Do you think anyone who claims to have the answers to something actually has them? I thought we’d be getting back online in September at the latest, and that certainly isn’t the case.ĭM: So in the book, you kind of protect yourself a lot in the sense that you’re asking the reader, “Why are you reading this? I don’t have all the answers to help you become a successful chef.”ĭC: I don’t think anyone does. I didn’t think stupidity would prevail in the way that it has. I didn’t think that people wouldn’t want to wear masks. And so when ~this all happened~ some friends were like “way to go fucking asshole, the one time you were right about doom and gloom it had to be this.” But what I failed to anticipate was that we would have a completely inept government led by a moron of a president. It saves me time to be prepared for both. (Sept.David Chang: It’s because I’m always thinking about the best case scenario and the worst case scenario.

Foodies and chefs alike will dig into Chang’s searing memoir. In the book’s most heartfelt section, Chang rhapsodizes about the egalitarian Asian dining ethos he wanted to import to the West and even allows himself a rare pat on the back for his influence (“Food across the country had become porkier, spicier, brighter, better”). Chang writes about the sweaty tension of his manic episodes and his dark depression, and there are stories of kitchen screaming fits, reflections on being in the “cool chefs club,” and particularly affecting passages about Chang’s late friend, Anthony Bourdain.

He left a “soul-sucking” post-college finance job after discovering that, though he was far from a natural at cooking, it was something he “didn’t hate doing.” He opened his first restaurant, Momofuku Noodle Bar, in the East Village in 2004 at least partially to stave off suicide, and in the course of becoming an international restaurateur, Chang tried to upend people’s expectations of ethnic culinary categories while pushing himself to the financial and emotional brink. Chang ( Momofuku), Momofuku restaurateur and star of Netflix’s Ugly Delicious, starts this self-effacing, heart-on-sleeve memoir with a disclaimer: “Frankly, I just don’t understand my appeal.” Chang writes about being a hard-driving Korean-American kid with an anger problem who channeled his frustrations into an eagerness to test limits and himself.

David chang eat a peach a memoir