Ep. 484: Cooking Noodles and Catching Permit with David Chang

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely,
bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listeningcast.

Speaker 2 (00:18):
You can't predict any ofthing.

Speaker 3 (00:20):
The Meat Eater Podcast is brought to you by First Light.
Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging deer stands, or scouting
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Speaker 2 (00:39):
All right, everybody, joined today by David Chang, Holy smokes,
excited to be here.

Speaker 3 (00:44):
I you okay, David Chang, Michelin star chef Momafuku restaurant
group podcaster, Tons of television, like a lot of television.

Speaker 2 (00:58):
Started out as a chef, yup, we do I just
play one on TV?

Speaker 1 (01:02):
Nice play one.

Speaker 3 (01:04):
We just talked about you a whole bunch because, as
I described to you earlier, I had was moose hunting
and we ate a.

Speaker 2 (01:14):
Lot of uh we ate a lot of your ramen.

Speaker 1 (01:19):
Wow, a lot of your ramen.

Speaker 3 (01:23):
With maybe in an area that no one has ever
eaten your ramen. And then I got home and got
to talking about this and and uh Randall Weaver here
he was saying that he likes to he.

Speaker 1 (01:37):
Likes to eat.

Speaker 3 (01:38):
You're the Mama Fuku ramen because you don't feel like
it's such a piece of ship eating.

Speaker 2 (01:43):
It's it's not.

Speaker 4 (01:48):
Just physiologically, not just physiologically, but in terms of self
esteem and all that stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:54):
That's what that's like. I know exactly what you mean.
You don't feel like it just yeah, you feel it
feels like clean and good.

Speaker 3 (02:02):
Dude, I'll tell you I sat down and did I
sat down to three packs?

Speaker 2 (02:07):
Wow? Two is really sort of the proper portion.

Speaker 1 (02:11):
Oh really, no, we moved down on a three pack.
What are you good for, Randall?

Speaker 2 (02:15):
I don't know.

Speaker 4 (02:16):
I'm thrilled to go home though, and tell my wife
that two is actually the proper amount for one person.

Speaker 2 (02:21):
Well, listen, we're gonna send you a whole boatload of
the Mombo product. Trust that's phenomenal.

Speaker 3 (02:27):
No, it was that ship was good and and a
buddy of mine we were sitting there after we got
a moose. Uh my colleague Seth that I work with,
he was he went to the over to where we
were storing all the meat, and he went over to
one of the game bags was cutting himself off super
thin moose slices, skewering amount of stick. And then he

(02:51):
did the momofuku.

Speaker 2 (02:53):
U can you say wants momofuku? So I'm saying exactly,
but I've heard every pronunciation of it. Momofuko is surely
the most popular way of saying it. They hadn't know.
But it's fine. It sounds like the reason that I
named it that it sounds like motherfucker. Sure does. That
really is so it doesn't mean something. It does because
I thought when we did the restaurant, when it came

(03:14):
out with the idea of two thousand and four is
to introduce ramia. Reintroduced romen to maya because most people
know it as instant noodles. The guy that created was
the Taiwanese guy. He wasn't even Japanese. He created to
sort of feed post war Japan in a fast way.
And his name was Momofuku, and I thought it would
be And at the time I was still reading a
lot of books about logic and teutologies and shit like that. Man,

(03:37):
I was spoken a lot of pop back then, But
like I thought, that was sounds good, sounds like motherfucker.
The guy's name was MoMA fuku even though now legally
I'm not allowed to say it even though we've won
that case. Don't worry about it. And three, you know,
the first concert I went to, A second concert I
went to was Alman Brothers when I was growing up,
because I grew up in Virginia and because to me

(04:02):
that I'm waiting if this explained something, this is all
gonna make sense, because there was my favorite cover as
a kid was Eat a Peach, and that's when I
remember going there. I remember I didn't even see I
didn't even know what a vinyl record looked like, and

(04:24):
I saw that and be like, oh, that's a cool thing.
So that was always ingrained in my head when I
went to the concert and people wearing T shirts of
that same that that that cover of that album. So
it became something that was like always, I've always associated
positive memories. And then I'm in Japan learning Japanese cooking
and I'm learning things words that would mostly associate with food.

(04:47):
Momo means leg mm hm. So you know, you go
to a katy restaurant, you get momo and fuku is
like an edge of lucky. So I said lucky peach.
So a logo became the peach. So that's why the
Almond Brothers came it. Yeah, oh that's great.

Speaker 3 (05:04):
Isn't that funny when you're talking about your Japanese being
food things? Is I've always struggled with Spanish, but I
can oftentimes smoke people on my uh the wildlife names
like I used to like every like I'd be like,
I don't really know any Spanish, just that I can
name most.

Speaker 1 (05:22):
Fish in Spanish and a lot of game animals and Spanish.

Speaker 2 (05:28):
Uh, but yeah, that l that stuff is phenomenal. Man.

Speaker 1 (05:30):
So he was cooking little moose slices and dressing his
thing up.

Speaker 2 (05:35):
So did he did he boil it? Or did he
roast it?

Speaker 1 (05:38):
We had a big argument. No, no, he was boiled.

Speaker 3 (05:40):
He was just skewering his little thin super moose slices
on a stick a little bit and little strips of
fat on a stick and then putting them in. I
was encouraging him to get it boiling and just drop
it in, which he didn't want to do it that
way for whatever reason.

Speaker 1 (05:58):
And another debate we had, well.

Speaker 2 (06:00):
You're the better cook, because clearly I think you had
a better understanding. So sorry, your friend, this friend I've
never been said.

Speaker 3 (06:06):
He's on this show quite frequently. He also we had
a debate. I'd like you to settle this once and
for all. He felt that you shouldn't actually boil the stuff.
He'd liked to have it be that you would just
put hot water on it and then let it give
it a good soak, contrary to the instructions, which is

(06:30):
a three minute boil.

Speaker 2 (06:32):
Seth. I appreciate the independent thinking, that out of the
box thinking. I'm sure sometimes that out of the box
thinking can come in handy, but not in this situation. Now,
it is not designed. In fact, I think it should
be cooked thirty seconds to a minute longer than the
three minutes. Because it is air dried. It will work eventually,
It'll just saturate and that's how it can be done.

(06:54):
But it should be boiled. We're working on some other
noodles where it can work that way. And I'll make
sure that send quicker so he doesn't look foolish. Yeah time, dude,
No that stuff.

Speaker 3 (07:07):
Yeah, I really really appreciated it, and and I had
I man, what's what yeard?

Speaker 1 (07:13):
You start in the restaurant.

Speaker 2 (07:13):
Business nineteen ninety nine? Okay, so you had.

Speaker 3 (07:16):
Been going quite a while before I went in, but
I was I ate in your restaurants early on, but
not that early. We're gonna get into your whole life story,
your big fly fisherman. Yes, saltwater fly fishermen.

Speaker 2 (07:29):
I moved on to although I did a lot of
trout fishing this summer, salt water is where I think
about almost all the time.

Speaker 1 (07:36):
I feel like that was that was surprised a lot
of people who are familiar to stuff.

