skate dish is representative of him coming from Singapore. All right. And there’s other skate dishes along the way that I could tell you exactly what was going on at that moment in time. I think there’s probably like three to four different sort of iconic skate dishes for Ssam Bar. So I don’t know. I constantly wonder what it is that I do that makes some things work, it’s very hard for me to understand.

Joe Skinner: Going back to this idea of an American master you know the American part of it is also something that is sometimes controversial when people talk about your food, and other food that I think is combining cuisines. What do you think makes a dish American?

David Chang: Wow, I have a lot of thoughts on this because I feel like so much of my life has been about finding my identity, and I’m 41 years old now and I think I’m finally comfortable in my own skin. And I think being American for me has been about discovery of what matters to me, right? And I’m so reluctant to say that American has to be one thing because I feel like that’s how problems get created. And if anything I interpret my American experience about figuring out how I fit into this world here in America. How I was raised in the Northern Virginia, D.C.-area and where I went to school. Went abroad. So on and so forth, but so much of it was like… So much of my life was a rejection of all the things that I was supposed to be. And once I started to realize that I can only do the things that I should feel confident about the things that scare me about myself. That’s the thing that I want my food to represent. And American for me is… I don’t want anyone to tell me that I’m some kind of genre. I’ve never said my food’s Korean. I’ve never said that my food’s Asian. I’ve never said that it’s southern or like the American South. I’ve always said that it’s American food. And there’s some, to paraphrase what Wolfgang Puck had said, someone that’s been instrumental in my career, it’s like American food is an amalgamation of… is the greatest melting pot of culinary cuisines in the world. That’s what American food is. And when you really look at just any food in general, it’s all fusion. It’s all some kind of point of view. That it’s easier to understand what’s French or Italian, but like honestly if there’s no collision of cultures you’re not getting any kind of cuisine anywhere. It’s going to be pretty bland. You know? And I look at what America is as food and it’s genuinely everything else. It’s not America. It’s literally immigrant food. And I’d argue that if you’re going to say American food is anything, the majority of American food to me is probably food from the American slaves. Like so much of our food is from black culture. And no one quite wants to see the truth in that but I do think it is.

Joe Skinner: What are some of the dishes that are from that, would you say?

David Chang: Everything from the South. You know? Like that’s really… The American South, to me, is the only true original American cuisine we have. Right? So when I go to Charleston I feel like that is something, whether it’s grits or whether it’s how we eat beans or the spread of spices, all of that stuff sort of came from like the Charleston area. It’s not just fried chicken and biscuits and some of the more stereotypical iconic foods. It’s all of these little things that sort of add up. And if I could say that if America is a hodgepodge of a lot of different cultures I would say I’m not I can’t put a percentage, I’d say a good portion of that comes from the American South. And if you’re going to say the American South has some kind of cuisine that a lot of that cuisine comes from slavery, and that comes from Africa, and a lot of those, like rice for instance and the rice culture that we have and so on and so forth. I’m not… I’m not an anthropologist. I’m not a historian in this regard, but it’s quick when I look at food I see where it all comes from like all it. It’s pretty much a main line from there. And then you have all of these other things and it’s constantly shifting and it’s constantly morphing. If you just look at Sichuan food, you look at Chinese food in New York City, in the past 25 years it’s gone from localized in Chinatown. Right. And I remember moving here and coming back in the mid-90s and it was about the discovery of the soup dumpling. And like people saying…

Joe Skinner: Joe Shanghai.

David Chang: Joe Shanghai! And that was like all the rage and now you have hot pots and Sichuan food here is tremendous. You have so many iterations now, the East Village of New York is probably like the third wave of Chinese food in America. Like how is that not American right? And when you’re using American ingredients you’re on American soil. American territory. That to me is like some of the most exciting stuff that can happen when you see it evolve right before your very eyes. And ultimately I don’t think a lot of people look at that. But in 25 years Chinese food in New York City changed dramatically. It’s not just… No longer Nom Wah Tea Parlor, which is fantastic, and it’s iconic. I mean it’s so much more diverse. And that diversity is what I think makes up American food. It’s like neither here nor there. If anything, most people would want to say that American food is hamburgers and hot dogs. Well that didn’t come from America either right? Definitely didn’t. The hotdog came from Europe and so did the hamburger, right? Whether it’s Louis’s Luncheonette or not like the idea of that stuff originated elsewhere. So I don’t know. I think that we have a hard time describing what American food is. If anything it’s fast food, now. But at the core I see it as anything that’s not sort of whatever people perceive that iconic imagery in their head is, of apple pies and baseball and stuff like that. Maybe that was the truth 100, 150 years ago, but today I think it’s that’s the furthest thing from what American food actually is.

