Steve Cuozzo

Steve Cuozzo

Lifestyle

Bad-boy chef David Chang is sorry he let New Yorkers down

Critics trashed David Chang’s latest New York restaurant. First he got angry; now he’s sorry and attempting to make things right.Christopher Anderson / Magnum

Since starting out with a tiny noodle bar in the East Village in 2004, David Chang has become one of the world’s most influential chefs. His Momofuku group now extends to Sydney, Toronto, Washington, DC — and, soon, Las Vegas — and Chang also has his own literary journal and a delivery-only restaurant, Ando.

But as his empire has grown, he’s given short shrift to the city that made him famous. In January, he opened Momofuku Nishi, his first new full-service New York restaurant in five years, to surprisingly tepid reviews. He didn’t take it well and, at first, responded with a torrent of F-bombs.

Now, though, the rarely contrite Chang is owning up to what he did wrong. “If anyone made a stupid mistake, it was me,” Chang tells me. “If I had to do [Nishi] over, I’d delay it and do it right.”

The 39-year-old chef is trying to right the ship, making changes at the troubled Nishi, renovating the 10-year-old Ssäm Bar, and soon opening a large restaurant at the South Street Seaport  — which could be anything from a high-end Japanese steakhouse to a casual Korean BBQ spot, Chang told us.

Nishi’s rocky launch was a wake-up call. Although I enjoyed the way Chang made Asian-esque dishes look Italian — like “ceci e pepe” masquerading as cacio e pepe, with chickpea hozon standing in for pecorino Romano cheese — I couldn’t disagree with other critics who took issue with the overly bright, loud, uncomfortable Chelsea space, likening it to a “ship container.”

In recent months, he’s installed soundproofing panels (which made a slight difference) and axed the service-included policy, which made marvelous dishes such as $31 barbecue mackerel — which he called the “patron fish” of the house — seem even more expensive.

“If you’re going to have service included, you’ve got to have more traditional trappings,” Chang says. “Not luxury, but normal. I’m sorry I didn’t know that before, but I learned.”

Up next for Chang: David Chang is opening a brand-new restaurant at Pier 17 at the South Street Seaport (pictured above, pre-renovation). Meanwhile, he’s sprucing up Momofuku Ssäm Bar (below) to make it more comfortable to diners.Helayne Seidman
William Hereford

He’s also added the much-hyped meatless Impossible Burger to the menu, a gimmick of a dish I can’t recommend, though it has succeeded in drawing more attention to the troubled eatery.

Chang blames some of his initial mistakes with Nishi on money.

“We had a very limited budget,” he says. But, although Chang has groaned over real-estate costs, under a lease that he bought from a previous tenant, his rent at 232 Eighth Ave. is a mere $216,000 a year. It rises in increments to just $266,000 in 2022 — about 20 percent below today’s going rate for 1,800 square feet of ground-floor space and 1,600 more in the basement on a busy block in Chelsea.

Meanwhile, he’s briefly closed Momofuku Ssäm Bar for a welcome tweaking. When Chang reopens it “as soon as we can,” he says, it will replace its uncomfortable wooden stools with chairs with backs, rare in Chang-land. He says the Second Avenue spot’s original hard-edged design wasn’t meant to punish customers — it was “what we could afford at the time” when it opened in 2006 — though those who have dined there may disagree.

Chang’s midcourse correction for comfort level doesn’t apply to the cuisine at Ssäm Bar, which has long been my favorite Chang restaurant. Thankfully, he has no intention of turning away from the much-copied style he popularized — revelatory riffs on everyday Asian dishes that draw on both the Korean flavors he took from his immigrant parents and the exacting technique he learned during his time at Cafe Boulud and other high-end spots.

“Our emphasis is on a lot of Korean food,” he says. He’s clearly still striving for the inspired, almost accidental epiphanies, such as the Momofuku pork bun, that first had people lining up on downtown sidewalks. They were “an 11th-hour addition, a slapped-together thing,” he told Wired.com last August, that was “just . . . a version of my favorite Peking duck buns, with pork belly where the duck used to be.”

His next great discovery might come at the relaunched South Street Seaport, where Chang will share Pier 17 with Jean-Georges Vongerichten. Due to open next year or in early 2018, it will re-anchor him to the city that put him on the map.

If anyone made a stupid mistake, it was me. If I had to do [Nishi] over, I’d delay it and do it right.

 - David Chang

Chang doesn’t expect his first truly mass-market location to mark a new culinary direction for him, even if it has a less gritty veneer than his usual spots.

“It’s definitely bigger than what we’ve done here before,” he says. “But ‘big’ for us is like medium for anyone else. In the grand scheme of New York restaurants, it would be medium.”

Chang said it could be a “higher-end restaurant or a more casual accessible one — nothing in between. It all depends on what we’re able to build out in the kitchen.
“For example, the Ko team may choose to open a Japanese steakhouse, whereas the Noodle Bar team might turn it into their take on Korean BBQ. But nothing’s set in stone.”

His deal with developer Howard Hughes Corporation at the Seaport finally gives Chang a big-league local partnership like the ones he forged in other cities. (Chang wouldn’t comment on a reported $7 million construction cost for his Momofuku and Milk Bar at the Cosmopolitan in Vegas, which will have 290 seats — nearly as many as at all his New York places combined.) It’s the only way even the most famous chefs can afford to launch large-scale, expensively crafted eateries — which is why Stephen Starr’s Le Coucou is in a hotel and Danny Meyer’s Untitled is in a museum.

If Chang has another regret about the state of his career, it might concern how much time he spends cooking. When asked just how many hours he’s in the kitchen, he says, “That’s a loaded question,” with a laugh.

“Not as much as I used to, which was every day.”

He says the day before we spoke, “I was at Noodle Bar for three hours, and the day before, I was at Ko. But we have a team. If we’re good, it’s because of everyone else.”

And since he got his Washington, DC, restaurant off the ground last year, he says, “I’ve been here [in New York] most of the time.”

Welcome home — and this time, stay a while.