As mentioned earlier, this week the New Yorker drops a mega piece on David Chang and the opening of Ko. Writer Larissa MacFarquhar follows team Momofuku around from weeks before the opening until the first friends and family night, and the epic, 8,000-word-plus profile includes an unwieldy number of details and revelations about the weaknesses and brilliance of our hero. Since the story is only available in print, we're going excerpt here for you aggressively, starting with an opening graf, then moving on to The Chang's ruminations on various subjects, like anger management and his girl (separately):"

Chang is only thirty, but in the past couple of years he has unexpectedly and, in his mind, accidentally and probably fraudulently, become one of the most celebrated chefs in the country. He is way too neurotic to handle this, however, so he compensates by representing himself as a bumbling idiot. He is five feet ten, built like a beer mug, and feels that most food tastes better with pork."

· Chang on tips: "They were sticking to the concept that there would be no servers, because Chang wanted the cooks to get all the tips. ('Servers are such greedy bastards,' he says. A server at Ssäm Bar could bring in seventeen hundred dol-
lars in a week working thirty-two hours; a cook working the same hours would earn three hundred and fifty.)

· Chang on self esteem: "'I feel like I didn’t deserve any of this,' he says. 'I blame my parents for my guilty conscience. Growing up, no one ever told me, 'Dave, you're smart, you're fast, you're witty'—it was quite the opposite. I’m still so insecure, I feel like I’m Forrest Gump—I’m mildly retarded, and people are, like, ‘Look how far this guy has come!'"

· Chang on Cafe Boulud: "It was chip-on-your-shoulder cooking, like, all these other restaurants have twice as many cooks, all this new equipment, and we’re gonna fucking outcook them with nothing but our sheer will and technique."

· Chang on anger management: "Most chefs yell, but Chang is on a different level. 'No one gets angry like I get angry,' he says unhappily. 'I just turn into a complete maniac. My brain feels like it’s gonna explode. It takes me a day to recover—I have to lie down and put ice on my head.'"

· Chang on integrity: "Are you willing to fucking sacrifice yourself for the food?...But for personal integrity as a cook, this is what we do, and I don’t think you guys fucking care enough. It takes those little things, the properly cut scallions, to set us apart from Uno’s and McDonald’s. If we don’t step up our game, we’re headed toward the middle, and I don’t want to fucking work there. We’re not the best cooks, we’re not the best restaurant—if you were a really good cook you wouldn’t be working here, because really good cooks are assholes.'"

· Chang on teamwork: "I know we’ve won awards, all this stuff, but it’s not because we’re doing something special—I believe it’s really because we care more than the next guy. So the next time you’re at your station and you see someone going down in flames—and every night someone goes down in flames—you gotta ask yourself, Do I have this person’s back? Because when the kitchen’s really humming, you know what? Getting into the weeds is a lot of fucking fun."

· Chang on expansion: "The obvious thing would be to open a temple of fine dining...preferably an eponymous temple that would secure his immortality in the public mind, but the idea made him sick. 'Why would you name a restaurant after yourself?' he says. 'I can’t imagine opening a restaurant called David Chang’s—I’d fucking off myself. I just want to make sure that I don’t become a total asshole.' He’d always liked the idea of starting a fast-food chain—he and Tosi have talked about opening a Momofuku Milk Bar, with soft-serve ice cream, like Dairy Queen."

· Chang on his mental state: "I don’t want to be this crazy. It’s tiring. I just want some mental clarity. But I don’t like that I’m becoming more self-aware of all my problems...I’m a total head case right now, I cannot keep this up. All I want to do is fucking move to Idaho and ski and fish and read books. All I want to do is run away and stop.”

· Chang on relationships: "'I’m finally dating somebody that I don’t hate her guts,' he says. 'We had dinner yesterday and I was like, I don’t hate you at all! You know?'"
· Chang Profiled [~E~]
· Momofuku Ko, previous coverage [~E~]

Filed under , David Chang, Momofuku Ko, New Yorker

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