Speaker 2 (07:39):
Yeah, a lot of people don't don't know that. There's
not a lot of crew people on the flats in Mexico.

Speaker 5 (07:47):
Uh.

Speaker 3 (07:47):
We got to touch out a couple of things. So man,
one of these random you gotta take it over on
one of these. Are you ready?

Speaker 2 (07:52):
I think so because the couple people, Okay.

Speaker 1 (07:54):
I'll get to it.

Speaker 3 (07:56):
I'll get to it, and you're gonna have to jump
in because it has some people I respect a lot.

Speaker 1 (08:00):
We're riled up. Remember I was talking about the guy,
the climate change guy.

Speaker 2 (08:05):
Oh yeah, yeah, okay.

Speaker 3 (08:07):
Now, first off, guy wrote in to say that we
were talking about the number of PhDs out there, and
a guy wrote in talking about the great explosion in
PhD candidates and he views it as a mark like
a market economy issue. Yah, the colleges realized they could

(08:30):
make money producing these things. But I'm only throwing that
out there because I was talking about was it the
journal Nature?

Speaker 2 (08:40):
Yes, Okay, on a past episode.

Speaker 3 (08:43):
And I've been and I've had multiple academics right in
very upset with me, including the people that account as
my friend. I mentioned a article that was in free Press.

Speaker 1 (08:56):
You know what I'm talking.

Speaker 3 (08:59):
A guy wrote, an academic researcher who works on wildfires,
wrote an article in Free Press, and he was saying,
I was just published in the journal Nature about California wildfires.
Our point out worrying in California right now. I was
just publishing the journal Nature about about wildfires. And he said,
and here's what it takes. This is an op ed.

(09:21):
He's like, here's what it takes to publish in esteemed
journals like Nature is you have to push a climate
change supremacy perspective in order to be taken seriously by journals. Meaning,
you know, eighty percent of California wildfires are human caused.

(09:41):
If you wrote a published paper about that, that's not
going to grab their interest. Electrical transmission, like we just
saw the fires in Maui. The dangers of how we
you know, transfer electricity can lead to a lot of
wildfires that won't be of interest to nature. What nature
would want to hear what they made and date to hear,
is they want to hear the climate change connection.

Speaker 1 (10:05):
And I pointed.

Speaker 3 (10:06):
Out this fact, but then it'll want to be into
this guy got himself an all kind of hot water
and had maybe already gotten in hot water.

Speaker 2 (10:18):
At the time I brought it up.

Speaker 3 (10:19):
And I only told a fraction of the story, and
a lot of people were like, dude, you kind of
like started off on the first.

Speaker 2 (10:26):
Page and ended and you didn't get to the end
of the book on this. Do you care to take
this up?

Speaker 4 (10:32):
I mean, I can only speak to what I read.
But apparently the journal had asked him to provide They said, well,
did you consider X, Y and Z. And he said,
oh no, we didn't have time or we didn't have
funding to look at.

Speaker 2 (10:48):
These different factors. Yep.

Speaker 4 (10:52):
And he you know, he responded to the reviewers by saying,
we looked at A, B and C, not X, Y
and Z, which is why. And so they apparently asked him,
you know, for the thing that he said they weren't
interested in Yeah, and then.

Speaker 3 (11:04):
They went specifically asked about the very same things. He
said that they didn't want to and.

Speaker 4 (11:09):
Then yeah, and then he kind of turned around and
said they only wanted A, B and C and they
they didn't ask me about X y Z, when in
fact they had prior to the publication of the article.

Speaker 2 (11:19):
So yeah, it wound up being like a not smart
move for that dude. Yeah. I think it came back
to bite him. I mean so, just just so so, Bob,
you know who you are.

Speaker 1 (11:33):
Jim you know he are.

Speaker 3 (11:34):
These are actual names too. Yeah, he thinks that would
makeing up names Bob and Jim. I'm not Bob and
Jim you know who you are. I'm not I have I've.

Speaker 1 (11:46):
Stand corrected yet corrected.

Speaker 3 (11:50):
But I appreciate the notes. I appreciate the notes. I
gotta keep these academic types keep warm. Yeah, because they
provide you a lot of information. On our episode four
seventy four, this is more listener feedback. This is a
little thing we do, little listener feedback. On our episode
four seventy four, Animal Diseases, someone writes this in Steve

(12:12):
seems shocked to find out about frogs being used for
pregnancy detection. This concept was actually developed after a test,
after a test that is known as the rabbit test.

Speaker 1 (12:29):
It's ringing a bell.

Speaker 2 (12:30):
You absolutely no idea. They used to use frogs. Check
this out.

Speaker 3 (12:34):
They used to use frogs. You could use frogs to
tell if a woman was pregnant. That's how pregnancy tests
used to be.

Speaker 2 (12:41):
Was frogs. What do you mean used to be actual frogs? Way, Yes, yes,
it was.

Speaker 3 (12:51):
You could you could take you could you could do
I'm not sure how it was done. There was a
swab that you could do of a woman and it
would like there would be like levels of hormonal I
don't know if it's like the estrogen level, whatever hormone levels,
and you could induce a you could induce a like

(13:12):
reproductive response in a frog with this swab, and that
would tell you if that was a pregnant individual.

Speaker 2 (13:24):
Seems like a lot of work.

Speaker 1 (13:25):
Well these frogs.

Speaker 3 (13:26):
Here's the crazy part we got in this whole podcast
episode with an or an animal disease specialist. These frogs
developed some sort of virus and now native frogs in
this country. This virus is traveling among native frogs in
this country, to which I asked, how do they even
get this virus? They got this virus from these pregnancy

(13:48):
frogs being released into the wild. So this, as this
listener goes on, this concept was actually developed after a
test is known as the rabbit test. The test which
involved subcutaneously injecting blood or urine of women assumed to

(14:09):
be pregnant into rabbits or mice, then dispatching the rabbit
to determine if there was folicular activity on the ovaries.
This is the origin of the saying. And he's acting
like this is gonna illuminate something for me. This is

(14:31):
the origin of the saying the rabbit died when referencing
of women who had been confirmed as pregnant.

Speaker 2 (14:41):
Not myself.

Speaker 1 (14:45):
No, I've never had that happen.

Speaker 2 (14:49):
Maybe we will. Did this take place?

Speaker 1 (14:51):
I didn't do a lot of work on it.

Speaker 2 (14:52):
We could repopularize that one.

Speaker 3 (14:54):
I think this is a misnomer. This listener goes on
to say, as regardless of the woman's pregnancy status, the
rabbit had perished.

Speaker 1 (15:04):
Wayne Wayne wrote that in Thanks Wayne, did he where's
he from? Did he give a location? He didn't give
any location. I'm gonna start using that man. Yeah, you
know about my neighbor, but the old rabbit has died.

Speaker 2 (15:20):
Fish spills Louisiana.

Speaker 1 (15:21):
This is a serious issue, and you as a as
a as a fishing anger, will be curious.