Joe Skinner: As our country kind of becomes… It takes a turn towards a bit more isolationism. Do you think that would affect cuisine? Do you think that there’s going to be more immigrant inspiration for cuisine or is there going to be kind of a pushback on that?

David Chang: This might sound incredibly insane. I sort of feel like if I believe in Darwinism, right, I feel like deliciousness as a human trait is something that is universal. And it’s almost like a meme. You can almost… And I believe IBM actually created some kind of algorithm with A.I. where they can sort of come up with logical food combinations that might evolve when you have collisions of culture. Right? So I sort of in my heart believe that certain combinations of food will… Certain combinations of food that really encapsulate truly delicious things are universal. I’m not saying every single person is going to like it but there are things out there I believe in the world that when you put it together and there’s a combination of ingredients that’s applied with certain culinary technique, it’s gonna be super delicious. And that left to its own devices, it’ll actually find its way. I really believe that the only thing that prevents that from happening is culture and cultural ignorance and a lot of this sort of xenophobia that might be seen towards people from the Middle East or from Latin America, that only slows that growth down. I still believe it will happen. The only time it won’t happen is when you have like a totalitarian state. But at the end of the day if you look at Malaysia or Burma… Malaysian food to me is super exciting because you have indigenous culture of Malaysia. You have Chinese culture and you have India and it’s now merged over, you know, I don’t know how many hundreds of years, into something uniquely its own. It wasn’t forced together. I guess technically you could say that some people might have been forced to immigrate there but left to its own devices it’s created its own thing. It’s like food in some ways is almost like the Galapagos Islands, depending on where you’re at you can almost see it evolve and that’s so exciting to me. And what makes me sad is when someone through ignorance says that shouldn’t be… That can’t go with this. Right? And we’ve seen this time and time again. Chinese food, “Oh that’s not very good.” Right? “You’re gonna get sick from eating Chinese food.” You name it. Right? We’ve seen it throughout history, people stereotype whole groups of people through their food. You know it doesn’t have to be that way. And I just… it’s gonna win. I really believe somehow deliciousness will always win out.

Joe Skinner: Yeah. I do feel like ultimately food is prevailing. In my hometown… There’s only 10,000 people there. We got a Thai restaurant in the past five years and that was a huge development. And I feel like it really kind of changed people’s perspective on Thai culture in the town. You said you know totalitarian states are the only place where maybe this kind of inspiration would have trouble happening. But Anthony Bourdain has touched on this idea that even under duress some of the best dishes can surface.

David Chang: Yes.

Joe Skinner Do you agree with that?

David Chang: 100 percent. But when someone says that something is not valid, I hate it so much. I can never remember the name of the governing body that determines what is actually Italian enough to be pizza right? It’s so ridiculous. It’s all a marketing scam but like it’s a governing body and like most governing bodies there’s gonna be some serious pause I think and it’s very clear that like, who determines what is pizza? It’s so insane to me. When you think that the tomato itself isn’t even Italian. Right. Like how can you say that this designated area of San Marzano tomatoes if you don’t use this then it’s not pizza related. It’s ridiculous. And you can see how certain cultures don’t change and the food becomes stagnant. Number one reason is it’s really good to begin with and they should be proud of it. But like this is why I am actually fearful of people that are proponents of authenticity. I think there’s two kinds again of authenticity, the only authenticity that I am a champion of is one that is trying to preserve and trying to educate because no one else knows what is actually real or false. Someone needs to care for that narrative. And when I… for instance like it’s unfortunate that we don’t have – and I know this because I had to do this thing with Dave Arnold a few years back about what food was in Manhattan pre-1492. Like we don’t even have records of that. That’s gone. All right? We have no idea. And if there is a record, it’s written by the people that won history there. So that’s problematic and I only come up with that because I just thought of it but there I’m sure there’s multitudes of examples of people’s histories through food just like vanished and I don’t want to live in that world.

