Momofuku

to josh, quint and kara

I have been ten days in this temple and my heart is restless.

The scarlet thread of lust at my feet has reached up long.

If someday you come looking for me,

I will be in a shop that sells fine seafood,

a good drinking place,

or a brothel.

—Ikkyu, fifteenth-century Zen Buddhist high priest

Despite a lack of natural ability, I did have the one element necessary to all early creativity: naïveté, that fabulous quality that keeps you from knowing just how unsuited you are for what you are about to do.

—Steve Martin, Born Standing Up

contents

INTRODUCTION

noodle bar

ssäm bar

ko

SOURCES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

introduction

What is Momofuku? That’s a tough one.

Momofuku is a restaurant group based in the East Village in New York City. The Momofuku restaurants are irrefutably casual places with music blaring at all hours of the day, with the kitchens opened and exposed, with backless stools to sit on and with framed John McEnroe Nike ads passing as decor. Momofuku is the anti-restaurant.

Momofuku, the name, is Japanese; David Chang, the owner and head chef, is Korean American; the food eludes easy, or really any, classification. There is a focus on good technique, on seasonality and sustainability, on intelligent and informed creativity. But it is deliciousness by any means that they’re really going for. Chang has called it bad pseudo-fusion cuisine, by which I take him to mean that anyone who needs to ask probably wouldn’t understand. Using a quote from Wolfgang Puck to describe the restaurant’s cooking, he’s made the argument that Momofuku tries to serve delicious American food. Seems like the most useful descriptor to me. Where else would labne and ssämjang and Sichuan peppercorns and poached rhubarb all end up in the same kitchen?

For people living in or attuned to the bubble world that is the post-millennial restaurant scene in America, Momofuku is a kinetic, hype-generating buzz magnet the likes of which has rarely, if ever, been seen. And few chefs, now or before, have gotten the golden shower of awards, attention and praise that Chang has, especially at his age, especially while unapologetically pursuing a path that so aggressively flaunts convention.

Momofuku is, from the inside looking out, like a gang, or maybe a pirate crew. A way of life lived under a flag with an orange peach on it instead of a Jolly Roger. A collective, but not some idyllic hippie thing; instead a group of humble, talented and dedicated people working as a whole to make their restaurants better every day, to revisit and re-create their menus, to always, always be pushing ahead. Complacency and contentedness are scarce commodities at Momofuku.

And me? I hated Momofuku Noodle Bar the first time I went there. Hated it.

It was late 2003. I was new to my job reviewing cheap restaurants for the New York Times; I was more enthralled with the ideal of authenticity than I am now, six years later. But if those were my problems, those were Momofuku’s problems, too: it took the place a while to shake off the newness and settle into a groove, for Chang and Joaquin Baca to loosen themselves from the conceptual shackles they’d opened with, to just start cooking whatever they wanted instead of laboring under the constraints of being a noodle bar—propagandist-in-chief Chang’s way of not calling his ramen shop a ramen shop—and becoming Noodle Bar as it exists today.

And did they change it. My editor urged me to go back and check the place out about eight months into its life. And though I didn’t think I’d like it any more than I had the first time around, that’s what the job was all about. And that second meal at Noodle Bar just killed me. It was so fucking good and not in some lightbulby way, but because it was gutsy. It was honest. It was delicious, that least descriptive of all food words, but it was and it was so in a way that made me want more.

After I reviewed Momofuku, I started eating there regularly, going every Saturday at noon, before the lines formed and the crowds crowded. (Chang still puzzles at the little groups that assemble outside his restaurants in the minutes before they flip over the open sign, protesting that they should go home and order some Chinese food if they’re hungry. But he’s like that.)

Mark Bittman, who wrote How to Cook Everything and was my lord and master before he helped me land the gig at the Times, was my regular lunch companion. Eventually he introduced me to Chang. We said hi and that was about it.

Then, one night in Brooklyn a few weeks later, I was at a club called Warsaw seeing The Hold Steady when I felt this meaty hand slap me on the back. I turned around and there was Chang, probably as toasted as I was, with a beer extended toward me and the question, which he yelled over the music, Are we going to pretend like we don’t know each other?