Speaker 3 (15:26):
Uh, it will be good to know. I don't want
to give the guy his full name. A guy wrote,
and he's from Louisiana. He's in the Navy. He's currently
stationed in San Diego. However, he's originally from South Louisiana,
where he points out there is a quote massive problem
with pogey boats.

Speaker 1 (15:46):
Manhattan.

Speaker 3 (15:47):
This is the fish of many names, Men Hayden. They
call him Pogy's in the Gulf, they call him men
Hayden in Chesapeake Bay. They got a handful of our names.

Speaker 1 (15:55):
Bunkers and bunkers and all.

Speaker 3 (15:57):
So if you're sitting there at home, you're like, never
heard of a poet by Noah Bunker, same guy, same fish,
massive problem with pogy boats fishing too close to the
coastline of wiping out our populations of game fish.

Speaker 1 (16:11):
He goes on to talk about. He sends along the
forwarded email. Blow is what the state president sent out.

Speaker 2 (16:20):
From a.

Speaker 3 (16:24):
From a fishing conservation organization, and it gets into this, Uh,
it gets into this pogy boat habit where they are
dumping trying to find the link here, dumping enormous numbers

(16:45):
of dead fish. And I hadn't realized this when these
when these pogy boats are operating, and part of the
problem here is so I'm on the board. I'm on
the board of organization called Theodore Rolls about Conservation Partnership
and TRCP where Randall's work.

Speaker 2 (16:59):
They've focused on energy on the.

Speaker 3 (17:00):
Men Hayden, the unregulated men Hayden harvest in Chesapeake Bay.

Speaker 4 (17:05):
I think they're now, Yeah, they've also focused on the
fishery and the Gulf, but the Chesapeake Bay one has
been a really hot issue.

Speaker 3 (17:14):
When they're doing these when they're doing this pogey netting,
apparently during the process of netting, the fish die, so
when they're hauling them up, the fish are dead, and
they'll now and then have these breeches and they need
to report how many fish are killed when there's a
breach or a spill, and it is just a litany

(17:37):
of insane numbers of millions.

Speaker 1 (17:44):
Of fish dumped.

Speaker 3 (17:46):
And I couldn't believe when I got to reading about this.
I mean, I knew about the lack of regulation on
his fishery. It's like often international interests operating without regulation
killing a forage fish that drives the whole ocean ecosystem
so that it can be like ground up for fish
oil and pet food and like knocking the legs off

(18:07):
the stool on marine resources. One of the reasons they
have to report a lot of these fish spills this
blew my mind, is because they caught too many and
sometimes the nets get their nets will get so full
of pogi's and redfish and all kinds of other game
fish that they don't have the machinery to hoist it.

(18:29):
By the time they find this out, it's all dead anyway,
and so they'll need to aband what's called abandon the catch,
and then file a report. But some of these officers
are in trouble now for not filing the reports. Then
file a report and saying, hey, what we were doing
worked better than we thought. Heads up, we just dumped

(18:51):
eight hundred thousand dead pogies and redfish.

Speaker 1 (18:55):
On the beach. It blows my mind that this is
a that this goes on.

Speaker 4 (19:05):
Yeah, this if you ever see photos of these big
catches and like a commercial manhadan harvest the scale of
it is unbelievable.

Speaker 2 (19:14):
And it's one of those things too where it's like
I've also worked up I can put my glasses a
lot of times.

Speaker 4 (19:20):
When you talk about allocation and like people using a
resource in different ways, there's like some nuance and some
gray area. But I think this is like one case
in which there's most folks agree that there's a bad
actor here, and it's these boats that have this enormous footprint.

Speaker 2 (19:34):
Isn't this happening to most fish cotton nets? Right? They
have a charter and a license to catch a cod,
but they catch all kinds of species and they can't
do anything with it because they're not allowed to, so
they just check it back in the water dead.

Speaker 3 (19:49):
Yeah, it's common, and there are a lot of like
like you know, like salmon per saying in Alaska, why
it's very responsible fishery. But some of this stuff is egregious.
So this is all the stuff this guy's was referred
to point in the news. So here's an article. Here's

(20:09):
an article about the Louisiana Spills. Three massive fish spills
that coated waves and beaches off the southwest coast of
the Louiana last week has renewed calls for title restrictions
on the Man Hayden industry Manhattan.

Speaker 2 (20:22):
How do you say, man Hayden, Man Hayden.

Speaker 3 (20:25):
Two men Hayden fishing companies dumped and estimated eight hundred
and fifty thousand that's more than I'd catch it a
full weekend of fishing and estimated eight hundred and fifty
thousand fish in the waters off Cameron Parish during three
incidents over four days. The fish form rotting rafts that

(20:46):
either floated into deeper water washed up by the thousands
near Holly Beach, one of the few communities in the
sparsely populated parish.

Speaker 1 (20:54):
Amid the dead.

Speaker 3 (20:55):
Amid the dead man Hayden also called pogy, were hundreds
of red fish, and then it gets into contributing to
sharp redfish population declines, that the industry is contributing these
red fish declines, and there's photos of just beaches littered
with the stuff. These companies are now required they're supposed

(21:17):
to go around and clean up all their dead fish.
The first of the three incidents happened on September eleven,
when the net of a vessel fishing for omega ripped
and spilled an estimated two hundred thousand dead fish about
two miles off east of Cameron Bar. The other two
incidents happened on September fourteenth. Another vessel released three hundred

(21:39):
and fifty thousand fish after its net broke. Around the
same time, a West Bank vessel caught quote an unmanageable load.
Rather than lose the whole catching the net, the captain
decided to let part of the catch go. They dumped
between one hundred thousand and three hundred thousand dead fish

(22:01):
on the beach. Follows up from the summer before when
they dumped a million dead Manhattan near Holly Beach Men Hayden.

Speaker 6 (22:10):
Near Holly Beach. Mind boggling numbers there, really is. I
just looked at the photo. That's insane. Yeah, that is insane.

Speaker 2 (22:24):
It's really something, all right. That's all.

Speaker 1 (22:29):
I know on that happy note.

Speaker 3 (22:34):
So, uh, tell me, uh, what what was your You
you described that you grew up in what you call
the preppy neighborhood.

Speaker 2 (22:45):
No, I I grew up in I was born in Alexandria,
outside DC, but my father had a business and I
had relatives that lived in Richmond, and I could not
understand that why Richmond was so goddamn different than where
I grew up, because it's I always say that when
you get to Richmond or Winchester, it's two hours south

(23:06):
of two hours west of Northern Virginia or DC area.
That's like to me, where the South actually begins. Then
everything else is the mid Atlantic. It's basically the North.
So I lived in Northern Virginia. But all I did
playing All I did was play golf when I was

(23:26):
a kid. Yeah, it was your your old males in
the golf business. Yeah, it's crazy golf. Now. I picked
it up again during the pandemic after maybe thirty years.
I'm not playing. Hold are you turn forty six? Yeah?
He didn't play for no like, yeah, I gotta do
the math re quick. Fourteen years old when I stopped
playing competitively, but I played many tournaments, mostly you know

(23:51):
in the South.

Speaker 1 (23:52):
Yeah you were, you were a child competitive golfer.