Joe Skinner: Well what’s an example of a dish that you think has been well preserved over time?

David Chang: Hmm. I think a dish that I think has been well preserved over time is like country ham. And here’s… The thing is I really believe sort of like left to our own devices the only thing that genuinely separates humanity is your access to resources. So over the years as we’ve domesticated the pig it’s not a surprise to me that everywhere you can potentially cure hams we’ve cured hams, you know? I mean there’s like a ham belt. It’s like probably like a hundred kilometers around the world and everywhere where there’s a perfect environment to salt and to hang hams, we hang hams and they’re all delicious. All the way to China to Parma to Iowa to Kentucky and Tennessee. It’s all in the same like latitude. So again when I look at that I’m like, who can really lay claim to anything?

Joe Skinner: Sounds like aliens came down and put hams everywhere around the world to me.

David Chang: You know, like that’s what. I see it’s like that… I love those dishes that were invented pre-refrigeration. And out of necessity. Like, “oh we need a cure this ham so we have it for travel and for winter months. And not only are we going to cure it, we’re gonna make it more delicious.” Like those are the kinds of foods that I just think are beautiful. Because if you do it right you’re literally doing it the same way that generations and generations of people have done before in the past. Like, it’s one of the few things you can do, today, that with all the technology that we have it’s the same that it’s always been done. What were we talking about before?

Joe Skinner: Well we we’re talking now how you know even under duress amazing cuisines can surface.

David Chang: Yeah. I mean just quickly talk about that. It’s assimilation that kills like then the new. Right? And this monolithic thing that I feel like food tries to be is something that has to be fought against because it’s a march towards efficiency, I feel like, that oftentimes ruins the diversity and deliciousness of food and I think assimilation in today’s day and age is probably the closest thing we’ll have to someone saying like if you like this we’re going to expel you from our country or something like that. Like growing up it was really hard to say I like Korean food, right? And I don’t think that’s gonna be the case… It’s weird to me I’m 41 years old and I remember being like seven years old and being made fun of because of the lunches that my mom would make and I would have to tell my mom please don’t. I’d rather… I would throw my lunch away that my mom would make because I was so fearful of being made fun of again and that kind of memory is still playing out in my life today, which is weird because if I was packing those… If I was bringing those packed lunches today in school, it would be seen as pretty cool, which again is not that long of a timeframe. Now all of a sudden how could that one cultural truth about this food not being valid and now it’s very cool, like that’s very hard for my brain to wrap my head around, you know what I mean? Like I don’t even understand how that’s possible. And that acceptance now is happening more and more and more, which is why you sort of even get to the realm of appropriation, like that’s the hot topic in food today. And that’s a whole ‘nother you know yearlong conversation.

Joe Skinner: Well I mean do you think we should be afraid of appropriating food?

David Chang: I’ve had this conversation a lot and oftentimes I’m now come to the conclusion of what David Simon has, who we had on our show last year and you know his claim is, that’s what America is and when we do it really well, that’s the best of America. And simultaneously it’s also the worst of America, when we do it poorly. That’s a lot to unpack. So I don’t know exactly how to feel about that. And for me I’ve been working through this process in my head of what is acceptable and I think a lot of it is just for myself and I’m sure that culture at large could benefit from not acting on something immediately – like withholding your judgment. I’ve used this example a lot. I don’t know why I choose Buffalo but I’ll choose Buffalo, New York. And if I see some individual chef all of a sudden proclaiming that they make kimchi and let’s just say they’re, you know, a white American, white male American, and they’re profiting from it and they’re you know becoming famous for their kimchi, my initial default setting is to get angry, is to not support them, is to almost try to do everything in my power to make it impossible for them to make kimchi again, because they didn’t have to go through suffering, they didn’t have to go through the ridicule and more importantly it’s like, I would rather someone that’s Korean, second generation, first generation, experience that success. But if they happen to make better kimchi, you know like I have to respect that. But I have to check myself because I have to ask myself, what do I believe in as a person? Do I believe in diversity? Do I believe in acceptance? Inclusion? Do I want everyone to see the benefits of Korean culture? That’s like the only thing I can speak about I can’t speak about any other food culture right? So forgive me if I am too Korean-centric. If they can make great kimchi and the only way that maybe they’ll learn to really appreciate Korean culture is by me supporting them. If I tear them down if I say, “Screw you, you can’t do this anymore.” I may turn them into a bitter enemy towards Korean people, you know? I think I just have to be a lot more accepting and to be a lot more generous with my time and my thoughts rather than be bitter and to tell someone they can’t do something for no good reason because the negative position I’m taking is I think one of the reasons why we have problems in food right?