We’re the same age, Chang and I and we were standing there at the same show and he had a cold beer in his hand. I took it. That’s how we got to knowing each other.

We’d grab a beer every once in a while in the months after that, bitch about whatever, eat cheap Chinese or Korean food. At some point Dave asked me to help him write this book. I didn’t see how I could say no.

It was those flavours. That pop. The fucking pork buns. The way Chang and company put together combinations that read like muddy dead ends—Brussels sprouts and kimchi, really?—but slapped me awake every time I ate them. Who wouldn’t want to know how to make this stuff? Who wouldn’t want to have the recipes for this food that was upending the hegemony and balance of the New York restaurant world? Who wouldn’t jump at the chance to work with the kitchen there, to try and ferret out what they were doing to make the food so goddamn good?

There was also the unlikely story of Momofuku’s genesis, evolution and ascension. It’s been told many times, by many good writers—in New York, GQ, The New Yorker and everywhere—but it was a chance to help Chang tell it himself. Who’d pass on that?

So here it is. The story of how Momofuku happened, or at least Chang’s version of it. It starts in the early years of the twenty-first century, with Dave finding his way into the kitchen and then out of it and then into a former chicken-wing joint, where he opens a ramen shop.

After that he opens a burrito shop that turns into something else entirely. Along the way he picks up a band of coconspirators, his chefs and chefs de cuisine and he meets friendly science-minded chefs and meatmen who help him along the way.

It ends, at least in terms of this book, in March 2008, with the opening menu at Ko, his third restaurant. Ko, which has since been honored with all manner of stars and awards and has propelled Dave onto the international stage (at least in the food world), is actually in the space that was once a five-for-a-dollar chicken-wing spot. Go figure.

There are also the recipes for a bunch of the dishes, lots of Momofuku classics—or at least that’s what they feel like. The menus at the Momofuku restaurants change almost daily, so these are, for the most part, dishes that persisted, that wouldn’t leave the menus without an unpleasant bout of kicking and screaming.

There are epic dishes—the bo ssäm you should plan on making for your next Super Bowl party, the rib-eye recipe to end all rib-eye recipes, the masterpiece of minutiae that is the Ko egg dish. But there are also dozens of almost insanely simple recipes that will change your approach to everyday cooking (or at least they did mine): the scores of easy pickles that keep in the fridge for weeks; ginger spring onion sauce, which was synonymous for me with summertime lunch while working on this book; the octo vin and the fish sauce vinaigrette that are as good over plain rice or cubed tofu as they are used as directed in these recipes. I have converted more than one Brussels sprout hater with Tien Ho’s Vietnamese-inflected Brussels sprout recipe in the Ssäm Bar chapter.

There is no attempt herein to answer the how/why conundrum of Momofuku. Of how these restaurants run by this Dave Chang character have succeeded so phenomenally, of why Momofuku went from a plywood-walled diamond in the rough to an undeniable and seemingly unstoppable force in the world of restaurants. Or how or why Dave, when there were so many more likely candidates, turned into an award-mongering poster boy for modern chefdom. Dave is thirty-one and he doesn’t know, so why press the point?

I’m sure there are some clues and signposts between these covers. But this isn’t an autopsy and there’s plenty more to come in the Momofuku story. Maybe the answer lies ahead, but Chang and I both suspect that whatever twists and turns will follow, none will be as improbable as the tale told here.

PFM

2009

noodle bar

noodle bar

Koreans are notorious noodle eaters.

I am no exception.

I grew up eating noodles. Chinese noodles, Korean noodles, all kinds of noodles in all kinds of places: in Los Angeles, in Seoul, in Virginia. My dad had it perfectly timed with one place near our house in Alexandria, Virginia: he’d call before we drove over to it so that bowls of jjajangmyun—wheat noodles in a black bean sauce—would be hot and waiting on the table as soon as we walked in. I remember being transfixed by the guy making noodles—the way he’d weave and slap a ball of dough into a ropy pile—then being struck by the sting of the white onions and vinegar served with jjajangmyun. On nights when it was just him and me, he’d make me eat sea cucumber along with the noodles and the weirdness of eating them would be offset by the warm afterglow of pride that came with making him happy.

