"So Pete, let’s just fucking bang out these recipes,” Chang said.
“We’ll get fish in tomorrow and start playing around,” Serpico said.
“Fish is easy. I know you don’t want to, but you can use the buttermilk with the stabilizer and whip it so it’s like yogurt.”
“I’m thinking a spicy buttermilk. Maybe we’ll make it the consistency of the tofu.”
“Doesn’t Jean Georges have that fluke with a buttermilk dressing and champagne grapes?” Chang said. “It’s fucking badass, over fluke.”
David Chang and Peter Serpico were sitting in the basement office of Momofuku Ssäm Bar, going over what they had to get done before the opening of Ko. The stoves were in, and the gas was ready to be turned on, but they couldn’t cook there yet, because the fire-extinguishing system wasn’t installed. Ssäm Bar was Chang’s second restaurant; Ko was his third.
Chang is only thirty, but in the past couple of years he has unexpectedly and, in his mind, accidentally and probably fraudulently, become one of the most celebrated chefs in the country. He is way too neurotic to handle this, however, so he compensates by representing himself as a bumbling idiot. He is five feet ten, built like a beer mug, and feels that most food tastes better with pork.
Serpico is Ko’s chef. He has worked with Chang for a couple of years, after a job at Bouley. He and Chang both raze their hair to buzz cuts, but while Chang’s makes his head look rounder and more baby-like, Serpico’s makes him look sharper, wirier, ready to flee.
“O.K., the one thing we don’t have down and standardized is scallops, which we’re gonna do right now.”
They’d been working on the scallop dish for weeks. It was a thing of beauty: a smear of black nori purée on the bottom of the bowl; then a layer of sea scallops and chanterelles and possibly clams; and then, spooned on top in front of the customer, a soft heap of foaming dashi (kelp and dried-bonito broth), made intentionally unstable with just a little methylcellulose, so that in front of the customer’s eyes the bubbles would burst and dissipate into a fishy liquid, at exactly the speed that foam from a wave dissipates onto sand. It looked like the sea and tasted like the sea, and Chang was extremely proud of it. The only thing he was worried about was the word “foam,” which, owing to its trendiness in the nineties, had become a symbol of everything pretentious and unnatural about nineties cuisine. In Chang’s mind, he was making fun of foam, but of course some people were not going to get that and were going to think he was just another leftover foam slave. “It’s gonna piss people off,” he said happily.
Serpico noticed a giant eggshell next to Chang’s computer.
“Is that the ostrich egg you cooked up the other day?” he asked. “How was it?”
by Larissa MacFarquhar, The New Yorker (March, 2008) | Read more:
Photograph by Platon
“We’ll get fish in tomorrow and start playing around,” Serpico said.
“Fish is easy. I know you don’t want to, but you can use the buttermilk with the stabilizer and whip it so it’s like yogurt.”“I’m thinking a spicy buttermilk. Maybe we’ll make it the consistency of the tofu.”
“Doesn’t Jean Georges have that fluke with a buttermilk dressing and champagne grapes?” Chang said. “It’s fucking badass, over fluke.”
David Chang and Peter Serpico were sitting in the basement office of Momofuku Ssäm Bar, going over what they had to get done before the opening of Ko. The stoves were in, and the gas was ready to be turned on, but they couldn’t cook there yet, because the fire-extinguishing system wasn’t installed. Ssäm Bar was Chang’s second restaurant; Ko was his third.
Chang is only thirty, but in the past couple of years he has unexpectedly and, in his mind, accidentally and probably fraudulently, become one of the most celebrated chefs in the country. He is way too neurotic to handle this, however, so he compensates by representing himself as a bumbling idiot. He is five feet ten, built like a beer mug, and feels that most food tastes better with pork.
Serpico is Ko’s chef. He has worked with Chang for a couple of years, after a job at Bouley. He and Chang both raze their hair to buzz cuts, but while Chang’s makes his head look rounder and more baby-like, Serpico’s makes him look sharper, wirier, ready to flee.
“O.K., the one thing we don’t have down and standardized is scallops, which we’re gonna do right now.”
They’d been working on the scallop dish for weeks. It was a thing of beauty: a smear of black nori purée on the bottom of the bowl; then a layer of sea scallops and chanterelles and possibly clams; and then, spooned on top in front of the customer, a soft heap of foaming dashi (kelp and dried-bonito broth), made intentionally unstable with just a little methylcellulose, so that in front of the customer’s eyes the bubbles would burst and dissipate into a fishy liquid, at exactly the speed that foam from a wave dissipates onto sand. It looked like the sea and tasted like the sea, and Chang was extremely proud of it. The only thing he was worried about was the word “foam,” which, owing to its trendiness in the nineties, had become a symbol of everything pretentious and unnatural about nineties cuisine. In Chang’s mind, he was making fun of foam, but of course some people were not going to get that and were going to think he was just another leftover foam slave. “It’s gonna piss people off,” he said happily.
Serpico noticed a giant eggshell next to Chang’s computer.
“Is that the ostrich egg you cooked up the other day?” he asked. “How was it?”
by Larissa MacFarquhar, The New Yorker (March, 2008) | Read more:
Photograph by Platon
