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A surprisingly honest restaurant cookbook
Four years ago, David Chang was considering closing Momofuku Noodle Bar, the two-man ramen shop he had opened on the Lower East Side in Manhattan.
So Chang and partner Joaquin Baca decided to stop trying for “authenticity” and just cook what they wanted to eat. “If we were going to go out of business anyway, we wanted to go out on our best face,” Chang says in “Momofuku.”
Three years later, Chang, 32, is one of the most influential chefs in New York City. He has won the big culinary awards, cooked on Martha Stewart’s TV show and become the public face of a 300-employee restaurant group that is opening its fifth site.
Along the way, Chang writes with co-author Peter Meehan, he made every mistake there is. The missteps are described in loving detail, part of a candid approach that makes “Momofuku” riveting reading between the recipes.
“We just wanted to portray the truth—from our perspective, but as objectively as possible— and document what happened,” Chang said in a recent phone interview. “If anything, it’s a document, because that’s how we felt—that maybe next year we’re not going to be around, so let’s just document everything that’s happened in case everything falls apart.”
They kept the ramen but added dishes that reinvented the best hits from Chang’s Korean-American childhood in Virginia, like shrimp and grits with bacon and slow-poached egg, seasonal pickles, and kimchi stew with rice cakes and shredded pork. The nearby Greenmarket inspired dishes like Brussels sprouts with kimchi puree and bacon, cherry tomato salad with tofu and shiso, and roasted asparagus with egg and miso butter.
Chang’s voice, punctuated by expletives in the narratives and endnotes, makes the book a recipe collection that is also partly memoir, confessional, source book and how-not-to-run-a-restaurant manual. Chang also gives credit for every dish, sauce and vinaigrette to the people who actually created them.
“Any time you read a cookbook and all those recipes came from that one chef?” Chang said. “It’s total nonsense. Every restaurant is a team effort. Every recipe is a team effort.”
These are the restaurant’s recipes, with some suggestions made for shortcuts, but no dumbing down for the home cook. The “world’s longest recipe for chicken wings” has the wings brined, smoked, braised in pork fat, then browned and dressed in a Japanese sauce with scallions and pickled chiles. Hey, it’s easier than the pig’s head recipe.
“People today want everything to be recipes in 30 minutes. That’s not what we do,” Chang said. “Do we really need another book that has 101 ways to make noodles fast? People might complain that this takes a long time. Good. Food is not an instantaneous process.”
On The Web: For Momofuku’s deceptively simple pork buns recipe, go online at blogs.buffalonews.com/hungryformore
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