And when I was fending for myself as a teenager and, later, in college, there was only one answer to hunger if I didn’t have the time or money to go out for some fried chicken: Sapporo Ichiban Original Flavor instant ramen, the kind that comes in the red packet. That was what I ate, sometimes to the exclusion of almost everything else, until I got into Nong Shim’s Gourmet Spicy Shin Bowl noodle soup, which comes in a styrofoam bowl, à la Cup Noodles, making it that much easier to prepare.

As I got older, noodles became a hobby. I noted the difference in preparation and flavouring from restaurant to restaurant. It was innocent enough. My dad had warned me away from giving serious thought to working in a kitchen. He was a busboy at an Irish bar when he and my mom first immigrated to the United States. Though he graduated from busboy to restaurant owner during the years he was getting settled, he’d sold his restaurants and gone into the golf business by the time I was a kid. He didn’t see any point in my following in those footsteps.

After high school, I went to Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut and spent four years majoring in religion. I spent a year abroad in London back when there was just a single outpost of Wagamama. It served affordable, tasty bowls of ramen for 5 to 7 quid and I ate there regularly. I spent a bunch of the rest of my time daydreaming about writing a screenplay that told the story of the Bhagavad-Gita through the lens of the American Civil War with Robert E. Lee in the hero’s role.

After school, I worked a couple of jobs where I pushed paper and sat at a desk. But I knew there was no way that path was going to pay off. Without a clear idea of what I wanted to do, I parlayed my useless liberal arts degree into a gig teaching English at a school in Wakayama, two hours south east of Osaka. I decided I’d teach English by day, eat noodles the rest of the time and maybe at some point figure out what I was going to do with myself.

I lived a few train stops away from the school in a little town called Izumi-Tottori. There wasn’t much there: a maki roll place, a sushi place, a dumpling house and a ramen shop. The ramen shop was near the train station and it was always busy, always bustling. It was like the town pub, where everybody went to drink and talk shit about each other. The place served tonkotsu-style ramen—it’s the porkiest ramen broth you can get, with the pork fat emulsified into the broth—and there were bowls of hard-boiled eggs everywhere that customers helped themselves to while they waited for their soup.

Rather than try to force my way into the conversation, I’d sit there—first at this place and later at any ramen or noodle shop I could get a seat in—by myself, shrouded in the sound of slurping noodles and the racket of the kitchen turning out bowl after bowl of soup and just watch the place work. Watch what people ate. Watch how they ate. Try to figure out this ramen thing for myself.

This was the view out my back window in Izumi-Tottori. I’d spend hours watching these hundred-year-old people picking rice.

But let’s take a break from navel-gazing and get a few things down about what ramen is and isn’t.

At the end of the day, ramen is not much different from any Asian noodle soup. It’s a broth with noodles in it. And while ramen is now Japanese, the Japanese got it from the Chinese. Lo mein is ramen’s Chinese precursor. (If you pronounce ramen properly, ra-myun, you’ll hear that they practically have the same name.) It has this mystique—the movie Tampopo did a lot to raise its profile—but it’s soup with noodles in it, topped with stuff. That’s it. I love ramen, but the sanctimony that’s often attached to it is a bit too much.

As I’ve pieced it together, the Japanese started making these lo mein–style noodle soups around the turn of the nineteenth century. As would have been the case in China, the broth could be chicken or beef or seafood or pork; toppings, when added, varied. In the early 1900s, a style of ramen started to become common in Tokyo. Its components were pork broth, boiled noodles, sliced roast pork, spring onions and bamboo shoots. Over time, that became the template, the standard, the definition of ramen.

As ramen grew in popularity, it spread to other regions and islands and it began to evolve. Cooks who opened ramen shops put their stamp on the soups they made. Shoyu ramen—ramen with a heavy dose of soy sauce added to the broth—seems inevitable when you look back on it. Shio ramen—with salt in place of shoyu (and a totally different, cleaner, lighter taste)—followed. Certain styles became synonymous with the places from which they sprung: the Hokkaido Prefecture, for example, is the home of miso ramen.