Speaker 2 (23:55):
Yeah. Most.

Speaker 1 (23:57):
I always say, it's pretty good. I mean it's been
pretty good.

Speaker 2 (23:59):
Yeah. When the Ruinia State Championship a couple of years
when I always say my old man was the Now,
if you go to a golf tournament or any golf course,
you're going to see a really Korean dad yelling at
his kid. I always say, my dad was the first.
He pioneered dad, Oh yeah, oh yeah, because he wanted
you to be he.

Speaker 1 (24:19):
Wanted to be like good.

Speaker 2 (24:21):
Yeah. He wanted me to be a pro golfer. So,
you know, I had three brothers an older sister, but
I you know, supposedly I had the most talent amongst everybody.
So he really pushed me. What was what was his
How was he in the golf business?

Speaker 1 (24:34):
He's a supply, like a distributor.

Speaker 2 (24:36):
Yeah, he got so. He came to America nineteen sixty three,
which is funny because most people they had the they
repeal the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Immigration Act, so all
of a sudden you had a lot of Koreans coming
in that were mostly academics, right, and engineers. My dad
was not any of those. My dad just hustled and
he came here and didn't speak any English and he

(24:58):
got in. That's a whole nother story how he got
a visa, but he came here in nineteen sixty three,
not an academic, and he worked in restaurants.

Speaker 1 (25:05):
And where did he come from? What part of Korea?

Speaker 2 (25:08):
Born in North Korea curious. Yeah, so my mother as well.
She lived in Kessong. So my mom's side came from
extraordinary wealth. My dad came from real hardcore Christians, like
from nothing really, so polar opposites. And when you say

(25:30):
North Korea now people are like, oh, that's but they
don't understand. That was like Vermont, you know, you know,
and now it's not so hey.

Speaker 1 (25:39):
Here in North Korean now is like a Dennis Rodin.

Speaker 2 (25:43):
Yeah, so he came here with nothing, and you know,
he just worked in restaurants for like twenty five years.
He worked his entire life in restaurants for the most
part in America, and then somehow got into the golf business. Mm.
And uh, that's what it all happened. Yeah, what was

(26:05):
when you were raised?

Speaker 3 (26:06):
What was what was your awareness of outdoor you know,
not when I say outdoor, I mean of course you
play golf outdoors, but somehow on outdoorsy in my view,
what was your awareness of fishing?

Speaker 2 (26:18):
And we would go crabbing, we would be fishing a
lot in the Chesapeake. I never went fresh water fishing.
In terms of hunting, my dad had a golf store
and all of his sales reps wore yeah, they would.
They just they would take videos of bow hunting and
I would watch that all the time. They would so

(26:40):
they would. I remember this guy jc uh Todd, like
all these guys, they were all hunters. Eddie was the
repair guy. He also hunted so long ago. And I
remember when the handheld camcorder became a thing and they
would like, you know, record these things. And in that area,

(27:01):
especially back then now, it's not Korean dudes or not
Korean dudes.

Speaker 3 (27:07):
Your dad didn't. He wasn't like your dad didn't just
hang out with Korean dudes because he was from creat.

Speaker 2 (27:12):
So he hung out with my dad hung out with
Korean dudes and everybody. But the salespeople were totally different, right,
And I remember that they really loved they like working there,
specifically because a lot of the people that would shop
at the store lived on really large plots of land,
so they were not only feel so they would not

(27:37):
you know, if you're a good salesperson, you get to
know everybody, especially repeat customers. Right and at that time,
and this is how it all happened. Tyson's Corner was
literally farmland. When I moved from my original house where
I was born, we literally lived on like a farm.
There's nothing near us, and now Tyson's Corner is just
like suburban retail sprawl. It's really gross and you would

(28:00):
never know that it was farmland. And back then it
started to get very very wealthy too, because it was
the premier shopping center outside in Washington, d C. So
McLain Potomac really the suburbs that became very very wealthy
and huge plots of land. So these people would also

(28:21):
they're not hunters, they play golf, but they had always
complain about deers eating something or whatever. So this is
really what happened. I think one of these guys must
have got convinced a bunch of other people to learn
how to sell here. And you're gonna get permission to
hunt on.

Speaker 3 (28:37):
Land, dude, this is gonna I used to have a
list of like the most like the most hunting friendliest occupations,
and I recently met a guy does egg loans. This
guy's like, listen, you want to talk about permissions. So
a guy that does agricultural loans working for the usdaars

(28:59):
because the Baker Asian policy is just absolutely insane. Firefighters
that weren't four on four off. That's pretty good. But
I'm gonna add a golf sales rep.

Speaker 2 (29:11):
Golf. Yeah, they probably look really respectable.

Speaker 7 (29:14):
You've got always kolo shirt and like, but these guys
would just always when I was the hunting season on,
they would always just go bow hunting and they would
almost sell their services as like we can exterminate right right.

Speaker 2 (29:29):
I remember it as a kid almost happening. I was like,
and I always asked my parents, like you are nothing,
what was your what was your what was your reaction
to it at the time, Like, how did you I
remember seeing this guy JC. I mean I remember seeing
a video being like it was so early on I
even know how he did it. But he's like, Dave,

(29:49):
check that, check this out. And I mean I that
was the first time I saw a deer shot with
bow was on his home video. On his home video.
I remember I was sitting on a Tripod golf folding
chair behind the cash register, and I remember exactly when
it happened.

Speaker 3 (30:05):
Actually, uh yeah, when you're if your old man wanted
you to get into he wanted you to be a
professional golfer, meaning I read that as he wanted you
to live out Yeah, his fantasy.

Speaker 2 (30:27):
Man, I have no idea. How the hell he came
up with that fantasy? It was proxy. It was like
a proxy it you're weird.

Speaker 3 (30:31):
Yeah, when when you when you got into restaurant work
was his initial thing, Like, oh brother.

Speaker 2 (30:39):
He thought it was what do you call it? A hobby?
He's such a tech He's like, he's just a hobby.
But you know, I tried to drop out of college
to do there, and I didn't know if. I remember
going abroad and trying to go into cooking school there,
but I didn't know anything. There was no internet, there
was no way to stay there. What do you mean
there in the UK, one of the great chefs of

(31:01):
all time, Marco Pierre White was literally running a restan
called Harvey's, maybe like ten minutes away from where I lived.
I didn't know. But you know, today with the Internet,
I probably wouldn't like, Oh, I'm going to try to
get a job there. I had no idea, so I
tried to apply. I didn't get in. That was my
first attempt to enter the color and profession. So you know,

(31:22):
you want to enter like that. You don't want to
enter as some dude working at McDonald's. I never got
a chance to work because I only played golf. The
only thing I ever did was play golf for like
fourteen years. While I played competively from age five to fourteen,
I got recruited to play golf at all the top
high school prep schools, and I chose to go to

(31:43):
one good Man. I was pretty good, yeah, and I
burned out. I burned out. I had a meltdown of
epic proportions. I was trying to qualify the US Amateur,
not the US Junior Amater, the US Amateur Sectional qualifying
was that Robert Trent Jones and Manassas Virginia and I
on the second eighteen. I had a total meltdown and

(32:03):
I never recover. I was a huge basketcase. When you
say a meltdown, you mean like the meltdown the dude
in Royal Tenim. I actually used that as an example
in a journalist of the years ago. I was like
when I saw that, I was like, that was that
was me?

