To be fair, Chang has acknowledge his terribleness.
One of his former employees wrote a review of his memoir on it is not pretty. It's a bummer for me since I've loved his restaurants since they debuted in 2004. The man has been massively influential on the American dining scene as well.
While Gordon Ramsey has made a joke of this. Many professionals hate this valorization of unprofessionalism, including one of my favorites, Kenji Lopez-Alt.
Great review. A more critical one as memoirs can be very one sided obviously.
One of his former employees wrote a review of his memoir on it is not pretty. It's a bummer for me since I've loved his restaurants since they debuted in 2004. The man has been massively influential on the American dining scene as well.
While Gordon Ramsey has made a joke of this. Many professionals hate this valorization of unprofessionalism, including one of my favorites, Kenji Lopez-Alt.
David Chang’s Memoir Fails to Account for the Trauma He Caused Me
Chang’s memoir "Eat a Peach" grapples with the white-hot fury that defined most of his career at Momofuku. But for an employee on the receiving end of that rage, the book fails to truly reckon with the pain he left behind.
www.eater.com
David Chang changed the way America eats. In 2004, Momofuku Noodle Bar, a ramen joint in NYC's East Village, ushered in a style of restaurant that's now recognizable everywhere: food that emphasized "what cooks really wanted to eat" with little regard for existing conventions; unabashed loudness; and a maniacal attention to detail and deliciousness, perhaps best encapsulated in its signature dish, a pork-belly bun that would be imitated across the country.
Along with Momofuku's rise has come Chang's own. He's now attached to some 15 restaurants spanning NYC to Toronto to Sydney (not counting his growing Fuku fried chicken enterprise), is the figurehead of a media and entertainment company, and, thanks in part to well-reviewed shows on PBS and Netflix, has become a recognizable public figure, even among those who have never eaten his food. After 15 years spent in the public eye, Chang has transcended his place in the so-called "bad boy" chef generation, and is now a leader in the restaurant industry. "He is probably the modern equivalent of Norman Mailer or Muhammad Ali in the 1960s and '70s," the New York Times's Pete Wells wrote in 2018, "somebody whose success in one part of the culture allows him to sound off on the rest of the culture and where it is heading."
And Chang does fail again and again, as he recounts in the book, especially when it comes to his anger. His memoir both acknowledges these failures and attempts to move past them, because absolution feels like the true goal here. "I hate that the anger has become my calling card," Chang writes. "With friends, family, my co-workers, and the media, my name has become synonymous with rage." Chang, always seeking to be in control, wants to reassert it over his own mythos, and to that end, he largely succeeds in Eat a Peach — as he always has in telling (and selling) his own story.
After all, the myth of Momofuku did not create itself. It took work. To fuel his high standards of creativity and perfection, Chang needed — and created — a combustible environment at Momofuku, aided by internal and external forces. "Conflict was fuel, and Momofuku was a gas-guzzling SUV," Chang writes. His pursuit of that conflict was often valorized by the media. A few weeks after I began working at Momofuku, Larissa MacFarquhar's March 2008 profile in the New Yorker, "On the Edge," dropped. That profile painted a robust picture of an angry chef who had trouble controlling his emotions: In response to a series of mistakes, none "egregious" in themselves, MacFarquhar writes that Chang had "screamed and yelled until a friend showed up and dragged him out of the restaurant, and his head still hurt nearly twenty-four hours later."
The recipients of Dave's anger — his employees — lack the same power to forget, or to leave the consideration of its impact to others. I vividly remember the day that a line cook, who could not have been more than 22, was brought to tears by Dave's rage for cooking what was deemed a subpar family meal: "I will scalp you," Dave screamed. "I will murder your fucking family!"
At a minimum, Chang has largely left out the problematic friendships that swirled around him during the most meteoric phase of Momofuku's rise. Missing from the majority of the book's narrative are the bad actors who had parties in "rape rooms" and then kicked backed at Ssäm Bar, the ones renowned for their bad behavior. He doesn't get to that part of the story until page 225, tying it specifically to the emergence of the #MeToo movement, and by then it feels like an afterthought.
Great review. A more critical one as memoirs can be very one sided obviously.