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I don’t think I could live without rice and butter. Not that I eat butter a lot, but I think that’s something we don’t get in America… there’s something decadent and luxurious about really, really good butter. It’s just sublime.

I should probably throw in eggs. I think eggs are, as a group, one of my most favorite things to eat, whether it’s a fish egg or a chicken egg. It’s such a perfect food, because there are so many ways you can manipulate it. Turn it into a sauce, you can soft boil it, you can fry it… there’s so many ways you can cook an egg, and they’re all fantastic and delicious. I’m particularly fond of a soft poached egg, because I always say that it’s a poor man’s way to add luxury to food. There is something about that creamy egg yolk that’s decadent and delicious.

Rice — not just because I’m Korean or Asian — because I eat it all the time, and it’s an ingredient that we’ve tried to look at over the years. It’s something we’ve been studying a lot more and trying to incorporate it in a more efficient way. I’m constantly dumbfounded by how people figure out how to manipulate this thing over the years to make rice noodles and rice cakes and all this stuff.

Obviously, a lot of that’s just trial and error over many, many years. Rice and heat have this very strange relationship that no other starch that I know of has. That’s something that we’re trying to figure out right now.

It’s not demanding; it’s you either care or you don’t care. And if you don’t care, see you later. There’s a lot of work that comes into making a certain dish, whether you realize it or not, so don’t mess it up. Mess it up once, but don’t mess it up again. One mistake is one mistake too many.

Let’s say my kitchen team has slaughtered a pig, and one of their colleagues is burning the hell out of it or making a dish with that pork and doing a very poor job out of it. They now are going to have a full understanding of that cycle of life. So they brought and raised this pig from birth to slaughter to full weight, so br/>
I try to tell them to care about the entire process — the farmer that raises it for them, the life that was taken for it, the prep cooks that took care of it and butchered it down for you, the person that made the sauce. There are hundreds of elements that go into making this, and if you don’t care enough — if you don’t care enough to make it delicious, and you don’t care enough to make a paying customer happy — then it’s never going to work. We want people to care. That’s it.

For every chef that grew up in the ’90s, let’s say anyone that’s like 28 to 35 or 40 even, [it was] The French Laundry Cookbook. When that came out, I can tell you it changed everyone’s lives. No one had seen anything like it before. They might have had cookbooks like that, but it was in another language. But to see that it was an American chef doing French food in his style, in an incredible, unique, personal way — and the book was probably the best cookbook to distill Thomas Keller’s culinary philosophy. It’s something that nobody had ever seen before, as young cooks or aspiring cooks.

That really set the tone for everyone. So I think a lot of people are indebted to him. A lot of people are maybe a little bit more obscure, but for me, it was Alex Lee. Chef Alex Lee was the chef at Daniel for Daniel Boulud. I always looked up to him because he was a highly intelligent Chinese-American man that ran Daniel and could have been doing anything. But he had been with Daniel a long time, and here’s a guy — this big, big Chinese guy that’s running an entire French brigade, speaking in French, telling the French sous chefs what to do. The passion and the hard work that he showed was legendary.

I always wanted to work for him; I always wanted to be like him, emulate him. Then when he quit because he was just burned out or whatever those reasons were, it really had an impact on me. He�s done everything you’re supposed to do, and he’s like 36 years old, and he’s calling it quits. Because what else is he going to do? He’s reached every goal that he’s wanted to reach professionally. What else is there? Is he going to open up a bistro now and go down a level? I think him quitting fine dining really changed that for me.

I have so many chefs that are heroes: Wylie Dufresne (who’s become a good friend of mine), Tom Colicchio, Marco Canora… I could go on and on. When I talk about chefs, it’s like collecting baseball cards.

I didn’t necessarily fall into this profession. My father was in the restaurant business almost his entire life, and he tried his best to make sure I never worked in it. Because he knew how hard it was, he definitely sabotaged several attempts when I was younger to enter the culinary profession. I was supposed to be everything but a cook. I tried several jobs — I almost golfed; I played competitive golf when I was younger. In college, I wanted to drop out to go to culinary school, because college wasn’t doing it for me. I wanted to… I just had this bug in me. But until I had an opportunity to finally chase after it, I was pursuing everything but cooking.

No. I mean, bread and butter. Give me good butter and some even mediocrely good bread, hot bread, I’m fine. It’s usually the simplest things.

I don’t try to tell stories, but certain food, certain chefs can make poetic food. It’s like a dance. It’s a progression when you just see it. You’re just navigating through this on cruise control, and you’re just eating, and you’re in wonder.