This was the street outside my apartment. The ramen shop was just up the block.

The most important development in the story of the popularization of ramen—and probably one of the most important events in the history of food—occurred in 1958, when Momofuku Ando, a middle-aged tinkerer, invented instant ramen and unleashed it on the world. His invention introduced millions of people to the world of ramen, myself included.

By the eighties, every ramen shop in Japan had its own distinctive style: rigourous ordering rules, lines that wrapped around the block, how they sliced their pork, how much fat they added to their soup. (There is a type of ramen called abura ramen, which means fat ramen: hot noodles tossed in hot pork fat seasoned with things like crushed sesame seeds, soy sauce, spring onions and bonito. It can be so rich it can make you sick. I love it.) Like pizza or barbecue in America, every shop has its own fanatical following. (And, like pizza or barbecue, everyone’s favourite ramen shop tends to be the one they grew up with, regardless of its faults.) I wanted to try all of them. I spent an unhealthy amount of my free time during my stay in Japan eating at ramen shops.

I learnt the vocabulary: omori portions had extra noodles. Menma was the name for bamboo shoots. The soy sauce used to season and flavour the soups in Tokyo wasn’t just soy, but taré—a combination of soy, mirin and sake, often boiled with chicken bones, that has its roots in the yakitori tradition.

I filled up notebooks with notes on ramen and noodle places and, loser (literally) that I am, lost track of all of them over the years. Some industrious night, well before I opened Momofuku and before my notebooks disappeared, I decided I’d type all my notes into the computer. I only did it for one place, for Taishoken, the birthplace of tsukemen—the style of serving the noodles, hot or cold, on a plate and the broth in a bowl next to it for dunking.

. . .

Notes from October 20, 2003

Went early Sunday to Taishoken @ Higeshikebukuro, supposed to be the best or top 3 ramen shop in all of Tokyo. Left at 10:30, got there at 11:00 a.m., doors open at 11—waited 1 hour 45 minutes to get around the corner. . . . Unbelievable that by the time I get to the entrance, the line is even longer. There must be at least 300 people in line.

The place is so small: 6–7 people eat at the bar, 6 people eat at 2 tables, 2 tables outside of door seat 6. A fucking dump. 1 guy taking orders from everyone in line, about 20 people at a time. Amazing ordering system . . . you sit down and your food is there.

3–4 cooks, 1 guy cooking noodles, 1 guy cooling noodles for tsuke-men/morisoba, another guy prepping mise en place, another guy finishing plates and what appears to be Mr. Yamagashi, famed owner/chef, cooking noodles and handing out the broth. Everyone has towels wrapped around their heads and is wearing rain boots.

1)soy sauce is placed in bowl, then stock

2)gigantic helping of noodles

3)toppings are placed

4)finished with a touch of stock

Size is outrageously big, biggest bowl ever?—cuts of char siu—not from belly, are ½ inch thick—butt?

Toppings: spring onions, hard-boiled egg, menma—it seems that they cook their menma in their own manner, I’m not sure if it’s dried and then rehydrated—a piece of fish cake and nori

I’m figuring that the soy sauce contains vinegar and chile pepper. The stock I see contains bones, carrots, onions, konbu, dried sardines and mackerel.

First slurp of soup: surprisingly sharp with white pepper, spicy chile and a kick of vinegar. After 2–3 minutes, cannot notice heat.

Noodles not made there?

One can tell that they’ve been doing this for a while, serious business back there in the kitchen. Must go back and try regular ramen, not omori size. Flavors are great, not too oily, etc.

Reason for success is flavor is so different.

At the time, I knew I wasn’t going to be holding forth on the conjugation of basic English verbs for Japanese kids for the rest of my life. I decided I wanted to work in a ramen shop. To learn ramen for real. My timid efforts to do so during the time I lived in Izumi-Tottori were fruitless. My Japanese was bad, I had no training and I had no business working in a kitchen.