Joe Skinner: Like building bridges instead of building walls from these different cultures. Well let’s shift gears a little bit. All the guests that we’ve had on for this season that we’re working on for the podcast, you know we’ve talked a lot about different artists that might have influenced them. And I feel like a lot of the ideas that you are swimming in, there’s a lot of artists that are kind of adjacent to those ideas. Are there some artists that you think of? I mean in Ugly Delicious in the first episode at least, there’s a Bob Dylan clip that comes up. That felt pretty intentional to me. Can you talk about that?

David Chang: Wow, you know I get so hesitant to talk about artistry and food, which is weird because I think it’s without a doubt a lot of things I’m talking about are artistic in expression. But to articulate it myself is so hard for me to do. I don’t know why. Because I think I’ve been brainwashed that it’s just cooking. Right? And maybe it’s defensive. I’m not sure. But when we were putting that thing together you know I didn’t even know that you could use clips and you could get these things and Morgan, Morgan Neville who made this with me, and he’s won an Oscar and he did the absolutely stupendous Mr. Rogers documentary, was like, “Hey I got an idea and this song, ‘It’s Alright Ma, I’m Only Bleeding,’ if you listen to those lyrics, it sort of encapsulates the time of when Dylan was writing that song and sort of where food was at right now.” And I don’t know how to convey that more than what I just said. But yeah I don’t know I always get weirded out by talking about all the parallels but the weird thing is, I only think about food in parallels to culture. So.

Joe Skinner: So when you were a kid were you watching… you know a lot of chefs were on TV at the time coming up. Were you watching like Julia Child on TV or Jacques Pepin?

David Chang: Grew up watching Julia Child, exclusively PBS. We didn’t have cable ‘til I got into like high school I think. And PBS was something where I learned so much about cooking. My favorite show ever in cooking was Great Chefs of the West. Great Chefs of the Midwest. It was a series that taught me about France as a youngster. I don’t know why I watched these cooking shows. Martin Yan was important to me, but I never thought that it was going to be a career.

Joe Skinner: What did you think you were going to be doing?

David Chang: Well my dad wanted me to be a professional golfer and my mother wanted me to be something more traditional of Asian-American success, like a lawyer, banker, doctors just never going to happen with me. But I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do. If I did better in school I probably wouldn’t be cooking today.

Joe Skinner: You studied religion in college, right?

David Chang: I did. Yeah.

Joe Skinner: What drew you to that?