Food can be challenging at the same time. I think the chef that best embodies this is Andoni [Luis Aduriz] at Mugaritz in San Sebastian, where literally, you sit down in this beautiful restaurant and you pick up a card, and one is pleasure and one is pain — 180 minutes of pleasure, 180 minutes of pain, basically. And it can straddle both, just like the poetic and abstract can straddle both.

You can eat a dish and not really quite get it. It could piss you off. It can evoke an emotion. It can be delicious at the same time. Andoni has a very famous starter dish of local rocks. They’re gray, and in the middle of the plate they put a side of aioli, garlic-infused mayo. And you’re like, “What am I supposed to do with this?” You can’t tell what’s a potato and what’s a rock. So over the years, they’ve had to tell people what’s a rock and what’s a potato to distinguish it, because people were biting into rocks. The weight and feel is the exact same — they’re hot rocks or potatoes. That’s a pretty extreme example of the pleasure or pain, but the whole idea is that it’s delicious, but at the same time, it can be completely abstract.

The third part to creativity is just sort of going where nobody wants to go — when somebody says something’s a bad idea, and just going with that. It’s not trying to be solipsistic or stubborn, but making sure that when somebody says, “You know what? No one is going to eat that; that’s too much fat,” trying to understand why that is the case… trying to understand that you’ve covered all your tracks.

Maybe somebody is missing an angle on that dish… just having the fortitude to serve that, knowing that it might fail. More often than not, those are the dishes that are home runs; the ones that you’re like, “Ah, I really believe in this dish, but I think people could be repulsed by it at the same time.”

You couldn’t try to do something more revolutionary than bringing food — good food in America, great food — to most people, to everyone. For the most part, if you wanted to have a great meal in New York City in the ’90s, it wasn’t like, “Let’s check out this little tiny corner shop that’s serving this blah, blah, blah.” It might have been like, “Check out this Punjabi Stand. It’s fantastic.” Or, “There’s this great place in Flushing that’s serving insanely good Thai food.” If you wanted great food, it was most often, “Let’s go to Lespinasse. Let’s go to La Bernardin.”

There’s nothing wrong with that, but having traveled the world — particularly Asia — food was for everyone. If I could pull off opening a fine dining restaurant, I would, because I love the beauty of it. But there certainly is a barrier to allowing everyone to eat that. That’s what I think fine dining is. It’s a certain level, a stratification within society, that can eat that [food].

An example of one of those dishes we came up with is this uni/tapioca/tofu dish. It wasn’t in the book. We served it, but it was such a unique dish for us. It was a play on textures (soft and crunchy) and temperature (cold and hot). Also in terms of flavor, spicy and the creaminess of the uni, it was something that you wouldn’t necessarily see in our restaurant. It’s not on the menu anymore, but that was a dish that I worked on and I just thought, “Well, instead of trying to set the tofu, we’ll just make it sort of like this amoeba-like foam.” And it worked. It was a dish that I remember very clearly putting it on as a special and watching people’s reactions, hoping they didn’t think it was disgusting. I’d say 90 percent of the people really enjoyed it, loved it, but some of the people didn’t get it.

Another example would be the frozen foie gras dish that we do at Ko. Everyone is pretty familiar with foie gras. A torchon of foie gras, which is cured foie, is very classic; but to serve it in a very austere way, just frozen shavings of foie gras over a Microplane, so it looks like a pile of snow, and to eat that… and underneath that you have a Riesling gelée, and a pine nut brittle, lychee fruit. It was just served in a different way, but to say that it was frozen in the manner in which we served it, I was like, “I know that it tastes good, but how are people going to accept it?” It’s more of the acceptance of things, because I think that chefs are creatures of habit and we are sort of masochists because we want approval. We need instant approval. It’s that fear of rejection, I think, that fear of failure. It’s that fear of letting someone down — whether it’s your colleague or a paying customer — that drives us, or certainly drives me. You don’t want to let anyone down.

I think that Americans need to develop a food culture. Americans have to change their food culture, but I feel that because we’ve had a short history compared to other countries, we’ve never really had to want for anything. So food has remained cheap. I think when food prices rise, and fast food no longer becomes cheap, people will begin to learn by necessity.

They’re going to learn that, “Okay, maybe I’m going to have to learn how to cook scraps. I’m going to learn how to make my own food. I’m going to plot a piece of land and then I’m going to plot a garden in the back of my yard.” I don’t know necessarily. I don’t know what the answers are. I just know that the future is problematic, and I think that fast food will no longer be synonymous with affordable and cheap.