Speaker 3 (32:16):
Like you had a meltdown, meaning not sort of a
prolonged I mean you had a meltdown.

Speaker 2 (32:21):
Meltdown oh yeah, oh yeah, like all of a sudden
Because again this is it gets in the nerdiness of
golf Robert Trent Jones is one of the longest courses
in the world, particularly from hole to hole. It's just
people don't walk it. They play it in a golf cart.
My caddy didn't show up was my friend Jason Dollard.
I remember that didn't show up. And I played like

(32:43):
really well the first eighteen. And it was also like
a sweltering Virginia hot It was like one hundred plus
one hundred percent commidity. It's just not nice weather to
play golf in. And I remember being like, if I
played well on the second eighteen, I had a shot
of maybe making the next qualifying round. And I felt bad.
This guy Jod Moseley, holy shit, he was my second eighteen.

(33:05):
I haven't thought about you got all the names. I
haven't thought about this in years. I feel like rain
Man right now. I think talking about a therapy session
where you're like you're coming to repressed memories. I think
talking about all the sales reps triggering something over my head.
I remember these looking names and years anyway, this guy
who wound up playing golf at Uva, very good golfer.
He never he was always so mad at me because

(33:27):
I should have decued myself, but I kept on playing,
and I think I was like crying. I don't know
what happened, but I just had a mental breakdown playing
golf and I just never recovered from like a kid though,
man like, but that's all I did. I didn't have
a one child.

Speaker 3 (33:42):
No, no, I'm not criticizing you for having a mental breakdown.
I mean it's just putting. It's just thrusting yourself into
or your your family. I mean that's just intense. You know, uh,
our little my little boy plays soccer and they there
was reason I didn't read it, but I heard about it.
There was recently an email that's a quiet Saturday asking.

Speaker 2 (34:03):
People to chill parents not like a lot of loud cheers.
You know.

Speaker 1 (34:10):
It's like I can't picture, like it's hard to picture
driving a you know, like driving a kid to that.

Speaker 4 (34:16):
To man, it happens a lot in golf, like those individuals,
especially where you have to begin at such.

Speaker 2 (34:24):
An immigrant parents too, it's like push push push, you know.

Speaker 3 (34:28):
Man, We've had a whole series of immigrant parents or
children of immigrant parents. We just had a we we
just had a guy on who came from Vietnam, Son
Tao who became a uh he's a competitive fly tire,
like a master fly attire. He came from His parents

(34:49):
came from South Vietnam after the US withdrawal from Vietnam.
Then we add a Mung chef on who was another
Cold like a Cold War refugee from among dude who
was a Cold War refugee from Laos who became an
American chef, And they both talked a lot about immigrant parents,

(35:11):
where a son Tao.

Speaker 1 (35:12):
Said, there's three ways this can go. You're a doctor,
you're a lawyer, You're not my kid.

Speaker 2 (35:19):
That's pretty much pretty much the same saying yeah, I
can totally relate. So me choosing to become a cook,
it wasn't just for my parents. It was at point
in my life where I was like, I hate everything.
I'm doing something that is effectively back then because cooking
is cool now, it was like social suicide to some degree, right,

(35:40):
Like in my world, I went to prep school, I
went all this thing. Nobody I knew would even think
about becoming a cook. That was ridiculous. That's exactly why
if you use oh yeah, it was total rebellion. And
then I found out when I started cooking I'm a
hyper competitive person. I wound up playing other sports. I
never really played team sports, and that got the high

(36:01):
school and I loved it. There was something about working
in a kitchen, and I'm not listen. Anytime you walk
in a kitchen of any sort, if it's fast food
or not, it's hard. But when you walk into a
place that's trying to be one of the very best
in your town, in the world, it's a different ball game.
And there was a level of seriousness and competitiveness and

(36:24):
desire to constantly improve that resonated with me simultaneously. All
of these professionals that I was looking at as a
DEMI gods. Almost everyone was dead serious but also the
funniest motherfucker I've ever come across. And probably couldn't do
their laundry properly because they didn't know how to do it.

(36:45):
Their life outside of the kitchen was in total shambles.
But you put them in whites, put them ready for service.
They were like f one race car drivers, you know.
And I love that dichotomy, and I love that it
was everyone came from all sorts of upbringings, backgrounds, parts

(37:07):
of the world. It was coming from like this homogenized
background that I sort of grew up and this was
the polar opposite, and I loved it, you know, getting
to work with people that didn't speak English, you know,
people that just immigrated from Mexico, or what I did
see with working with a lot of the prep teams
and the dishwashers. They always remind him of my dad,

(37:32):
that hard work mentality. It was like, this is the
only job they can do, so hopefully they do it
so well that their kids don't have to do. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (37:41):
That that that perspective, I think is something that is
lost on a lot of people. I think, like I
saw it my own, my own dad, you know, he
never finished high school. Right, But there's this like but
I just don't know if that idea that I'm struggling

(38:02):
for words because it's hard thing to phrase up, but
that idea that I'm I'm like sucking hind titty right
now so that you don't have to. Yeah, as I
think that that families or however you track families and lineages,
at some point in time you get out of that,

(38:24):
right and then and then it's like the I worry
that that you create like a decline, like a decline
of the empire because like right now for me to
in any way ever act like I'm sucking hind titty
so that my kid don't have to. I mean, I
have the you know, as my wife says, man, you
better be careful who you complain to, right, is so

(38:48):
like to see and then my kid's not gonna like
I can run around and look at sacrifices, you know,
I'll run around look at sacrifices. Like my dad was
raised by Italian immigrants, fought in the war, right, grew
up super super poor, and that created like a like
a drive, right, and then you wonder like what happens next?

Speaker 2 (39:12):
Like do they that?

Speaker 3 (39:14):
Because that every everything is is opulence and decay. Man,
I guess that's a hard part of So my kids
aren't listening.

Speaker 2 (39:22):
How do you as a parent that institute some kind
of struggle that's not like crazy?

Speaker 1 (39:31):
You know, we do it through just.

Speaker 3 (39:35):
Chores and discipline and long hikes and shitty experiences and
whatever whatever. It's manufactured in some way it's manufactured. I
found someonest recently, I'll take my kids to do something,
they're like, why do I have to do this? You know,
and sometimes say that let's just so you can hang out.

Speaker 1 (39:52):
With cool people.

Speaker 2 (39:53):
When you get older, theyn't appreciate it.

Speaker 3 (39:58):
They'll appreciate your tenacity. Yeah, man, that's it's like it's
it's man, you have to manufacture it.

Speaker 2 (40:05):
It's not. It's not like that.

Speaker 1 (40:08):
It's you somehow move beyond.

