Trying to figure out Chang’s “style” is a challenge—as he does his best to present a moving target, and because his menus are so collaborative.

But one window into where it all comes from is the time he spent at Café Boulud with chef Andrew Carmellini. His job there was the amuse-bouche station—challenged to throw together an always-changing array of tiny and, hopefully, exciting bites of first-course freebies, mostly with ingredients at hand. The idea of the amuse being to “wake up” or “tease” the customers’ palates in preparation for the more studiously composed dishes to follow. Fast, pretty, flavorful—and, most important, “amusing.” Whoever’s making the amuses is usually less constrained by a need to stay “on brand.” There are fewer rules. You are more likely to be allowed to stray from France, for instance—in what is otherwise a strictly French restaurant—on the amuses. Whimsy is a virtue.

Because David Chang is an interesting guy doing interesting things, and because, unusually for a chef with a lot to lose, he’s both articulate and impulsively undiplomatic, people who get paid to write about food, or blog about food, or make television about interesting people are constantly coming round and poking him with a stick—in the not-unreasonable assumption that something quotable and, hopefully, even controversial will come tumbling out of his mouth. An off-the-cuff and only half-serious quip that he “hate[s] San Francisco—all they do is put fuckin’ figs on a plate” can be easily conflated into weeks of blog posts and newspaper articles. Actually, with Chang, you don’t even have to poke him. Just wait around long enough and he’s pretty sure to drop a soundbite that will piss off somebody somewhere. Column inches, especially for print food writers, are harder and harder to fill with something “new” or relevant these days. As drearily limiting as writing porn is for someone who enjoys adjectives, and difficult as hell for those looking to keep up with the many-headed, quick-reacting blogosphere. For a food writer usually consigned to matters no more exciting than cupcakes, Chang-watching has become something of a one-man Gold Rush, a potentially life-giving font of hipness. There are those who grudgingly admire the guy and look to his next move to show them what to write about or talk about (“The Next Big Thing!”), and those who sense the injury just beneath the surface of Chang’s public persona, the recklessness—and hurt—and want to write about that. And those like me, who straight-up love the very fact that he exists—but also can’t help trying to psychoanalyze him.

“Why does everybody want to get inside his skull?” asks his friend and coauthor Peter Meehan. Though he knows the answer.

Unlike just about any other chef in the public eye, Chang wears his fears and his most deeply felt loathings right on his sleeve, for everybody to see.

What Chang would have you believe is that he really deserves neither the acclaim nor the success. He’s been saying this to journalists quite disarmingly for some time, repeatedly pointing out his relatively minimal qualifications and experience—and insistently comparing himself (unfavorably) to other chefs. To what degree this is a pose is debatable. I’d maintain that just because he says it often doesn’t mean it’s not true.

“I didn’t want any of this,” he says. A statement, conversely, I do not believe for a second.

He’s a former junior golf champion, after all, who quit the sport completely at age thirteen because, he’s said, “If I can’t beat the brains out of everyone, I don’t want to play. It’s not fun otherwise.”

That doesn’t sound like somebody who doesn’t want things. “Golf fucked me up in the head,” he says, by way of explanation. We’re talking about God over skewers of chicken ass at Yakitori Totto on the West Side.

We arrived early, because they don’t take reservations before seven at this traditional, Japanese-style yakitori joint—and because they tend to run out of the good bits early: chicken heart, chicken ass, chicken “oyster,” chicken skin. You don’t want to miss that stuff. We’re drinking beer and talking shit and I’m doing a very bad job of what everybody else is trying to do—which is to figure out what David Chang is all about.

He was born into a Korean family of observant Christians, the youngest of four kids.

In his book, he describes his relationship with his father—and the beginnings of his relationship with food—thus: “I grew up eating noodles with my dad…On nights when it was just him and me, he’d make me eat sea cucumber along with the noodles. And the weirdness of eating them would be offset by the warm afterglow of pride I felt in being an adventurous eating companion to him.” His father, who had first worked in restaurants after emigrating from Korea, warned him to stay away from the business.

It is my theory that the fact that Chang attended Jesuit High School and then Trinity College, majoring in religion, is of vital significance to the emerging science of Changology.

“For me…it wasn’t…enough,” he says cryptically. “I used to give a shit about God…but if God were to exist, I’d rather burn in hell. If he failed, he failed by putting the message in human hands. I guess I’m pretty pissed at God. The Crusades…Pol Pot…Hitler…Stalin. The same time all these terrible things were happening, people were bowing their heads and thanking God before they ate.”

Which begs the question: If you don’t believe in God, why study religion?

“I just needed to figure out…I just wanted to know,” he says, draining his beer a little sadly. “You know, I always thought you can never disprove faith. The Christian God seemed flawed. I mean, you only had one chance to make it into heaven.”

He looks up from a half-eaten skewer of chicken, worried. “What if you don’t get the chance? At the end of the day, the heart of the matter is: what happens when you’re dead? For me, the Christian ending just isn’t…good enough.”

He mentions the bodhisattva of Mahayana Buddhism, sentient beings who delay their own attainment of nirvana to become guides to those who have yet to reach it—as more worthy of emulation than the Christian saints.

I generally don’t hear a lot of talk about Buddhist spirituality (certainly not over chicken meatballs and beer), and I’m still pondering what it must be like to get out from under the twin boulders of a father’s love and expectations—and a God who turned out to be a disappointment. “I try to put my goals second to other people’s goals,” he says.

Which I wonder about—so I later ask his friend Peter Meehan. “I’d like to say he’s a fucking sweetheart,” he says, asked simply if he’d describe Chang as a nice guy, “that he’s compassionate. That he’s generous. And he is. But it’s, like, steel-jacketed love. It’s hard-edged. I mean, I’ve never woken up next to him, but I don’t think there are a lot of tender and delicate moments with David. He’s…loyal as shit. So if you’re part of his brood and somebody harms you? You can count on him to be appropriately supportive and vengeful.”

“Loyalty and honesty are really important things to me,” says Chang.

He is, to say the least, unforgiving of those he feels have lied to him or let him down in the loyalty department.

His friend Dave Arnold has told him, “Your hobby is hating people,” and, to be sure, he has a long and carefully tended—even cherished—list of enemies.

“I don’t mind people saying they hate my guts,” he says, warming to his subject. “Just have the balls to say it to my face.”

“Don’t try to be my fuckin’ friend and then…” he trails off, remembering the “Ozersky incident.” Josh Ozersky, at the time of his transgression, was an editor-correspondent for New York magazine’s influential food-and-dining Web site, Grub Street. The root of his conflict with Chang, it is said, stems from the publication of a Momofuku menu—before Chang felt it ready for release. There had been, Chang insists, assurances that the document would be withheld.