My cooking career has taken a nonlinear journey. I really got into cooking because I thought it was honest and it was beautiful. And then you learn that it’s a very competitive environment and that you want to be as good as the best chefs around, and I quickly saw that I was probably being very hard on myself that I wasn’t as good as my heroes. There just seemed to be so many great cooks around that I wanted to take a different path.

I didn’t want to go fine dining — fine dining was where you could eat good food outside of ethnic food — so I decided to study ramen, and then I opened up a ramen bar after working for some very famous chefs here in New York. I was somehow in a position where I was trying to avoid everything that was fine dining or the world of fine dining. I am now in the dead center of it with, I guess, some of the accolades and the criticisms… and just nobody would have planned it this way.

Opening Noodle Bar, Ssäm Bar, was not how anyone would do anything, particularly how we did things. It was completely unconventional. I think it was also around the time, around 2004, right when people started to read the Internet for food or whatnot, and we were probably one of the first restaurants that had a live feed to the audience. There were constant updates so people could see us grow and make mistakes. There was no hiding period; there was no trying to figure it out.

Creativity in the kitchen, more often than not, happens from trial and error and accidents. That’s probably the majority of recipe development — just screwing up or burning something, and then taking that burned product into a beautiful dish. A lot of eureka-like moments come from a total disaster, trying to save the situation.

Second, it comes from a collaboration of ideas, because a restaurant isn’t a singular effort. You have an entire crew of people, and if you can edit each other’s ideas, theoretically at least… Let’s just say we do a dinner service tonight and we get these rutabagas coming in, and it’s a beautiful rutabaga. No one else is excited about rutabaga, but we’re really excited about rutabaga. And we start riffing on about what we might want to serve with that tomorrow or what dish we want to cook around that tomorrow. So you get a lot of people that are excited about a product, and that excitement sort of creates this creative spark. You’re sort of throwing ideas out there, and then the next day we’re going to work on those ideas, and edit and whittle away. There’s no improvising. Not our restaurants. I don’t really believe in improvising, in cooking. I just don’t. I think you can do it — I think you can improvise and be good, once in a while. But to be good consistently, you can’t improvise. It takes lots of practice.

I think the food we cook at our restaurants, at Momofuku, is a little bit eclectic; it’s all over the place. Then obviously there’s an Asian bent, but not really. I mean, we’re sitting here at Ssäm Bar, where the menus have country hams from Tennessee, North Carolina and Kentucky. We have crudo. We have roast ducks that are stuffed in a very, very Chinese/French way. It’s all over the place. For me, it was a discovery from when I opened Noodle Bar. Instead of trying to be authentic, instead of trying to fit into a category, let’s reverse-engineer the process.

There are French restaurants uptown that are using more Asian ingredients than we are, but nobody says that they’re Asian — they’re French because they have French chefs and there’s a French name on the door. I think that most people are stuck in the realm of having to categorize stuff, and I think that limits your ability to make delicious food. It’s like, “We’re trying to make delicious food that’s affordable.” We want people to leave the restaurant being like, “Wow, that was really worth it. It was worth the hype. I wanted to go in hating it, but I left loving it.”

So that’s the goal. Whatever we need to do to get to that point, that’s what our food is going to be. And that’s a constantly evolving, changing, dynamic variable. It’s not easy to describe our food, so sometimes I just say, “It�s American food.” That raises the eyebrows of some people.

I think to inspire the next generation of chefs, you somehow have to inspire hope and you’ve got to tell them hopefully the government will let you work more than 40 hours a week.

I loved golf, because winning was cut and dry. There’s nobody that can say, “Oh, he doesn’t deserve it. He didn’t earn it.” Well, I beat you by eight strokes. It’s very simple: We played the same course, same conditions. There are no ifs, ands or buts. But the culinary world was something that I never thought I would win any awards in, let alone all the great wonderful things that have come our way. It’s not false modesty. I just had no plan on it ever happening. I never wanted to be that person that had that pressure.

Something that I’ve asked myself recently is, “Are we cooking now because we want to make people happy? Or are we cooking to win awards?” It’s a hard question that, to be honest, I don’t know how to answer. It’s something that looms very large on us. We try not to think about. We try to keep it out of sight, out of mind, but there is a lot of pressure. Ssäm Bar, for instance, got three stars in the New York Times. We didn’t want three stars. We’re happy to have it, but with that came a lot of criticism. We became a lightning rod for a lot of the accolades, and I didn’t think that was fair. I’ll take whatever heat, but don’t mess with my guys — don’t mess with my staff.

