“So Pete, let’s just fucking bang out these recipes,” Chang said.

“We’ll get fish in tomorrow and start playing around,” Serpico said.

“Fish is easy. I know you don’t want to, but you can use the buttermilk with the stabilizer and whip it so it’s like yogurt.”

“I’m thinking a spicy buttermilk. Maybe we’ll make it the consistency of the tofu.”

“Doesn’t Jean Georges have that fluke with a buttermilk dressing and champagne grapes?” Chang said. “It’s fucking badass, over fluke.”

David Chang and Peter Serpico were sitting in the basement office of Momofuku Ssäm Bar, going over what they had to get done before the opening of Ko. The stoves were in, and the gas was ready to be turned on, but they couldn’t cook there yet, because the fire-extinguishing system wasn’t installed. Ssäm Bar was Chang’s second restaurant; Ko was his third.

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.

Serpico is Ko’s chef. He has worked with Chang for a couple of years, after a job at Bouley. He and Chang both raze their hair to buzz cuts, but while Chang’s makes his head look rounder and more baby-like, Serpico’s makes him look sharper, wirier, ready to flee.

“O.K., the one thing we don’t have down and standardized is scallops, which we’re gonna do right now.”

They’d been working on the scallop dish for weeks. It was a thing of beauty: a smear of black nori purée on the bottom of the bowl; then a layer of sea scallops and chanterelles and possibly clams; and then, spooned on top in front of the customer, a soft heap of foaming dashi (kelp and dried-bonito broth), made intentionally unstable with just a little methylcellulose, so that in front of the customer’s eyes the bubbles would burst and dissipate into a fishy liquid, at exactly the speed that foam from a wave dissipates onto sand. It looked like the sea and tasted like the sea, and Chang was extremely proud of it. The only thing he was worried about was the word “foam,” which, owing to its trendiness in the nineties, had become a symbol of everything pretentious and unnatural about nineties cuisine. In Chang’s mind, he was making fun of foam, but of course some people were not going to get that and were going to think he was just another leftover foam slave. “It’s gonna piss people off,” he said happily.

Serpico noticed a giant eggshell next to Chang’s computer.

“Is that the ostrich egg you cooked up the other day?” he asked. “How was it?”

“It was awful,” Chang said. “I wanted it over easy, you know—I wanted to pretend I was Fred Flintstone. So I got a big rondeau, put like two inches of oil, and I was gonna deep-fry the motherfucker, but there was so much water content in the white that it just sort of dispersed. It looked like cottage cheese.”

“Eww.”

“The egg yolk, though—the egg yolk was massive. Equivalent to twenty-four chicken eggs.”

“Wow.”

“We’re gonna be ready to roll next week,” Chang said. “If not, I’m gonna chop Hiro’s pinkie off.” Hiro was Ko’s architect.

“I can’t wait,” Serpico said. “I’m fucking killing myself, man. I’ve got nothing to do. I guess I could look for an apartment.”

Serpico had to be out of his apartment in less than a month but had not yet found another place to live. He has not historically paid much attention to his living arrangements. He is twenty-six and inherited his first bed a year ago. Until then, he hadn’t even owned a mattress—he just slept on the floor. He still doesn’t have a closet: he drops his clothes at the laundry, then just takes stuff as he needs it right out of the bag. He has cooked at home once in six years. If he isn’t eating at the restaurant, he usually gets McDonald’s or KFC.

Serpico’s habits are not unusual among the cooks at Momofuku. Chang never cooks at home, either—he orders Chinese or pizza. He had a bed in his old apartment, but only because it had been left behind by the previous tenant. Recently, he bought a place, but he had no furniture, so one day he braced himself and went to Crate & Barrel. He had only an hour to shop, though, so he picked out one of the mockup rooms and told a salesperson he wanted to buy everything in it, just as it was. The consequence of this, he realized when the furniture arrived, was that his apartment looked like a hotel room, but at least there was stuff on the floor.

“You’re freaking out,” Chang said. “Let’s go cook, dude.”

“This is awesome!” Chang cried to Serpico, running his hands along the countertop. For the first time, Ko was starting to look like a restaurant. It was filthy, it was tiny, it was constructed almost entirely of plywood—walls, doors, counter, cabinets—but it was a restaurant, and soon they would cook there.

“Telepan saw this last night,” Chang said. Bill Telepan runs the restaurant Telepan, on the Upper West Side. “He laughed his ass off. He’s like, ‘This is the smallest fucking place I’ve ever gotten into.’ You’re a dumb man, Serpico. Nobody in their right mind would do something like this.”

Chang was hoping that the opening of Ko would be marginally less disastrous than the opening of his first two restaurants, but he was expecting the worst. Already they’d saved themselves from several ideas that, in retrospect, seemed to them so incredibly stupid it was hard to believe they’d had them in the first place. The idea that the cooks would wash all the dishes themselves during service, for instance. That had been a kind of principled thing for Chang—he felt that no one who worked for Momofuku should be too proud to help out with the grossest tasks in the kitchen—but it was still a really bad idea. 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 dollars in a week working thirty-two hours; a cook working the same hours would earn three hundred and fifty.) On the other hand, most cooks were not fully domesticated, and it was already expecting kind of a lot to have them do their job two feet from normal people who were paying to have a pleasant evening. (Ko is set up like a sushi bar, with all the customers at a counter facing the stoves.) Asking them to act like waiters as well might be one step too far.