It was the via negativa way of figuring out I wanted to do with my life: I didn’t know what I wanted, but I knew what I didn’t want. I couldn’t stand wearing a suit or navigating office politics. I wouldn’t have to deal with either in a kitchen. I couldn’t imagine striving to get promoted to associate regional manager. I could imagine that learning to cook and striving to get better at it would be rewarding—I’d been a successful golfer and football player as a kid and the physicality of kitchen work seemed similar to me in that it was repetitious and rewarded some people’s efforts more than others. I knew I wasn’t going to become an academic and I couldn’t stand office work, so maybe I could pour myself into cooking, to see how far it would take me—maybe, if I worked hard, I’d go back to Japan, to a ramen shop, where I’d be the guy in the rain boots hollering orders. I wanted to see how far I could go. (Though I now know that I had no idea how deep the rabbit hole is.)

I decided if I were serious, I’d need to go to culinary school first. So I closed up shop and moved back to the States, where I enrolled in the French Culinary Institute in New York City. I was going to become a cook. Then I’d go back to Japan and they’d have to hire me.

FCI was quick—six months in and out. I learned enough to get into a kitchen and get yelled at constantly about how little I knew or did right. I started off at Mercer Kitchen, one of the restaurants owned by Jean-Georges Vongerichten, a good starting place for me. I got to work the line, to do some real cooking.

While I was working at Mercer, I caught up one night with Marc Salafia, a friend from college and he told me he was going to work at Tom Colicchio’s new restaurant, Craft. Craft was massively hyped at the time. Colicchio’s clean flavours and American/French cooking at Gramercy Tavern had earned him a cult following in New York—I was a huge fan—and this was his first post-Gramercy venture. After talking to Marc about Craft, I knew it was the place I wanted to work. I put in a call to the chef de cuisine, Marco Canora, who told me he didn’t have room or a need for my services unless I wanted to answer the phones.

So on my days off from Mercer Kitchen, I answered phones at Craft. Craft’s conceit was simple: an all à la carte menu, with sides, proteins, starches and sauces all offered separately. That meant that every item had to be cooked perfectly and that all the products had to be top quality—there was no extra dash of a delicious sauce to help along a slightly overcooked piece of meat, no imperfect polenta made passable in the presence of a perfectly braised lamb shank. Everything had to be right. The glimpse I got into the kitchen life there—the dedication of the cooks, the talent, the quality of the ingredients—kept me answering the phones and bothering Marco every single day for a chance to peel carrots and clean mushrooms.

I don’t mean to slight the Mercer, but I felt that I would be better served honing my fundamentals under the tutelage of some truly amazing cooks. The crew at Craft was unbelievable: Marco Canora, Karen DeMasco, Jonathan Benno, Damon Wise, Ahktar Nawab, James Tracey, Mack Kern, Dukie, Dan Sauer, Liz Chapman, Ed Higgins—all of them have gone on to become chefs of their own restaurants, chefs of note in their own right.

My determination paid off. I found a way into the kitchen by working for free in the mornings: chopping mirepoix, cleaning morels, doing menial but essential tasks. I loved it. To make ends meet, I quit my job at the Mercer and answered phones full-time for the first month Craft was open. When they opened for lunch, I graduated to paid kitchen slave and, eventually, to cook. I learnt about ingredients. I learnt about technique. I learnt how to work for—or at least how to avoid pissing off—a demanding chef. I learnt a lot at Craft.

But I was still a noodle eater. I hit all of the relatively few ramen spots in the city and, in a bit of daydreaming, would regularly write letters, have a friend translate them into Japanese and mail them off to ramen shops in Tokyo that I’d heard of or eaten at. I knew my chances were slim, but I didn’t stop trying.

I never got a single response.

Towards the end of my second year at Craft, a friend of my father’s caught wind of my situation and passed along word that he could set me up with a kitchen job in a Tokyo ramen shop if I was interested. He even had a place for me to stay.

Me, in a ramen shop in Tokyo. I didn’t ask which one or where or what kind of ramen it served. All I wanted to do was go.

The one stumbling block: I didn’t feel ready to leave Craft and I didn’t feel great about leaving a place and a group of people who had taught me so much and still had more to teach me. But I needed to go