Chef David Chang runs Momofuku, which includes 13 restaurants, a bakery, two bars, and a culinary lab. | Chang wears a Michael Kors shirt; Levi’s jeans; Carrera watch by Tag Heuer. Knife by Wusthof.
Joe Pugliese
y first restaurant, Momofuku Noodle Bar, had an open kitchen. This wasn’t by choice—I didn’t have enough money or space to put it farther away from the diners. But cooking in front of my customers changed the way I look at food. In the early years, around 2004, we were improvising new recipes every day, and I could instantly tell what was working and what wasn’t by watching people eat. A great dish hits you like a Whip-It: There’s momentary elation, a brief ripple of pure pleasure in the spacetime continuum. That’s what I was chasing, that split second when someone tastes something so delicious that their conversation suddenly derails and they blurt out something guttural like they stubbed their toe.
The Momofuku Pork Bun was our first dish that consistently got this kind of reaction. It was an 11th-hour addition, a slapped-together thing. I took some pork belly, topped it with hoisin sauce, scallions, and cucumbers, and put it inside some steamed bread. I was just making a version of my favorite Peking duck buns, with pork belly where the duck used to be. But people went crazy for them. Their faces melted. Word spread, and soon people were lining up for these buns.
That became my yardstick: I’d ask, “Is this dish good enough to come downtown and wait in line for? If not, it’s not what we’re after.” A chef can go years before getting another dish like that. We’ve been lucky: Hits have come at the least expected time and place. I’ve spent weeks on one dish that ultimately very few people would care about. And then I’ve spent 15 minutes on something that ends up flooring people like the pork bun.
Believe me, nobody is more surprised about this than I am. Cooking, as a physical activity, doesn’t come naturally to me. It never has. To compensate for my lack of dexterity, speed, and technique, I think about food constantly. In fact, I’m much stronger at thinking about food than I am at cooking it. And recently I started seeing patterns in our most successful dishes that suggested our hits weren’t entirely random; there’s a set of underlying laws that links them together. I’ve struggled to put this into words, and I haven’t talked to my fellow chefs about it, because I worry they’ll think I’m crazy. But I think there’s something to it, and so I’m sharing it now for the first time. I call it the Unified Theory of Deliciousness.
This probably sounds absolutely ridiculous, but the theory is rooted in a class I took in college called Advanced Logic. A philosopher named Howard DeLong taught it; he wrote one of the books that directly inspired Douglas Hofstadter to write Gödel, Escher, Bach. The first day, he said, “This class will change your life,” and I was like, “What kind of asshole is this?” But he was right. I would never pretend to be an expert in logic, and I never made it all the way through Gödel, Escher, Bach. But the ideas and concepts I took away from that class have haunted me ever since.
DeLong and Hofstadter both found great beauty in what the latter called strange loops—occasions when mathematical systems or works of art or pieces of music fold back upon themselves. M. C. Escher’s drawings are a great, overt example of this. Take his famous picture of two hands drawing each other; it’s impossible to say where it starts or ends. When you hit a strange loop like this, it shifts your point of view: Suddenly you aren’t just thinking about what’s happening inside the picture; you’re thinking about the system it represents and your response to it.
It was only recently that I had a realization: Maybe it’s possible to express some of these ideas in food as well. I may never be able to hear them or draw them or turn them into math. But I’ll bet I can taste them. In fact, looking back over the years, I think a version of those concepts has helped guide me to some of our most popular dishes.
y first breakthrough on this idea was with salt. It’s the most basic ingredient, but it can also be hellishly complex. A chef can go crazy figuring out how much salt to add to a dish. But I believe there is an objectively correct amount of salt, and it is rooted in a counterintuitive idea. Normally we think of a balanced dish as being neither too salty nor undersalted. I think that’s wrong. When a dish is perfectly seasoned, it will taste simultaneously like it has too much salt and too little salt. It is fully committed to being both at the same time.
Try it for yourself. Set out a few glasses of water with varying amounts of salt in them. As you taste them, think hard about whether there is too much or too little salt. If you keep experimenting, you’ll eventually hit this sweet spot. You’ll think that it’s too bland, but as soon as you form that thought, you’ll suddenly find it tastes too salty. It teeters. And once you experience that sensation, I guarantee it will be in your head any time you taste anything for the rest of your life.
“When mathematical systems or pieces of music fold back upon themselves in a loop, it’s beautiful. Maybe there’s a way to do that with food as well.” David Chang
It’s a little bit like the famous liar’s paradox, which we studied in DeLong’s class. Here’s one version of it: “The following sentence is true. The preceding sentence is false.” As soon as you accept the first sentence, you validate the second sentence, which invalidates the first sentence, which invalidates the second, which validates the first, and on and on.
Most people won’t ever notice this sensation; they’ll just appreciate that the food tastes good. But under the surface, the saltiness paradox has a very powerful effect, because it makes you very aware of what you’re eating and your own reaction to it. It nags at you, and it keeps you in the moment, thinking about what you’re tasting. And that’s what makes it delicious.