It was unbelievable how many decisions had to be made before they opened. Just figuring out how to pour the miso soup into bowls in front of the customer had taken a whole discussion with Cory Lane. (Cory Lane manages the front of the house—servers, setup, beverages—at all three restaurants. He went to cooking school, decided that he wasn’t a very good cook, and became a wine expert instead.)

“What would be easier is maybe a small pot, like something ghetto, and then just pour it in,” Chang had said.

“No, you’re leaning over and you pour it from the pan,” Serpico said.

“It’s gonna get all over the place!” Chang said. “You wanna spoon it or ladle it. Like a teapot, dude.”

“With those sake carafes, you can do them ahead of time and they hold hot for a little while,” Lane suggested.

“I don’t know, man. You reach over and you pour it right in their bowl,” Serpico said, pouring the liquid from a tiny saucepan into a bowl over the back of a spoon, so that it flowed smoothly and didn’t splash.

“That I like, pouring it over the back of the spoon like that,” Lane said approvingly. “I mean, you can go anywhere and have a soup poured tableside out of a fucking pitcher. I like that.”

In the beginning, Chang’s whole goal was to open a noodle bar. He didn’t really give much thought to what he would do with it once he did. When he thinks back on the ridiculous way he went about starting his first restaurant, four years ago, and the way it succeeded so wildly, despite his complete ignorance of the business and all the mistakes he made as a consequence, and led to another restaurant, and then another, and all the chef’s prizes he’s received since, it all seems to him like an impossible fairy tale, and he becomes convinced that it could vanish at any moment. “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’s parents emigrated from Korea as adults in the nineteen-sixties, he from North Korea, she from South. His father, Joe, had fifty dollars when he arrived. He started out working as a dishwasher in New York, and later moved to a suburb of Washington, D.C., and opened a couple of delis. He began making real money when David was a teen-ager (David is the youngest of four), with a golf-supplies business. David became a junior golf champion but quit when he was thirteen.

Chang was miserable in school and claims to have failed everything. “I never even made the high-school golf team,” he says. “I was too much of a head case. Remember that scene in ‘The Royal Tenenbaums’ when Luke Wilson’s playing tennis and crying and he throws his shoe? That’s what I was like.” He went to Trinity College, in Connecticut, but says he only got in because he was Asian; he smoked pot almost every day. But one thing that interested him was religion—his parents and his sister were very involved with a Korean Presbyterian church, and he had turned against that—so he became a religion major and wrote a thesis on Thoreau. Something about the mindful ordinariness of “Walden” appealed to him—the elevation of daily repetitions into an honorable way of life. “Even menial tasks such as domestic chores were a pleasant pastime,” Chang wrote. “He enjoyed these duties because he completed them with painstaking diligence.”

After college, he spent six months at the French Culinary Institute; at the same time, he worked the dinner shift at Mercer Kitchen and, on his days off, answered phones at Craft until he got a job as a cook. Meanwhile, for years he’d been obsessed with ramen (“momofuku” means “lucky peach,” but it is also the name of the man who invented packaged ramen noodles), and he knew he wanted to apprentice in a Japanese noodle shop. Finally, an opportunity presented itself: his aunt was friends with Reverend Paul Hwang, a Korean businessman who had turned a building he owned in Tokyo into a combination church and men’s homeless shelter, with a ramen shop on the first floor. Reverend Hwang said that Chang could live in the homeless shelter and work in the ramen shop. As it turned out, Reverend Hwang’s ramen shop was one of the few really bad ramen shops in Tokyo, so Chang didn’t stay there for long, but his true apprenticeship came from eating around the city and realizing what it meant to live in a food culture where even the smallest, cheapest place served food more delicious than you could get in half the restaurants in Manhattan.

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When he got back to New York, he got a job at Café Boulud, a three-star restaurant on the Upper East Side then being run by Andrew Carmellini. He worked six or seven days a week, fifteen-hour days (though only because he felt he had to get there two hours early to keep up). It was brutal. “Café Boulud was intentionally difficult,” he says. “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.” But it wasn’t just machismo—it was also beautiful. “Andrew knows how things should taste,” Chang says. “It’s crystal clear in his mind. There were so many instances when he was, like, ‘It’s missing something, do this,’ and it’s fucking perfect.” Chang felt lucky to be working in such a kitchen, but he was preoccupied with trouble at home—fights between his father and his oldest brother over the family business, then his mother being diagnosed with cancer—and he could feel that he was starting to freak out. His hands were shaking so much that he couldn’t sauce plates. Finally, he had an epiphany. “Why can’t I cook something simple?” he said to himself. “I’m not an awesome cook—I just want to make noodles.” He quit Café Boulud and moved home for a while to help take care of his mother. Then he put together a business plan, asked his father for just shy of two hundred thousand dollars in seed money, and started looking for a place to open a noodle bar.