Ten years afer launching Momofuku Noodle Bar, chef David Chang has a restaurant empire in three countries, owns a magazine and dreams of a nation chain. What's the secret ingredient for his success? Failure
David Chang wants me to put on a hairnet. He hands one to me as he pushes open a dented, unmarked door in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, that hides the entrance to the baking operation of Momofuku Milk Bar—the dessert capital of his culinary kingdom. Inside, Chang’s addictive Crack Pie batter churns in industrial mixers, and an endless stream of raw Compost Cookies slide by on conveyer belts. Even for the casual foodie, this is Willy Wonka territory—but, I’m about to glimpse something even more elusive.
We walk by shelves of Ritz Crackers, Crisco and cornflakes to another scuffed door. “You’re only the fifth civilian to ever see this,” Chang says as he leads me to his windowless Momofuku culinary lab, where his team of food scientists and chefs is trying to invent new tastes for his growing restaurant empire. “I don’t know any other way to get my guys to embrace failure,” he says. “I just want them to go for the big f*@#-up.”
There have been a lot of those in the five years Chang has run the lab. Hundreds of turkeys have been sacrificed in his noble attempt to create the perfect turducken (deboned chicken stuffed into a deboned duck stuffed into a deboned turkey). Experiments with modern gear to make ancient rice paper, rice noodles and rice balls were all disasters. Then there was the pressure cooker explosion that almost destroyed the place. “The top cracked in half—lima beans were going at 1,000 miles per hour. It looked like a grenade went off,” Chang says, as he shakes his head and laughs. “It was scary. I feel like something really bad could have happened.”
Of course, the secret lab has had breakthroughs, too—and they usually involve fungus. “We had an idea to just naturally ferment everything—making soy sauce, misos, pickled everything and hot sauces. We discovered, through a lot of trial and error, ways to make stuff no one had made before.” The new creations typically centre on Hozon—his take on Japanese miso paste but made from American ingredients like chickpeas, sunflower seeds and lentils instead of the traditional soy. He hands me a Hozon jar and a spoon—it’s sweet and salty, with an umami kick that hits you in the back of the cheeks.
Next, we sample the rye “soy sauce” (aged in old charred bourbon barrels and squeezed through a hand-cranked cider press) with layers of char and spice. After that comes the sweet and thick Hot Sauce No. 22 (the previous 21 versions having failed to meet Chang’s exacting specifications): “We finally have one that tastes good on pizza.”
The endgame is to take these concoctions mainstream: “Go to Whole Foods—there’s a whole aisle with 100 olive oils. With Asian food becoming more accessible, we can do that with these sauces. Make it here in America—make the best version of it and hopefully create that trend.”
But for now, these lab experiments have found their way to dishes at Chang’s New York Noodle Bar and Ssäm Bar (ramen, sardines and baby beets) and non-Chang restaurants such as Wylie Dufresne’s Alder (uni jalapeño poppers) and Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s Perry St. (soft-shell crabs). “I just figured we’d do it sort of like drug dealers,” the 37-year-old culinary mogul says. “Just send it to our network of chef friends and see how they incorporate it.” As this open-source approach works itself out, he continues to force his sous-scientists to keep playing with their food: “It’s imperative that we learn the scientific process and document what happens. I want people to own their mistakes and to just go for it—really great flavour comes from the failure.”
If only we could all fail like David Chang. In the decade since he opened Momofuku Noodle Bar, he’s turned a meagre, 600-square-foot East Village noodle joint into a food cartel that now includes Canada and stretches all the way to Australia. Along the way he’s yanked the white tablecloth out from under the fine-dining scene, proving that haute cuisine can come in the form of country ham, pork butt and kimchi—all served in raw-plywood-lined spaces with a large helping of Guns N’ Roses. “Momofuku had an attitude that says, ‘Park your expectations and preconceptions of fine dining at the door and let me feed you really good food,’ ” says Danny Meyer, founder of Union Square Hospitality Group. “He’s liberated hundreds of young entrepreneurial chefs to open places they can afford to open.”
Ken Friedman of Spotted Pig fame adds, “It was like going to a bar but, he was serving the best food in town.”
But Chang had a bigger problem when he launched Noodle Bar, in 2004. “He couldn’t boil noodles,” says Peter Meehan, a former New York Times food critic (his review would eventually kick-start Chang’s career) and an editor of Momofuku’s Lucky Peach. Adds Chang: “We were a terrible restaurant.” There were no waiters, bussers or dishwashers—or glasses. Noodle Bar was a total failure—and, as it would turn out, the best thing that could have happened to him. “I really believe that if I just had a little bit more experience and a little bit more wisdom, Momofuku would never have happened,” he says. “I viewed it as a death sentence. Like when people learn they have a year left to live—they finally start living.”
In 2012, Chang opened four spots in a single modern glass cube in Toronto that he dubbed Momofuku world. “It felt like a restaurant opening every week. I was waterboarding myself. I could feel the years coming off my life.” And then came the opportunity to open a 47-seat restaurant in Sydney, Australia. Chang spent about a year and a half Down Under to open that restaurant because his partners helped fund his “dream kitchen” (including two custom Molteni ranges, which he calls “the Lamborghini of stoves”).
(This story appears in the Nov-Dec 2014 issue of ForbesLife India. To visit our Archives, click here.)