I do feel that service is very important. For instance, I think it’s a lost art. Nobody wants to be a captain anymore, career server, ma�tre d’. So when I go to per se, for instance, or the French Laundry or Daniel or Le Bernardin, you see the servers in action and you’re like, “This is why I choose not to do fine dining,” because there’s no way I could get this choreographed. It is so difficult, and I don’t think people realize when the plates are down, everyone’s doing it at the same time — no spilling, no nothing. That end of it is unbelievably difficult to do.

That’s an aspect of the restaurant world that I didn’t really care too much about. A restaurant I worked at, I remember being told that food was the third most important thing. Service is number one and décor was number two, and I was like, “Wait a second. You’re holding an entire staff meeting and you’re telling us we’re the third most important element?” I could have taken it out in the wings, like, “Well, service is everything.” Or, “I want to elevate the food and I don’t really care too much about the service.” So that’s something that we did at our restaurants for a number of years is not really care too much about the service.

All I want in my servers is to get the food hot to the customers that want it hot, get the food cold to the customer that want it cold, and know what they’re ordering. So, good service was good enough for me. But as we’ve grown, we realize what worked for us in the past doesn’t necessarily work for us in the future. We’ve tried and constantly investing in our servers to be more knowledgeable about wines, about the food, about the restaurant in general. No matter how delicious your dish is, if it doesn’t get to the customer in a timely fashion and if the server don’t know how to explain the dish, then all our work goes up in smoke.

I think simple is fine, but too simple is not something I look after. Unless it’s something like… let’s just say we stumble upon a can of Beluga caviar, which is totally illegal. I wouldn’t turn that into a sauce, for instance. I wouldn’t turn it in to the authorities, but certainly it would be a treat. Or say a dry aged côte de boeuf, I wouldn’t be turning that into sausage. I’d be roasting that and serving it as is, with a sauce on the side. So there are certain things that I feel adamantly that should be served simple. But not everyone needs to be serving simple. I think there are enough restaurants out there that are serving simple and beautiful, and cherishing the product and the farmer and that entire cycle.

I want our food to be deceivingly complex. I want someone to look at a dish and to slap themselves on the head and be like, “Why didn’t I think of this? Wow, these flavors are fantastic. It was totally within my frame of reference to do this dish, but I didn’t think of it.” We want to put a lot of thought into our food, and we want it to be simple, but not really simple.

Organic doesn’t really mean that much to me. Organic means that certain farmers are doing it, but sometimes it could just be more of a marketing ploy. Two examples like organic: There are a lot of farmers that don’t make a lot of money, and for them to be organic, they’re going to go straight out of business. But they’re going to raise their animals and their vegetables in a much more humane way — in a better way — than any farmer that’s certified organic. So it’s just, again, semantics really.

Organic is something that is also a marketing term. I was dealing with large pork producer a few years back, and I wouldn’t buy their pork because it was commodity pork. When I say “commodity pork,” these are pigs that are raised in terrible conditions. They came in here in suits and I was like, “Okay, this is a major food conglomerate, not a bunch of farmers, wearing slick suits.” And I’ll never forget, I was like, “How can these guys say they’re farmers?” And I told them, “Listen, I want to know the farmer, I want to be able to call and I want to be able to talk to the farmer about what’s going on with the animals, the feed. There needs to be not just the story. I need to know that the pigs were treated right and they are going to taste a certain way.” They said, “Okay,” and literally a week later I look on the website and they have these families that have popped up everywhere representing this company. And I just thought, “Oh, and it’s organic now.” I was like, “Well, how is that possible?” So that’s when I really started to be a little bit leery of the word organic.

Absolutely. I was 27 when I opened [Noodle Bar], and I didn’t know enough. I knew enough to fail. I didn’t know enough to succeed, and that naiveté was instrumental in making some terribly stupid decisions. If you don’t make that mistake, you’re never going to open pathways that were not available to you. It’s this catch-22: Make a mistake, but don’t make the mistake. Make smart mistakes. You have to be reckless. That’s what I tell everyone in their 20s.

