Medium Raw

He looks up from a half-eaten skewer of chicken, worried. “What if you don’t get the chance? At the end of the day, the heart of the matter is: what happens when you’re dead? For me, the Christian ending just isn’t…good enough.”

He mentions the bodhisattva of Mahayana Buddhism, sentient beings who delay their own attainment of nirvana to become guides to those who have yet to reach it—as more worthy of emulation than the Christian saints.

I generally don’t hear a lot of talk about Buddhist spirituality (certainly not over chicken meatballs and beer), and I’m still pondering what it must be like to get out from under the twin boulders of a father’s love and expectations—and a God who turned out to be a disappointment. “I try to put my goals second to other people’s goals,” he says.

Which I wonder about—so I later ask his friend Peter Meehan. “I’d like to say he’s a fucking sweetheart,” he says, asked simply if he’d describe Chang as a nice guy, “that he’s compassionate. That he’s generous. And he is. But it’s, like, steel-jacketed love. It’s hard-edged. I mean, I’ve never woken up next to him, but I don’t think there are a lot of tender and delicate moments with David. He’s…

loyal as shit. So if you’re part of his brood and somebody harms you? You can count on him to be appropriately supportive and vengeful.”

“Loyalty and honesty are really important things to me,” says Chang.

He is, to say the least, unforgiving of those he feels have lied to him or let him down in the loyalty department.

His friend Dave Arnold has told him, “Your hobby is hating people,” and, to be sure, he has a long and carefully tended—even cherished—list of enemies.

“I don’t mind people saying they hate my guts,” he says, warming to his subject. “Just have the balls to say it to my face.”

“Don’t try to be my fuckin’ friend and then…” he trails off, remembering the “Ozersky incident.” Josh Ozersky, at the time of his transgression, was an editor-correspondent for New York magazine’s influential food-and-dining Web site, Grub Street. The root of his conflict with Chang, it is said, stems from the publication of a Momofuku menu—before Chang felt it ready for release. There had been, Chang insists, assurances that the document would be withheld.

Ozersky’s “scoop” got him banned for life from all Chang restaurants. And when I say “for life,” I’m not kidding. There is no question in my mind that buffalo will graze in Times Square—and pink macaroons will fall from the sky—before Josh Ozersky ever makes it through the door of a Momofuku anywhere.

“I hate Antoinette Bruno,” says Chang. This was a wound inflicted early in his career, when the Momofuku thing was just getting going. Chang felt particularly vulnerable at the time, and the offense still burns, years later. Bruno is head honcho of Star Chefs, an outfit that, every year, organizes what Chang calls “a poor imitation of Madrid Fusion.” After one of the events, Bruno found herself shooting her mouth off about how “overrated” she found this David Chang character, blissfully—and stupidly—unaware that she was talking with Chang’s cooks at the time. “Opportunist. A fake. Not a good person. Sycophant. Dishonorable,” says Chang, still genuinely angry just thinking about her.

“I fuckin’ hate X,” he says, talking about the saintly proprietor of a good-for-the-world restaurant, a pioneer of conscientious, sustainable food production. “It’s like hating the Dalai Lama!” I protest. “How could you hate that guy? And he stands for everything you support!” (Chang is deeply involved with—and curious about—new avenues and new sources for sustainable, low-impact ingredients.)

“I fuckin’ hate him so much it’s unbelievable.”

“But you love Alice Waters,” I point out, as an example of someone far, far more dogmatic.

“Yeah, but Alice means well. She may not articulate as well as she could—but she’s a nice lady who maybe just took too much acid back in the ’60s. Plus…she’s a mom figure to me. When I got sick, she was the first person to call. Before my family even.”

He doesn’t elaborate about Chef X beyond “He’s weirdly manipulative.”

And “I hate Y,” another beloved figure in cuisine, the hugely talented chef-owner of an innovative restaurant specializing in a cuisine that might be called “experimental.”

“But…but you worship Ferran Adrià,” I say, “you’re bestest pals with Wylie Dufresne, for fuck’s sake”—arguing the inconsistency in idolizing them while utterly dismissing the other guy, a major acolyte. Why hate this guy?

“For his seriousness” is all he has to say. “Eating in a restaurant should be fun.”

Anyway, he continues, “Ferran Adrià is a genius; [his work was] like Bob Dylan going electric. Nobody has quite fathomed the Ferran impact yet. It will last forever.”

I begin to gather that Chang doesn’t need a logical reason to hate a guy. In almost every case, it’s in some way personal.