Speaker 3 (40:11):
Yeah, you worry about what happens when when you've moved
beyond the struggle. I mean, you know, you gotta be
careful who you bring up the unibomber around. But that
was one of the Unibomber's big gripes was that everybody
had it's to damn easy now, and it gave us
all this room for all of our neurotic behavior.

Speaker 1 (40:32):
Now that he wasn't a little bit near.

Speaker 2 (40:34):
There could have been other ways you could have communicated
that many other ways. Yeah, I know, inheritance, inherited success
is very difficult. You know, it's just as difficult as
I would imagine inherited wealth.

Speaker 3 (40:49):
Right, it's a curse. Yeah, it's like just gonna be
worried now. Okay, I want to keep going. I don't
want to hang up on that one. Earlier were telling
me you in your training as a chef, you wound
up in Japan. Yeah, and you're telling me how you
wound up somehow they had it peg that you were
interested in prepping turtles. Yeah, this is this is like

(41:14):
some kind of weird misunderstanding.

Speaker 2 (41:16):
I've worked at Japan a bunch, you know. First time
I was not cooking, I was teaching English. Then I
come back and long story cut short. Second time around,
I'm working in Japan cooking and then I open up
a restaurant and I come back and they invite me
because now I'm, you know, a person of note or successful,
and they invited a bunch of chefs, no. Three or
four of us to come down. And we're in Kyoto

(41:38):
right where there's restaurants that are four hundred years older. Wow,
older than America. Right, there is a restaurant that's almost
a thousand years older.

Speaker 1 (41:48):
You're kidding.

Speaker 3 (41:49):
No, I remember being at a bar in uh I
remember being in a bar in Oxford and someone pointing out,
this bar has been in business longer than your country
has existed.

Speaker 2 (42:01):
Like, I never thought it makes total sense about it.
Never thought of that. I don't know, I just never
thought of Japan. Food hasn't changed in like a millennia. Crazy, right,
especially the food in Kyoto.

Speaker 1 (42:12):
Wow, is it good?

Speaker 2 (42:14):
It's it's it's not just good, it's it's like going
to the Library of Alexandria almost for food.

Speaker 8 (42:23):
Right.

Speaker 2 (42:23):
They're like maintaining traditions that go back hundreds of years.
I remember I had nothing to do with the kitchen,
but one of the farms there that a lot of
the places use. I was eating strawberries and it was
like dead winter and it didn't look fancy. In fact,
it looks sort of dilapidated, but you eat these strawberries.
And I was eating strawberries and I was like, that's

(42:44):
like the best strawberry ahead of my life, like, and
then he's like, oh. The farmer's like, oh, eat this
one over here, under this other pile of stuff. It
tasted totally different, and he's telling me why it tastes different.
I'm like, I have no idea because of the translator,
and I'm like, why does it taste good? And then
the translator goes, oh, because he's like the four pink
generation farmer. No joke. Right, When you start thinking about

(43:05):
it that way, it's like, oh, this person knows so
much more about growing fruits than anybody else. Yeah, particularly
in that area, probably not as good if you moved,
you know, a couple of times over. But in that
there are nobody's going to grow stuff better than this guy.

Speaker 1 (43:20):
And when you understand that, that longevity is incredible, because yeah,
you know, you go to most Americans, man, they can't
you get bagged for generations. They're like a little hazy
on what country they might have come from.

Speaker 2 (43:30):
Oh yeah, I don't even have to go that far.
It's teen generations. So I think when I got there again,
I was I think about all that I learned there
and what I saw. But one of the things I
got somehow communicated was oh, Chef Chang, he wants to
learn how to you know, cook soupon, which is Japanese
soft shell turtles. And I was like, cool, I want

(43:52):
to learn it one day, And then the day after the.

Speaker 9 (43:55):
Day, I was just like, there must be some misunderstanding.
I'm never going to cook this way. Yeah, I've never
picked it. Sense, how walk me through? Like what is
the what is there?

Speaker 2 (44:07):
What is the preparation? So you take these things they're
like yellow or white and they have like sort of
a soft shell and then they're clear. I mean, how
many pounds is one of these things. I mean probably
like four pounds. They can't be bigger. But I don't
even at the tiny ones. I don't even know if
they're farm raised not. No, they're they're wild, and then
they're their diet is cleaned, so it's like and then

(44:31):
you take the thing and there's like not almost like
a thin skewer got pointed, and you sort of agitate
the hell out of the head until it bites it yep,
and then you grab it with your left hand and
it's like this, and it's again you're like pretty traumatic
because it's very phallic seeming. And then you basically yank
the head as far as can go and you take
a you know, short deba like a Japanese butcher knife

(44:53):
in you you slice it right in front of your
groin area. And it was very weird.

Speaker 1 (44:59):
Oh, I got.

Speaker 2 (45:03):
To yourself almost right, and I was like, this is
not I don't First of all, that was a lot
to process, just killing the chartle and then you cut
around it pop off the shell and I don't remember
we're talking about the organs. I just remember it all
feeling like it was moving, like it was an alien.

Speaker 1 (45:23):
Yeah, it's very water inside.

Speaker 2 (45:26):
And anatomy that I just I don't even know what
was what. You know, everything looked like an intestine, you know,
what the hell was happening in there? And uh, you
don't need any of that, you know, so you basically
scoop all that out. But what they really wanted was
the meat under the shell, Like there's like a lining
of that and the feet right and the neck.

Speaker 1 (45:50):
But mainly what you do is you would blanch it and.

Speaker 2 (45:54):
Then you'd peel the skin off, and then you would
make it into a broth, so any part of meat
attached to it, you would again chop it up. And
it's in Kyoto delicacy of this beautiful clean broth soup
and with like turtle feet basically down there. Yeah, and
it's lot it was. It's delicious, and I know somebody listening,

(46:16):
that's probably again I had no idea that Michigan people
late turtles. I just didn't think anybody ate turtles. I
had no idea. I assure you, it's it's really wonderful
and it's delicious. So that's that was my I must
have done like fifty of those that had fill. Yeah.
I was like, oh so that, uh, what you told

(46:37):
me earlier. I thought that was like when you're in
your younger years. No, that happened when I was like thirty. Yeah,
how did it?

Speaker 3 (46:45):
What did that path look like for you to you know,
you came out of being a golfer, decided you're going
to go down and be a cook and a chef.

Speaker 1 (46:56):
At what point did it?

Speaker 3 (46:57):
Did you get where you're going to take the leap
and uh, you know, try to open your own place.

Speaker 2 (47:04):
So I think it's important to note, like, go back
to college. So I went to Trinity College in Hartford.
I had a great time. I had a wonderful time.
I parted my ass off, and I did terribly in school.

Speaker 1 (47:22):
Would you what were you supposed to studying?

Speaker 2 (47:25):
Anything to get me into law school or investment banking
or anything but that a liberal art school. There's like
fifteen hundred kids nescak New England and what I wound up?

Speaker 1 (47:37):
So you you were being groomed to be a banker or.

