I am definitely not the intended audience for Eat a Peach: In 2008, I was hired as the corporate beverage director for Chang’s young empire I held this job for seven months before I was fired without explanation. The book, co-written with food writer (and Eater contributor) Gabe Ulla, focuses on Chang’s years building Momofuku, 2004 to roughly 2017, although it briefly explores his formative years, from his “certifiably average” childhood in Virginia to his time in culinary school and as an inexperienced young cook at NYC institutions Craft and Café Boulud. The latest entry in this ongoing project of self-narrativization is his memoir Eat a Peach, which was released in September. Part of Chang’s savvy has been the mindful integration of his flaws in public he has catalogued them throughout his career, so that the man and the myth are nearly inseparable. As the canny narrator of his own story, he has often declared that he is mystified by his own success, as in a 2014 interview with CBC/Radio-Canada, when he described himself as “so in the moment, and unaware, and unprepared for any success, and I just didn’t care what anyone thought.” “He is probably the modern equivalent of Norman Mailer or Muhammad Ali in the 1960s and ’70s,” the New York Times’s Pete Wells wrote in 2018, “somebody whose success in one part of the culture allows him to sound off on the rest of the culture and where it is heading.”įor those who’ve closely followed Chang’s arc, it’s impossible to divorce the chef and restaurateur’s ascent from the image that helped propel him there - angry, effusive, self-aware, self-righteous, and disarmingly candid - an avatar embraced by the media, but largely created by Chang himself. After 15 years spent in the public eye, Chang has transcended his place in the so-called “bad boy” chef generation, and is now a leader in the restaurant industry. He’s now attached to some 15 restaurants spanning NYC to Toronto to Sydney (not counting his growing Fuku fried chicken enterprise), is the figurehead of a media and entertainment company, and, thanks in part to well-reviewed shows on PBS and Netflix, has become a recognizable public figure, even among those who have never eaten his food. In 2004, Momofuku Noodle Bar, a ramen joint in NYC’s East Village, ushered in a style of restaurant that’s now recognizable everywhere: food that emphasized “what cooks really wanted to eat” with little regard for existing conventions unabashed loudness and a maniacal attention to detail and deliciousness, perhaps best encapsulated in its signature dish, a pork-belly bun that would be imitated across the country.Īlong with Momofuku’s rise has come Chang’s own. David Chang changed the way America eats.
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