David Chang: I grew up in a very very religious household. My grandmother on both sides converted to Christianity when they were in Korea. And I don’t know there’s something about Korean culture and Christianity that just like, is the perfect storm. The joke is, if you’re not doing a dry cleaner or a bodega store, you’re opening a church in America. And my father came from a giant family, like 11 kids.13. I think a couple of them passed away early on in the war, and amongst all of those offspring, my cousins, like so many of them went into the ministry. Like a lot. Even my sister went to seminary school and it was impressed upon me at an early age, going to school, Sunday school, and just Bible study, reading the Bible over and over and over again, that like, “oh the whole concept of Christianity is that one day he’s going to come back and then some people are going to heaven. Some people are going to go to hell.” And that just stuck with me forever. And I was the kid in Sunday school that would always ask questions like, “I don’t understand this.” That seems to me like pretty mean as to why some people should go to hell. And I couldn’t get over the idea as a kid. Why would some people that didn’t hear the Scripture or the word of God go to hell? I would ask the question, “So someone never heard like the sermon or whatever and they haven’t accepted Jesus Christ, are they going to go to hell?” And I would present these like moral conundrums of theology to these people. And I don’t think they appreciate it at all. And it didn’t help that I was also a class buffoon too, but I just didn’t know anything else. And I had a resistance to it, and it was just something that I had to be, is religious and observant. And I just never quite drank the Kool-Aid. I went to a private school, Catholic school. Studying Catholicism was a stark contrast to what I grew up learning and that just left a giant impression on me. And then it was like, “Wait you have Presbyterian, you have this great schism and now you have Cathol-,” and then it just like constantly made me understand that like, no one really knows what the hell they’re talking about. And then I got to college and I had a great time in college which meant that I did a lot of drinking. I went out a lot and I did barely any studying and quite frankly a lot of the Religious Studies classes were all past like noon so I could get there in time, and they were also the only classes that I got good grades and that’s it. And it dawned on me because I think I was gonna be an Econ major or whatever whatever but for whatever reason religion was something that I could understand. And in college I started to go down all of these different avenues of comparative religion and I became enamored with Hinduism and Buddhism and Daoism and all of these things that I think I think are more philosophies and always in contrast to Christianity. And like I think of Walter Kaufmann this guy that wrote the critique of religion and philosophy, and he was one of my professor’s professors at Princeton, he said that those that grew up in the faith are the most critical of it. And I just compared everything to the faith that I grew up in. And I thought that it was just an imperfect system for me. And I studied religion not for religious sake because I’m not that religious actually at all. I wanted to study religion as to why people become religious and along the way I studied a bunch of stuff that still has impressed upon me how I think today.

Joe Skinner: Yeah I feel like a lot of what you’re saying, I assume it would translate to some of what you’ve been doing with food in some way.

David Chang: Yeah I mean one of the most earth shattering things that happened to me was when I learned about Mahayana Buddhism which is, you know a form where there is Bodhisattvas, which are individuals that have reached enlightenment and escaped the cycle of some sorrow. Instead of going to heaven, they’ve decided to withhold that, delay their gratification. And like almost made a pact, none of us are going to enjoy heaven or nirvana until everyone enjoys heaven and nirvana. Every sentient life being has to sort of get through that cycle. And I just thought that was unequivocally the most beautiful thing I have ever read. Right? Like the concept was like wait a second here, like this is way better than… Hey, on average, the lifespan of humanity for the ages it’s probably a lot like 45 years or something like that. You’re telling me that you have 45 years to accept Jesus Christ as your lord and savior and if you don’t – let’s just say it’s a thousand years you have to do that – versus infinity? I mean like that’s just not right. Like come on. like I just could not buy that and for whatever reasons that was so much more thoughtful and compassionate that it really shaped how I thought about stuff because as a person that’s not how I think. I don’t think I’m as compassionate and empathetic. I’m probably incredibly selfish in all of these things that are not like positive attributes and I think that by interacting and learning these things I tried to like get me out of that shell. I’m just realizing too how insane this must sound because I am far from an expert at any of this stuff. Oh my God. I never talk about this stuff.

Joe Skinner: Well what did your parents think when you pivoted to food? Were they supportive? What did they think of your food now?