Speaker 2 (47:40):
Something like that, right, but yea or something in the
corporate world. Yeah, and all my friends are doing those things.
For the most part. From college, I wound up the classes.
I wound up doing really well, and mainly because I
took these classes because they were like you know, three
three in the afternoon, you know, like things like that

(48:02):
were religion and philosophy. And I came from a very
hardcore Presbyterian family. A lot of it was from you know,
my dad's side of the family, and that's where Christianity
started in Korea, was really North Korea, of all places,
So my dad's side, they were like the first Christians
in Korea. Like hardcore. That was just how I grew up.

(48:27):
So I was pretty rebellious to that idea as well.
So I wanted to study why people were religious, and
I studied a lot of things about philosophy and things
that were meaningful to me, but really makes you gainfully
unemployable when you graduate. So there was nothing I could do.
And besides, those were good grades, but my other grades
and other classes were terrible, so like I couldn't really

(48:50):
get jobs that I wanted. So I moved to Jackson,
Wyoming in the summer ninety nine. That's where I worked
at Jackson Ole Resort Lodge, and that's why I learned
how to fly fish. So I worked shift and I
just I was like, I'm just going to learn how
to fly fish. So that's what I did during the
day times. I would just drive to McCoy Creek by
myself and I would just figure out how to do that.

(49:13):
And that's when I caught that bug and moved back.
When I moved to Wakayama to teach English, and I
only this is just give the example of my personality.
Everyone's asking me what I was going to do after graduating.
I had no fucking idea. So I went to the
career fair and I took the first job they offered,
right on the right side of the hall, like I
camera with the cafeteria where they're setting up all the

(49:35):
job fair stuff, and it was teaching English. And I
didn't want to teach English, but that's just what I
did because I could tell someone at least I have
something to do. Anyway, that was short lived, but that
was an important moment because when I lived in this
really suck like hot it was almost like the Jacksonville,
Florida of Japan, right industrial, super humid, tropical climate. Not

(49:57):
much to do, but there was only one place that
only one. There's two restaurants in my small town, and
one was this ramen shop. And I was like, oh,
I tasted tastes great ramen for the first time, like real, real,
delicious ramen, and never had anything like that. I've eaten

(50:17):
a lot of noodles. Is I didn't know, Like I
didn't know that is ramen. Definitionally Japanese ramyen translates to
loman from Chinese. Okay, Yeah, that's what I always But
the origins, like most things in Asia, are from China,
and it's turned into a variety of things and it's

(50:38):
uniquely Japanese.

Speaker 1 (50:39):
Nowt but it found its origin and it yeah, I mean,
you know the dried blocks.

Speaker 2 (50:46):
That's the guy that created instant noodles.

Speaker 1 (50:49):
Okay, So that that the way most Americans is just
in there, you know, coming of age, encounter ramen as.

Speaker 2 (50:57):
You know, like a plastic wrap dry that's not romyen.

Speaker 3 (51:01):
Yeah, but that but that, I mean, that's what people know.
And when when you do that, you have the association
of it being like a Chinese food.

Speaker 2 (51:08):
Yeah. It's like you know how most Americans probably think
taco bell is like Mexican food. It's not right. So
you know, that's what I always say to anybody that's younger,
is like, you can't connect the dots till after the fact.
You just got to keep on like chugging along. And
in the moment when you're doing something, you think you're
a complete failure and everything newing sucks. I had no

(51:29):
idea that that moment in that crappy town in southern
Japan eating ramyan would come back to be a massive
moment for me. Anyway, I come back, I try to
get a desk job. I do terribly. I hate it.
It's now two thousand, No, right before two thousand, I
just I had a lot of things happen. Couple, I

(51:52):
three friends die in a year. There's a lot of
stuff going on, my family, health, all kinds of terrible shit.
And I was just like, I don't want to do
this anymore. I don't know what I want to do.
Were you a good cook? No, so even personally, not
for your friends, cook at all. She's a great cook,
my mom to her day she died and refused to

(52:13):
give me a recipe. I alwa, I was not, And
still to this day, I say I'm not a good cook,
and he goes, oh, dang, change, you suck at cooking.
I think I'm not a good cook. I'm a really
good cook, but it's not something that comes naturally to me.
So I just I got really drunk at the Christmas part.
I told all my bosses how much I hated them,
and uh, I literally pulled off off of space. You

(52:34):
know that. You know, I'm just gonna quit. And and
I wanted to burn every bridge possible so I could
never go back to what was a possible corporate job.
And I didn't know if cooking was going to be
the thing. But one of the things I learned in
school was this idea via negativa, which early Christian the
is gonna be crazy, I'm ready for. Early Christian theologians

(52:56):
would meditate on how to know God right, But God
is ineffable. God is impossible to know. So they would
think about what God was not. God is not that
cup of tea, God is not that table, and you
would just go on and on and on, and the
more you would think about what God is not, you
would get closer to God righte in some weird ways.

(53:21):
I was like, well, I don't know what the hell
I want to do, so I'm just going to try
a bunch of things. And the more I try, it'll
get me close to what I want to do. I
just got to keep on moving along. And I'd done
a bunch of jobs in my life, and I was like,
you know what, I've always wanted to cook. Had a
few false starts. My dad really tried hard to make
sure I never worked in the culinary profession. I won't

(53:41):
bore you with some of the stories, but he did
go out of his way to make sure, Like my
first job, I tried to get a cooking job. He
like secretly sabotaged it, you know. And now I understand
my kids wanted to come and cook. I probably do
the same thing as to goddamn hard. Anyway, I get
into cooking and go cooking school when I start working
full time immediately and I'm pretty allergic to the work

(54:04):
at the time. Next thing you know, I'm working like
I didn't take a day off for like a year.
I was so immersed in it, and I realized doing
what kind of food, it's like the technical I was
working for Geen George of the Mersey Kitchen, and I
was going to cooking school from eight o'clock to three o'clock,

(54:25):
and I was working from four o'clock to one o'clock
working for John George. Was just sort of like modified
contemporary French food. John George being one of the great
chess from all sauce and he's been a mentor and
a great, great culinary figure. And on the weekends I
started working at Craft for Tom Klichio, just answering phones

(54:48):
because I wanted to work there, because the crew that
was assembled there I want bore people at New York
genealogy of kitchens. And the only way I could get
into that kitchen was answering phones. And they didn't need me.
They did in fact, they did not want me. So
I just answered phones on the weekends.

Speaker 1 (55:07):
So I literally every front of house phone answering.

Speaker 2 (55:10):
It worked every day for like a year till I
could get my feet in the door there.

Speaker 5 (55:15):
And uh, exactly, yeah, I'm an I fucking grind man,
like you need to grind, you know, And uh and
I was allergic to work, so I was like, holy shit,
like I'm working my ass off and I don't know
if I love it, but like I can't imagine doing
anything else.

