There was sorbet. Then quail. A Long Island striped-bass “shank.” I had a riff on the legendary butter-poached lobster while my wife ate softshell crabs. All good and lovely to look at.
A pasta course presented us with tagliatelle on the one hand and spinach rigatini on the other, both absolutely heaped with truffles by our waiter. Again, I wanted to say, “What the fuck are you doing? It’s too much!” but I sat mute as my delicately flavored pasta disappeared beneath a blanket of aromatic fungi. I was again kind of hurt—this time, personally—feeling suddenly like a stripper you drunkenly throw money at in the mistaken belief she’ll like you better.
There was a flawless and impeccably sourced hunk of veal and then a much-welcome and—once again—thrilling shock.
A large, decidedly un-Kelleresque single plate (not four plates nesting on top of one another) covered with beautiful slices of heirloom tomatoes, a rough mound of stunningly creamy burrata in the middle, a drizzle of extraordinary-quality olive oil. The simplest, most ordinary fucking thing imaginable—particularly for my wife, who came over from Italy only a few years back. It was a course as “foreign” to my expectations of the Laundry or Per Se as could be. It was also the best and most welcome course of the meal. Both wake-up call and antidote to what preceded it.
There were desserts, a lot of them. And, for the first time, I had no difficulty making room for at least a taste of each. It’s worth noting that it’s always the pastry chef at degustation-style restaurants who gets fucked—which is to say, neglected—as the customers usually hit the wall long before that department gets its opportunity to shine.
What did I make of all this? I’m still asking myself this, the next day, still trying to come to grips with my feelings. Playing the whole meal through again in my head, trying to separate out what percentage of my reactions comes from being a jaded, contrarian asshole and what might be “legitimate” or in any way “meaningful” criticism.
Maybe I should think about Thomas Keller like Orson Welles. It doesn’t matter what happens now—or what he does, or what I may think of his later projects. The man made Citizen Kane, for fuck’s sake! He’s cool for life. Un-deposable. He’s The Greatest. Always. Like Muhammad Ali. Why nitpick?
Fact is, I love Keller’s more casual restaurant concept: Bouchon. I like that he’s expanded his empire—that he’s successfully moved on, loosened his reins on any one place. I think it’s good for the world and, I hope, good for him personally.
The more I think about last night, the more I keep coming back to that mortadella, and that coppa, then that gleeful kick of that plate of tomatoes and cheese—and let me tell you, that was some pretty good motherfuckin’ cheese and some mighty good tomatoes.
As it should be with all great dining experiences, as I’d felt throughout those first, golden hours at the French Laundry, it seemed, all too briefly, that someone was talking to me, telling me something about themselves, their past, the things they loved and remembered.
Maybe this was Jonathan Benno, intentionally or not, saying: “This is what I’m going to be doing next. After I’m gone.” (It’s worth noting that shortly after this meal, he indeed announced his own new venture, into high-end Italian.)
Or maybe I’m just too thick and too dumb to figure out what was going on.
Was this meal a harbinger of anything? A sign of the apocalypse? Meaningful in any way? Or not? I don’t know.
What I know for sure is that they comped me—and I feel like an utter snake in the grass.
If I didn’t love that meal at Per Se, if I can’t “get” what Grant Achatz is doing, does that mean anything at all?
Which brings me to David Chang. Whose relatively recent arrival on the scene—and spectacular rise—I’m pretty damn sure means a fuck of a lot.
The Fury
Build, therefore, your own world.
—RALPH WALDO EMERSON
What took me to cooking was that there was something honest about it,” says David Chang.
There is no lying in the kitchen. And no god there, either. He couldn’t help you anyway. You either can—or can’t—make an omelet. You either can—or can’t—chop an onion, shake a pan, keep up with the other cooks, replicate again and again, perfectly, the dishes that need to be done. No credential, no amount of bullshit, no well-formed sentences or pleas for mercy will change the basic facts. The kitchen is the last meritocracy—a world of absolutes; one knows without any ambiguity at the end of each day how one did. “Good” and “evil” are easily and instantly recognized for what they are. Good is a cook who shows up on time and does what he said yesterday he was going to do. Evil is a cook who’s full of shit and doesn’t or can’t do what he said he was going to do. Good is a busy restaurant from which the customers go home happy and everybody makes money. Evil is a slow restaurant from which the cooks go home feeling depressed and ashamed.
Nobody wonders, in a busy kitchen, if there is a god. Or if they’ve chosen the right god.
Except maybe David Chang. “I run on hate and anger,” says David Chang. “It’s fueled me for the longest fucking time.”
As usual, when I meet him, he’s got an air of frantic befuddlement about him—as if he just can’t figure out what just happened or what’s probably going to happen. He has the demeanor of a man who believes that whatever might be coming down the pike, whatever locomotive is headed his way, it’s probably not going to be a good thing.
“Dude,” he says, “I just got a spinal tap!”
Two days earlier, he woke up with the worst headache of his life, a sharp, driving pain in his skull so ferocious that he raced off to the hospital, convinced he was having a brain hemorrhage. He seems oddly disappointed that the tests found nothing.
Other successful chefs tend to screw up their faces a little bit when you mention David Chang. Even the ones who like him and like his restaurants, they wince perceptibly—exasperated, perhaps, by the unprecedented and seemingly never-ending torrent of praise for the thirty-two-year-old chef and restaurateur, the all-too quick Michelin stars, the awards—Food and Wine’s Best New Chef, GQ’s Chef of the Year, Bon Appetit’s Chef of the Year, the three James Beard Awards. They’ve watched with a mix of envy and astonishment the way he’s effortlessly brought the blogosphere to heel and mesmerized the press like so many dancing cobras. The great chefs of France and Spain—not just great ones but the cool ones—make obligatory swings by his restaurants to sit happily at the bar, eating with their hands. Ruth Reichl treats him like a son. Alice Waters treats him like a son. Martha Stewart adores him. The New Yorker gives him the full-on treatment, the kind of lengthy, in-depth, and admiring profile usually reserved for economists or statesmen. Charlie Rose invites him on the show and interviews him like A Person of Serious Importance. Throughout the entire process of his elevation to Culinary Godhead, Chang has continued, in his public life, to curse uncontrollably like a Tourette’s-afflicted Marine, rage injudiciously at and about his enemies, deny special treatment to those in the food-writing community who are used to such things, insult the very food bloggers who helped build his legend—and generally conduct himself as someone who’s just woken up to find himself holding a winning lottery ticket. If there was a David Chang catchphrase written on T-shirts, it would be “Dude! I don’t fuckin’ know!”—his best explanation for what’s happening. He continues to flirt with—and then turn down—deals that would have made him a millionaire many times over by now. His twelve-seat restaurant, Momofuku Ko, is the most sought-after and hardest-to-get reservation in America. He is, inarguably, a star.