David Chang: My mom thinks it’s too salty and for a long time my dad thought it was a hobby. He’s like “When are you gonna do something serious?” And quite frankly I think all my religious studies helped me embrace some kind of panic that I had about what I’m going to do with my life. And you know I try to do everything else but cooking. There’s a concept I learned in, my God I can’t believe I remember all the stuff, history of Christian thought in the West by Professor Frank Patrick, and it was one of a few classes I got like a C+ on in religion and I never, I did so poorly in it, but I learned of this idea of Via Negativa and the early theologians of the Christian church would sort of meditate on that, they’d understand like as a basis like God’s ineffable, you cannot discover what God is. But in theory then we can discover what God is not. So God’s not this lamp. God’s not this bottle of water. They would go over and over as like almost a meditation to sort of… The more they understood what God wasn’t, in theory they could get closer to God, and I swear to God I used this as my own way of like… What do I want to do? Like every college graduate like, “What do you want to do with your life?” And I was like, if it was good enough to figure out that idea I was like maybe I can get close to what exactly I want to do in my own life, from answering phones in Jackson Hole, Wyoming to working in restaurants as a server and as a busboy, to working at a bar, to working at a golf store, to trying to do competitive golf. I did so many different things… To teaching English, to working a little bit in finance. I didn’t have any inclination that food was going to be for me. I almost dropped out of college, but like the reasons weren’t there to go into cooking. It was more out of escape and I felt by the age of 22 I had an idea that sitting at a desk doing something meaningless, like tallying numbers together or collating papers. It just, I was like, come on, like that is literally the definition of absurdity. I got to find something that’s useful to me. So I literally did everything I could to burn all my bridges so I could never go back to a sort of a traditional lifestyle. My dad was so upset, so upset, because he basically worked his entire life to make sure I would never become a cook, because he knows how hard that life is. He worked 30 years in the restaurant business. And the only thing as to why I wanted to go was I thought it was honorable. I thought it was an honest way to live, that I could work really hard and it wasn’t about accumulating a lot of wealth, and it’s something that I was terrible at, and I could get better at. And that was basically why I did it. I had no grandiose vision as… Oh this is what my life might be like. At that time in 1999, 2000, when you told your friends, and I was so blessed to have like the education that I had. It was basically telling someone that I was like enlisting in the army or something like not even… Like less prestigious, sometimes, right? Like, what? You’re gonna be like help? You’re going to… What are you doing? And now it’s so weird again because like now it’s almost like cool to say you’re going to be a cook and I did it because I was allergic to sort of the world at large and I wanted to live on the periphery. I wanted to discover myself and I honestly didn’t think I would find myself in the kitchen but it’s obviously where I was most comfortable.

Joe Skinner: Well it seems to have worked out. To put it bluntly.

David Chang: But it wasn’t following some grand scheme. You know what I mean like I had no idea what I was doing. I just was like, “Oh I like this.” I think that there’s a bunch of people in this kitchen that are all lunatics and they couldn’t probably make their own bed or pay their bills on time or show up on time to anything else outside in the regular world. But when they put on their whites and they’re in the kitchen it’s like they’re like the top surgeon in America. You know it’s like crazy. And the competitiveness and the mentorship, and I love the culture, I love teams, I love sports. It was like a sport to me and it was something that there was all of this esoteric knowledge that was esoteric to me because I wasn’t part of it that I could go down, and I could read all these cookbooks, I could study all these chefs and I truthfully like, I am allergic to work unless it’s something that I can pour myself in, and for a year, over a year, I never took a day off and that’s when I sort of had a realization like wait a second. Like I never work this hard. I’m never willing to miss hanging out with my friends and I just couldn’t get enough of it. And that’s when I realized like, “Oh I think this is what I need I need to be doing.”

Joe Skinner: Kind of a nice quick way for me to ask this question that points to our season the theme is, is if you had to list three heroes in your life who would you list?

David Chang: Oh man these are the hardest questions because they’re constantly changing. Like Wolfgang Puck right now is definitely someone that I would love to emulate my career on, because I think he’s actually misunderstood but his legacy on food in America? Like it’s funny, like the most important chef in America was not born in America. He’s from Austria. Like fundamentally altered gastronomy in America. And I never thought in my wildest dreams that I’d be able to like sort of potentially follow in his footsteps. That’s like so crazy to me. On the culinary end you know like I think that the whole generation of American chefs that don’t get the credit that they deserve, that sort of got into cooking before it was even a profession right. That we’re talking about right after the CIA, the Culinary Institute of America was formed, the Alfred Portales, the Charlie Palmers of the world, the Rick Moonens, there is this band of American chefs that were very popular in the mid to late 90s. But I think today they don’t get the recognition they deserve for paving the way for an entire industry today, because they were the first ones to be like wait we need to go to Europe, we need to figure this stuff out. And there’s so many of them, like Alex Lee, Daniel Boulud, like I could go on and on, on just a culinary end, and I’m a real geek on culinary history. It’s really important to me that I know what came before me so I could list every chef possible and why they’re important to me. But off the top my head yeah. Alfred Portale, Tom Colicchio, Thomas Keller, Alice Waters, massively important to me because these are people that I got to know I never thought that I would get to know these people. And I don’t know where else to talk about because we could be here all day talking about what about us.

Joe Skinner: What happened when you met Alice Waters?

