“He’s not that great a chef,” says one very, very famous chef with no reason, one would think, to feel threatened by Chang. Chang just hasn’t been around long enough for his taste. From his point of view, and from his hard-won, hard-fought place on the mountaintop, the man just hasn’t paid enough dues. “He’s not even that good a cook,” says another.

Both statements miss the point entirely.

Things are going well and yet Chang is characteristically miserable. “I continuously feel like I’m a fuck. When is this going to end?”

Love the guy, hate the guy, overhyped or not, the simple fact is that David Chang is the most important chef in America today. It’s a significant distinction. He’s not a great chef—as he’d be the first to admit—or even a particularly experienced one, and there are many better, more talented, more technically proficient cooks in New York City. But he’s an important chef, a man who, in a ridiculously brief period of time, changed the landscape of dining, created a new kind of model for high-end eateries, and tapped once, twice, three times and counting into a zeitgeist whose parameters people are still struggling to identify (and put in a bottle, if possible). That’s what sets him above and apart from the rest—and it’s also what drives some other chefs crazy. Describing David Chang as a chef does both him and the word “chef” a disservice. David Chang is…something else.

In the unforgiving restaurant universe, having a good idea is one thing. Executing that idea is harder. If you’re skilled enough and lucky enough to succeed in realizing that idea, the challenge becomes keeping it going, maybe even expanding on it, and ultimately (and most vitally) not fucking it all up somewhere along the way. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about David Chang’s growing empire is that he did fuck it up. Twice. And that fucking up was—in each case—absolutely essential to his success. His first restaurant, Momofuku Noodle Bar, was supposed to be just that—a joint selling noodles. His second, Momofuku Ssäm, was a far more knuckleheaded concept—a place intended to sell Korean burritos. It was only when Chang and his team, looking certain doom in the face, threw up their hands and said, like a baseball team sixteen runs down in the second inning, “What the fuck…let’s just do the best we can. Let’s try and have fun,” that he twice backed into the pop-cultural Main Vein. Noodle Bar got famous for everything BUT the noodles. And nobody orders the burritos at Ssäm.

He’s famously consumed by his restaurants—and where the whole circus is going. See him on TV and you’d think the man shell-shocked, an impression he reinforces with shrugs and a guilty, confused-looking “who, me?” smile. But somebody’s keeping the train on the tracks. And somebody’s cracking the whip, too. He is subject to notorious rages. People who’ve seen them for the first time have described them as “frightening,” “near cataleptic,” and seemingly “coming from nowhere.” These episodes often culminate with Chang punching holes in the walls of his kitchens—so many of them that they are referred to, jokingly, by his cooks as design features. He suffers periodically from paralyzing headaches, mysterious numbnesses, shingles—and every variety of stress-related affliction.

He knows very well that he’s walking a high wire in front of the whole world of food wonks—and that many of them, maybe even most of them, would be only too happy to see him fall face-first into a shit pile. It is a characteristic of a certain breed of high-end foodie elite that they secretly want the place they most love to fail. Killing what one loves is a primal instinct. “Discover” an exciting new place, a uniquely creative chef in an unexpected location. Tell all your friends, blog gushingly about it. Then, months later, complain that because of growing pains, or because “everybody goes there now,” the young chef couldn’t handle the pressure, or that, simply because of the passage of time, the whole thing is “over.”

It’s great to say you ate the best meal of your life at the French Laundry. It’s a far rarer distinction to be able to say you ate at Rakel, Thomas Keller’s failed restaurant in SoHo, “back in the day”—and even then, recognized his brilliance. When Rakel closed and Keller left the city, it made for an instant Golden Era, a limited-edition experience that nobody can ever have again at any price. Unlike England, where they often build you up just so they can enjoy the process of tearing you down, people who genuinely adore and appreciate what you do as a chef are, at the same time, instinctively waiting for you to fail. As well, there’s the age-old syndrome common to fans of musicians with passionate and discerning cult followings. When the objects of adulation are crass enough to become popular, they quickly become a case of “used to be good.” As a devoted music fan himself—the kind of music nerd for whom listening to Electric Ladyland on vinyl is pure crack, and who gets most excited when indie musicians few others have heard of come to his restaurants—Chang is familiar with this auto-destruct impulse. Other chefs under that kind of scrutiny—the guys who’ve been around longer, stayed on top year after year—tend to deal with the problem laterally, through a subtle combination of good intelligence work and a continuing attention to the care and feeding of those who might, someday, hurt them.

Chang tends to attack the problem head-on, telling any and all—probably before it occurred to them—that yeah…things are very probably going to turn to shit any minute now. Only way one can react to that is with a gnawing suspicion that one should Eat Here Now. Much of what makes David Chang such a compelling subject is the ease with which one can imagine him as the protagonist of a neat, Icarus-style morality play. It is hard to imagine, meeting him, that he will not crash and burn. One Web site even has a “MomoWatch,” a regular newsfeed dedicated to tracking developments in ChangWorld—hour by hour, if need be.

The degree and kind of fascination with which his every move and utterance are observed and discussed is unique in the history of chefdom. Marco Pierre White’s exploits as the first rock-star chef—and Gordon Ramsay’s strategic evictions—were tabloid fodder. The people watching and writing about Chang are, for the most part, smart people, sophisticated about dining. They know exactly where to slip the knife if and when it comes to that.

How does he handle all this? “Rage or fear…It oscillates. Rage I need to motivate me to try things that I can’t ordinarily do—as I’m a lazy man. Fear—to keep pushing harder so we don’t lose what we’ve accomplished.”

He’s persisted with one even more bold throw after another: a series of what would appear to be erratic, straight-outta-left-field choices—and yet everything works.

When Noodle Bar opened, chefs and cooks liked that there was a place where they could get a bowl of noodles from a crazy, surly, overworked Korean-American who worked (fairly briefly) for Tom Colicchio and, later, Daniel Boulud. They enjoyed watching him curse at customers; liked that, after receiving complaints about the scarcity of vegetarian options, he’d turned around and put pork in nearly every dish on the menu.

It’s no accident that all of his restaurants seem designed exclusively for hungry chefs and cooks and jaded industry people. When they opened, they felt like manifestations of a collective secret urge. Everything from counter service to menus to music to the appearance of the cooks, the way one interacts directly with them, seemed to suggest to those within the business: “This is the way—this is how good, how much fun our business could be if only we didn’t have to worry about fucking customers.”

Now, non-industry people are clamoring to get in on the kind of dining experience that was once the perk of a debauched but exclusive elite. If the mark of a successful chef is, indeed, getting regular, honest-John diners to eat what chefs themselves have always loved to eat—the way they themselves like to eat it—then David Chang is a very successful chef. But in the process, he’s democratized a dining sector that once required, for admission, burn marks, aching feet, beef fat under the nails, and blisters. For some, that’s treachery of a kind.