I still love you David Chang

The snow was falling in Kansas City. The apartment I was in could be described as a halfway house of the homeless, a building of broken lights, unsafe floors, questionably plumping, and on the edge of being condemned . I was in living with my cockroach roommates and thumbing through a copy of the Momofuku cookbook by David Chang. I borrowed the book that evening and promised I would have it back in the morning. All through the night I read the autobiographical beginnings of David Chang's eventual domination of the Lower East Side. I looked in owe at pictures of deep fried brussel sprouts, korean fried chicken, and shaved frozen foie gras. I was in love, my life had changed. I read the Momofuku cook as the snow fell outside my window and dreamt that someday and somehow I would be working along side David Chang.

One year later the snow was falling in Connecticut. I had asked to do a stage at Momofuku Noodle Bar and was told to come in for a night. The train ride to New York was about an hour and a half, but seemed like minutes. When I got to 1st Avenue I walked to the Noodle Bar and peeked through the window, the dining room was packed and more customers were lining up on the streets. I walked to David Chang's other Momofuku safe house, Ssam Bar. Again, the place was packed. I walked to the Michelin starred Momfuku Ko; packed. The Chang domination was true, in a two block radius David Chang had three restaurants, all of them filled.

The brilliance of Momofuku is also present in the ambiance. The design is a mix of subtle advertisement and feng shui. In a borough filled with pizzerias, cheap chinese food, and trash bags stacked five feet high, the Momofuku restaurants look clean, inviting, streamline, and brand new; like an oasis in the desert. The restaurants seem to pop out at you while walking down the street and almost pull you in and say, come on in! It's great in here! All the Momofuku restaurants are built with plywood interiors and industrial metal exteriors, no signs; just a logo on the front of the door of an orange peach. Simple, but somehow intensely brilliant.

I walked around the Lower East Side scared, nervous, and about to say fuck it to the stage and run away just to relieve the anxiety. The only thing that kept that me from running was several phone calls to my girlfriend. She kept telling me you only get nervous when you're about to do something special, that it was these moments that made up your life, and she was very right. I took a deep breath and walked into the Noodle Bar with my knives by my side.

When I started at Momofuku I was doing prep in the basement. The walls were lined with pictures of Harold McGee, Wylie Dufresne, and John MacEnroe. I spent the afternoon cutting scallions and pig parts all the time looking over my shoulder to make sure David Chang was nowhere to be seen. I was afraid David would walk in and see me, see me doing something wrong.I was scared that he would throw me out on the street for holding a pair of chopsticks wrong and thereby dishonoring his Momofuku temple. Mostly I was afraid of being star struck, looking David in the eye and saying "I know you from the TV!" Just like I may or may not have done to Al Franken years ago.

I was given a tour of the walk-in. It was filled with pork belly on top of pork belly, 50 pounds of shoulder in the corner, and enough pickled mushrooms to keep a Korean family well fed for four years and more cut scallions than you would need to hold a ticker-tape across Manhattan. Being in the walk-in was like reliving the Momofuku cookbook I had first laid eyes on almost a year ago. To my right were fried chicken pieces, to my left ginger-scallion sauce. I felt like I was inside the cookbook that had given me hope in a cramped Kansas City apartment when, well, almost all hope was lost.

I went upstairs to join the cooks for the family meal (a meal made up of whatever leftovers are sitting around to feed the cooks and wait staff; a concession given for working 12 hour shifts in the restaurant world). Sitting with the cooks eating fried chicken and french toast all I could think of was I hope to fucking god David Chang doesn't walk in. The thought bounced around my brain like a bad migraine starting at the base of my skull and filling the front of my head. I guess I thought I wasn't good enough to be there. Chang would see I was a phony. He would be able to smell it.

Then it happened.

I saw him out the corner of my eye at first, a brief flash. David Chang was in the corner of Noodle Bar. He wore a stocking cap and a puffy winter coat, looking very homeless and very stoned. I could see him smiling and joking with the veterans of the Noodle Bar. I was standing in the middle of the restaurant trying to decide if I would run downstairs or stand there with my half eaten fried chicken in hand. I decided to stand there, I pulled my hat down as far as it it would go covering my eyes and hoping I would go unnoticed. He couldn't stand there to long right? He had other restaurants to go and inspect. He had to leave soon right? Chang walked around the Noodle Bar for a minute and came up to me.

"Do you work here man?" Chang said.

"Well, I am tonight." I said.

"Cool" Chang said, then he sat for a minute with the cooks,took a few bits of fried chicken and then he left. It was like Spartacus had left the Colosseum.

About twenty minutes later I was standing in the open kitchen working the noodle station. The doors opened and people flew in. The people looked like silhouettes momentarily brought to color by the flashes of different cameras. Tourist and locals alike sat down in front of me all waiting for the magic moments of David Chang's infamous ramen.

The orders came in quick and I started to plunge noodles in the blanching water. I was shadowing a guy had worked at the Noodle Bar for about a year. He handed me a pair of chopsticks and told me that was tool I needed to use. I was handicapped for the first hour with those goddamn chopsticks. The guy I was working with had adapted nicely to his wooden tools and could pick up a single noodle with his bamboo with incredible speed and accuracy . About two hours into my shift the guy I was shadowing vanished. He was gone. Real gone. Tickets kept pouring in, I kept making ramen. The sous chef came up to me and said the guy I was working with was going home sick.

"Can you work this station Mike?"

"Sure." I said. Why not? It was only my dream to be here. I had fantasized about this moment since first cracking open the Momofuku cookbook. The night went on, I could hear customers talking infront of me as I dropped a bowl of hot ramen in front of them. Pictures were taken of me, like I was part of the team, and for about six hours, I was.

The night ended and sous chef took me into the basement.

"Good work tonight." She said. "Would you be interested in a job here?"

"I'll have to discuss it with my girlfriend first, but probably." I said.

"Fair enough, Ma Peche is hiring too, do you want me to send your resume?"

"Sure, can I stage at SSam Bar?" I asked

"Well, let me text David tonight and see what we can do." She said. (I can only hope she meant David as in Chang)

It took me a few days to process what had happened. I worked at my dream restaurant for night and they offered me a job. Amazing. It felt like some kind of odd validation. That I hadn't been wasting my life and time in restaurants, that it all mattered all of a sudden.

The job offer from the Noodle Bar was exciting, but over the next few days I thought it over and felt like I had come a little to late to the party, the place was on autopilot. Momofuku Noodle Bar is a great restaurant and experience, but the model was already cut years ago. It was now a ramen factory. The food is great, but Noodle Bar now seems like a greatest hits album, perfect to introduce you to Momofuku, but boring after you've already heard the box set. I wanted it to be part of that rebel experience of cutting edge cuisine served in a plywood box, giving the finger to the fine dining world and becoming what I dreamt about while reading the cookbook. Those days are gone now it seems. Nothing last forever and we both know hearts can change. The dangerous thing about cooking is that once you come up with an idea it's already boring. A new invention is outdated the minute it's dreamt up. It's only a matter of time before some punk doing a stage calls it boring. I still love you David Chang. I will eat at Momofuku for years. I will still open the cookbook and be wowed. I still talk about it, rave about it, and still get angry when you don't get it. Most of all I thank you David, you gave me a dream and let me live it.

I cooked at Momofuku, and no one can ever take that away from me.