David Chang: That was such a strange moment. She came into Noodle Bar and she basically gave me a big hug and she basically said, “What kind of sugar is this?” In the ice cream that we make. And she’s like if it’s not the best kind of sugar this isn’t going to, even if it tastes good you need to strive harder. You need to strive higher to make this better. And it immediately showed to me not only the providence of ingredients but also so many of the people that I’ve just mentioned, which is so you know how should I say, indicative of my profession and my peer group is, almost everyone is as dedicated to building their own restaurants as to giving back to the community and Alice literally said it’s all about the kids. What are you gonna do to help out the kids David? I swear to God I was like literally a minute in I’m like whoa!

Joe Skinner: That’s pretty heavy.

David Chang: Yeah yeah. And that’s how we got in conversation about Edible Schoolyard and I’ll never forget that I was like she’s a real hero of mine and now she’s taken on this, again I feel very blessed to have a lot of people that have taken parental mentorship-like roles in my life and Alice was one of them.

Joe Skinner: So when you’re working with these chefs that are coming up is it about helping them find their voice find, their story or their way of expressing? Or is it about kind of channeling the Momofuku way of doing things?

David Chang: I think it’s a little mixture of both. There’s a paradox there. I’m trying to teach them how to follow the rules and to understand the rules. So when to determine when to break the rules, right? At any given situation, I don’t want them just to blindly follow the rule. I want to teach them to analyze the situation and to know when it’s appropriate to defy the rules. And that’s a weird way of describing like how do I sort of cultivate someone that’s talented and how to get the most out of themselves and I don’t know if I’ve gotten better at explaining it because it’s very hard. I think it’s entirely about the culture that we create. And I think it’s gonna sound crazy again but this is some kind of religious understanding. It’s about free will and I’ve learned that the only way I can get someone to do something on their own volition is if they want to do it. And I can force them, I can get anyone to do my bidding. I can tell them you got to make this dish exactly the way I want it. But if they don’t buy into it and maybe it’s very successful for the short term and maybe it’s a very efficient way of teaching. But ultimately they’re going to tire it. They’re not going to believe in it or they’re going to they’re just going to say that this is not for me. “I’ll do it out of fear.” But so much of a kitchen and a high quality kitchen is I think no different than any organization that is trying to operate at a high level. When your back is turned and you’re no longer supervising them and they’re on their own making the decision are they going to make the right decision versus the wrong decision? And the only thing that’s separating them from making the wrong decision is personal integrity because no one’s ever gonna make… No one’s going to know. So many times in a kitchen you’re trying to teach someone to do the dumb long way. And like let’s just say you have a cook that’s making a dish and one of the steps that they do can save them 30 minutes if they just cheat, and the reality is the end result will lead to no one ever knowing the difference. I have to try to create an environment where I’m trying to get that Cook to take the long stupid way. It’s so inefficient. And ultimately I think being a chef is one of the hardest jobs to motivate people because there’s no lure of a giant paycheck or bonus or stock options. You’re really trying to teach someone to better themselves through their own personal integrity. That’s hard.

Joe Skinner: Well thanks so much for coming in David. We really appreciate being able to have you here in the studio.

David Chang: Yeah.

Josh Hamilton: Chefs James Beard and Julia Child were the earliest pioneers of bringing thoughtful takes on cooking and food to television. In this excerpt from American Masters James Beard, America’s first foodie, author Kathleen Collins describes this pivotal moment in television history.

James Beard: Good evening! Well here we are again and as usual I’m left home to prepare the supper.

Kathleen Collins: Elsie presents James Beard and I Love To Eat began in 1946 on NBC and it was the first nationally televised cooking show. No one really had a television so it was not really seen by many people. The televisions that existed for public consumption in those days were in department store windows. They were in bars. So a lot of his audience was men who were watching him before the Friday night fights.

James Beard: Today we’re going to make chili con carne.

Woman: And we’re going to have a session of kitchen clinic.

James Beard: And we’re going to discuss sponge cakes.

Kathleen Collins: Well it wasn’t really the right time for epicurean delights to be presented on television. And then Julia Child appears in 1963 on The French Chef. While of course she didn’t intend to change the landscape.

Julia Child: What’s missing in this picture. The goose. And here it is. We’re cooking a goose today on The French chef.

Kathleen Collins: Julia Child was not only bringing in French food at the height of its popularity but also was a very charming entertainer. She just was her natural self and had a great personality.

Julia Child: And here it is just sitting up waving at you.