This was an important realization for me, because it seemed like I’d discovered an unequivocal law. And I figured if I could find one, there had to be more—a set of base patterns that people inherently respond to. So then the challenge became discovering those patterns and replicating them in dish after dish. If you could do that, you’d be like the Berry Gordy of cooking; you’d be able to crank out the hits.
What you’re eating vs. What you’re thinking
1. Spicy Pork Sausage & Rice Cakes
Flavor patterns crisscross cultures. This dish reveals a kind of missing link between a Chinese classic and an Italian one.
2. Ceci e Pepe
To channel the Italian classic cacio e pepe, this dish replaces one umami-rich ingredient with another. (Ceci means chickpeas.)
3. Momofuku Pork Bun
Lots of Asian cuisines pair steamed bread with fatty meat; Americans adore the BLT. This hit speaks both languages.
few years ago I got really into experimenting with fermentation. Miso is made by fermenting soybeans, but I wanted to see what happens when you ferment nuts, seeds, and other legumes. It turns out you can get some really delicious flavors. I particularly loved the flavor I was able to get from fermenting chickpeas. I called the result a chickpea hozon, a word I invented because it wasn’t technically miso.
It proved to be a really versatile ingredient. I served it with sea urchin at my restaurant Ko, and we made a killer dish that used it on sardine toasts at Ssäm Bar. The more time I spent with it, the more I realized it had some of the umami of a soybean miso but a sweetness that reminded me of pecorino Romano.
That got me wondering if I could use it to create a new version of a classic dish, cacio e pepe. Everyone loves cacio e pepe. It’s simple: pasta with pepper, olive oil, and pecorino Romano cheese. There are only four ingredients, but with those ingredients you get this great interplay of saltiness, the chewiness of the noodles, a little prick of heat from the pepper, and the velvetiness of the fat. At heart, though, cacio e pepe is a vehicle for glutamic acid, which comes from the pecorino. It’s an umami bomb. So we made ceci e pepe (ceci is Italian for chickpeas), keeping the pepper and the pasta, using butter instead of oil, and replacing the pecorino Romano with chickpea hozon.
In and of itself, this kind of idea isn’t particularly unique. Lots of cooks strip a dish down to its component flavors and re-create them in different ways. That’s the whole concept behind deconstructed dishes. But where this gets really exciting is when you realize that many dishes from around the world share some of these base patterns, and by reverse-engineering one of these dishes you can actually tap into many of them at the same time.
This is easier to see in retrospect than to plan out in advance. For instance, I inadvertently stumbled on a hit again in 2006, after I hired Joshua McFadden from the Italian restaurant Lupa. (He has since gone on to greatness in Portland, Oregon, at Ava Gene’s.) Joshua told me he wanted to make a version of a Bolognese, the Italian meat sauce. I told him that was fine, but he had to use only Korean ingredients. I often set these kinds of limitations, because I’m a big believer that creativity comes from working within constraints. (And also, maybe it’s a form of payback; when I was a kid in northern Virginia, my mother had to make her Korean dishes using only ingredients she could find at the local Safeway.)
Anyway, that meant he would have to find a way of re-creating the sweetness, umami, and pungency of Bolognese without the onions, celery, carrot, tomato paste, or white wine. He ended up using scallions, red chiles, ground pork, and fermented bean paste. Instead of using milk to provide that silky mouthfeel, I encouraged him to add in some whipped tofu. And rather than pasta or gnocchi, he served it with rice cakes that looked like gnocchi. We called it Spicy Pork Sausage & Rice Cakes, and when most people taste it, it reminds them—even on a subconscious level—of a spicier version of Bolognese.
But here’s the thing. When I taste that dish, I don’t taste Bolognese—I taste mapo tofu, a spicy, flavorful Chinese dish made with soft tofu, Szechuan peppers, and ground pork. I’ve had way more mapo tofu than I’ve had Bolognese, so that resonates more for me. I’d never seen a connection between Bolognese and mapo tofu before, but Joshua had inadvertently discovered this overlap between them. We hit the middle of a Venn diagram, creating something that incorporated enough elements of both mapo tofu and Bolognese that it could evoke both of them, while being neither one precisely.
ltimately this whole theory amounts to an argument for breaking down the barriers that prevent people from understanding delicious food from other cultures. Europeans like sauerkraut—but kimchi is this weird foreign entity. They’re both salty, rotten cabbage! It shows you just how shallow human nature is, for someone to say, oh I’ll eat this but I’d never eat that. That’s the dumbest thing in the world.
Hofstadter (yes, him again) had a different word for what I call base patterns. He called them isomorphisms, concepts that can be expressed in different ways while retaining their core form. He used the example of a record player. The groove in the record, the vibrations in your loudspeaker, the sound waves in the air: These are all different media, but they expresses the same underlying pattern.
That’s how I feel about food. Different cultures may use different media to express those base patterns—with different ingredients, for instance, depending on what’s available. But they are, at heart, doing the exact same thing. They are fundamentally playing the same music. And if you can recognize that music, you’ll blow people’s minds with a paradox they can taste: the new and the familiar woven together in a strange loop.
David Chang (@davidchang) is the chef-owner of Momofuku.
This article appears in the August 2016 issue.
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