In your 20s, you have nothing to lose. You can go bankrupt many times over and no one’s going to care. So go for broke. That was really the way I looked at it. And when I opened up Noodle Bar and said, “Be reckless,” there was a lot that happened to me in my early 20s. I had several close friends that had passed away. September 11th had happened. I was like, “Well, what’s the point of playing it safe? Who cares? At the end of the day, a hundred years from now, no one’s going to care. So let’s just do this and do it to the best of my abilities. If I fail, I fail.”

People seem to be afraid. And I always look at it like this: Everyone had gone [to] school mixers as a kid, and either you ask that girl out for a dance or you don’t. You can be a wallflower. But at the end of the day, if you get rejected, what harm was done? You pick yourself up and your life goes on. So failing in business, while extraordinarily important to me, is also something that you have to let go of at the same time in order to make some decisions. And it was a lot easier to do that when we had two, three, four, five employees. Now we’re in the hundreds. I cannot be as reckless. My decisions have to be a little bit more calculated, because something that I do affects so many more people. So I have to be mindful of that.

No, there’s no rhyme or reason. We just did it because these spaces became available, and they change as they go. We’re in Ssäm Bar right now. Ssäm Bar originally opened as a Korean-Mexican burrito joint. Three years later, it’s in the San Pellegrino top 50 restaurants in the world. We didn’t plan on that. The laundromat next door becomes available — well, we’ll put in a bakery. That becomes Milk Bar. Next thing you know, it turns over there, and we expand. If your goal is to constantly push yourself and to grow and grow when you’re ready to grow, you’re not following a blueprint.

I talk to people who are managers at other places, and they say, “What’s your mission statement?” I was like, “Why have a mission statement?” We want to be the best and we want to grow every day, and we want to learn every day.

The big questions for me that keep me up are: Are we going to stay in business? How am I going to take care of everybody? Not that it’s my sole responsibility, but certain actions that I take now, I am now fully aware [how they] have repercussions that affect hundreds of people. So it’s a lot to think about. That’s what keeps you up all day, pretty much, is how to make sure we keep the business afloat.

The future seems to be filled with projects. We’re still working on an app. We’re publishing a magazine called Lucky Peach, which is the name of the app. That’s headed by Peter Meehan, who co-wrote the cookbook with me, and the guys from McSweeney’s, Chris Ying. We’re opening a restaurant in Sydney, Australia — a small restaurant with 24 to 40 seats. Then later we’re going to open a restaurant in Toronto. So that’ll be an interesting year.

Curiosity to me in the culinary world, or in general, just means asking why — questioning dogma, questioning why anything is what it is. I think that only furthers your knowledge, and knowledge is never a bad thing, particularly in the culinary world, where you have to challenge certain set notions in order to expand your culinary horizons so you can cook new things.

I am less in the kitchen during service, partly because it’s not very good for me. If it was a closed kitchen, I could work, but an open kitchen… it’s just too intense now. I can’t work and talk to a customer at the same time. And I don’t want to yell at the customer, but for me, the food is the first thing. I’ll spend as much time as possible at the restaurants if I don’t have to work service. I want to work service. This is what kills me, because I want to work service, but doctors have all said it’s bad for me. Everyone says it’s bad for me, because every dish, every plate, everything means so much to me.

Farm to table is something that I’ve never quite understood as a culinary movement. I feel farm to table is, what, getting the best possible produce and giving it to your restaurant and selling it at your restaurant? That’s what you’re supposed to do. I don’t know why you should be congratulated for doing what you’re supposed to do. What are you supposed to say, you’re selling 90-day frozen peaches? It’s your responsibility as a chef, as a business owner, not to screw over your customer but to provide them with the best thing you can afford.

I’ve maintained this for a while now: I think meat is going to take a back seat to vegetables and grains. Moreover, that’s how the world eats. No one really has a 64-ounce T-bone steak — that’s only in America. I think that meat will be much more used as a flavoring agent rather than the centerpiece of a dish. And just like most other cultures, meat is going to be eaten on celebratory occasions, because I think it is going to quite expensive. Food is going to get expensive. People just have to embrace that notion. We serve meat, and we try to procure from the best farmers we can. I think it’s a misnomer that we’re a meat-centered restaurant. We’ve really never been.

What makes me curious is probably that I know nothing. I really know nothing. I’m not trying to take the Socratic approach or anything, [it’s just that] the more I figure out this business, the less I know. It truly makes me dumbfounded, this culinary world of cooking. For instance, I’m now stumbling upon microbiology — something I avoided completely in high school and college — and yet it’s consuming my life right now, and I know nothing about microbiology. So that door is only going to open up another door, and it is an endless journey.