Speaker 2 (55:32):
So for me, I don't. I think it's bullshit. When
people say, oh I love what I do, I love it,
It's like one hundred percent. I think that's a fucking
crocod shit. It's like fifty one percent. You love it
more than you hate it. Yeah, you know, nobody wants
to get up at like four in the morning of
peel potatoes, but you know you do it because it
gets just another goal. So I did that and I
just was like a sponge and it wasn't There are

(55:54):
cooks that are much more naturally gifted. What I love
about cooking, which is what I tell anybody that it's
worked for me or anyone that's thinking about doing it.
If you, if you pour yourself into this, hard work
is the greatest equalizer and cooking, if somebody is better
than you, if you practice and if you put yourself
like fully into that situation, you will not only get

(56:18):
even with that person that you view as I view
everything as a competitor, because I am just that kind
of person, because a golf everything is a fucking competition.
You will not only even up with that person or peer,
you will then exceed that person on hard work alone.

Speaker 3 (56:33):
You know, we had a we We talked to a
chef recently and his his ticket to success early on
was that he would he would show up. She said,
it really differentiated him from.

Speaker 2 (56:51):
But at the time too, it was like, that's my
secrets and everything else has followed showing up up in
a job that's so fucking physically tough. Nobody wants to
do that work. So I felt lucky because there are
a lot of people that were so talented and have
done amazing things, and I just I feel that was

(57:13):
an instrumental moment for me.

Speaker 1 (57:15):
And and.

Speaker 2 (57:17):
You know the thing is, I I didn't know. Nobody
thought I was going to be good. Right. If you
if you had to put like odds on anybody in
that that kitchen, I'm not even I'm not even I'm
part of the rest of the field odds, you know
what I mean, be successful? Right, So they'd be like

(57:40):
fifteen people in odds of who's going to be very successful.
I would be not even making up your individual lives.
You're in the everybody else. And and I understood that.
And for that entire time though, I was just trying
to find things that I like to do, and I like,
I did eat a lot of noodles, whether it was
rhyming or not. Because of where I grew up in

(58:00):
Northern Virginia, there's amazing Vietnamese population, Koread food, Chinese food.
So I ate a lot of delicious things, but you
were drawn to the contemporary American and French shit. I
wanted to was that because that's what you thought success
would say's got.

Speaker 1 (58:13):
You what you like to eat?

Speaker 2 (58:15):
Because that's where the best war. Yeah, yeah, that's where
the best war.

Speaker 1 (58:18):
The cell at that time that really celebrated players were
from that world.

Speaker 2 (58:22):
And there was another chef called out and his name
is Alex Lee, and he was this sixth He's a
big Chinese guy and Chinese American and he ran Danielle's
Kitchen and Upper east Side and he was a badass, right,
intimidating as fuck. Spoke with the worst fluent French possible
in a long Island accent. But all these French chefs
and Sioux chefs like served him. I was like to

(58:46):
a lot of Asian kids growing up, like he was
the fucking real superstar, right.

Speaker 1 (58:51):
So I was like all these places you're naming, man,
at some point I've been to Like, uh, I've been
to these I kind of forgot about it, remember, Like
Daniels and like someone hovering like all the time, someone
like changing your forks and ship out.

Speaker 2 (59:06):
Yeah, but I don't want to eat that food at
the time, you know what I mean?

Speaker 3 (59:10):
Was the most like overbearing sort of shuffling of plates
and shit and like what fork And it's like, my
goodness withold you people just.

Speaker 2 (59:19):
Go away for a minute. The people eating there and
the food you're making and the people making it very different.
But the reason why people are making that food and
drawing that talent because you're working with the best ingredient,
the best techniques. And back then, to learn how to
make any dish, like one dish, you had to like
work a year there. You couldn't go online and learn anything.

Speaker 1 (59:40):
Yeah, I got you.

Speaker 2 (59:41):
You actually had to like spend time and maybe the
chef would finally teach you how to make something. You know.
That's the way it was that.

Speaker 1 (59:49):
Yeah, man, to do a thing for future generations to understand,
is there should be like a you're like a Library
of Congress project where you try to future generations didn't
understand how shit went before the internet, do you know
what I mean? I think about that a lot, like
because people are going to lose track of if you

(01:00:10):
wanted to know something, it was hard you could it
was hard to find You didn't know it at the
time because everybody thinks that what they exit their existence
is totally normal. But if you wanted, I remember like
talking about a cooking thing, trying to figure out like
how mountain men would cook beaver tails.

Speaker 2 (01:00:28):
Dude, did it take you four years to figure that
shit out?

Speaker 1 (01:00:31):
Now it's like my kid can figure it out.

Speaker 2 (01:00:33):
Watch some YouTube video, watch one of year of the video. Well, yeah,
just everything. It's just like it's just so many years
of knowledge that was hard earned is now in this
five minute edited video.

Speaker 3 (01:00:43):
Yeah, the comedian Hotels his name Joey Diaz, talking about
he's trying to describe dating, you know, before the Internet.
He's talking about how you used to have to go
up and throw rocks at their window to try to
wake them up.

Speaker 2 (01:01:02):
But it's like, yeah, to learn how to make shit
like you couldn't it was. It sounds wild, but yeah,
you would have to work at a restaurant to learn
how to do one thing.

Speaker 1 (01:01:10):
Yeah, your mom, your mom had like six cookbooks, and
if someone made some shit in your house is because
of one of those six cookbooks.

Speaker 2 (01:01:17):
I mean, think about even on the cookbook level, right, like,
at the time, a lot of the progressive stuff was
happening in France, and I don't won't bore your audience
with like food neurdery on the chefs, but I would
have friends working at some of the top places you
would want to be at. They would send postcards right
about like, Hey, I'm learning this, but there's not enough
to fucking fit on a postcard about like what the

(01:01:37):
hell is happening? You know? So I do think we
were talking about inherited success or wealth or knowledge. I
think that that generation everything proceeded in the Internet. There's
a level of creativity that is better in that generation.
I'm not saying cooks today are fucking more knowledge? Are
they know more? And I'm not trying to I can
imagine all these people, Oh fuck you, dab, you're telling

(01:01:57):
we're just as good you are. But the originality and
creativity of the older generation from you know, pre Internet,
is because we had to struggle what the fuck was
happening to think about it, use our imagination. We'd go
to restaurants after service and just look at their menu,
be like, how do you think they're making them? What

(01:02:18):
do you think that's sauces? Oh, I've never heard about that,
and we then go to Chinatown, drink some beers, eat
some food, and talk about how do you think that
dish is being made? It was awesome.

Speaker 1 (01:02:27):
Yeah, but now that.

Speaker 2 (01:02:29):
Camaraderie and talking about it and imagining it then not
on a YouTube video. While that's amazing, that difficulty of
acquiring that information is a beautiful thing. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:02:48):
Another one, just to drive that point homecause I remember,
long ago before the internet was like populated the way
it is, really struggling with when you'd see the glaze
to roast the ducks, the Chinese style, the hanging, and
just to be like, if I could only know.

Speaker 2 (01:03:10):
Chinese, yeah, I would tell you one thing. That's one
of those things that even if you can see the video,
it's still hard to do.

Speaker 1 (01:03:16):
Hard to just be like, how would anyone ever figure
that out?

Speaker 2 (01:03:20):
So hard and so delicious? But yeah, man, like I
I I just wanted to learn how to make noodles.
So if I was a better cook, I probably would
have gone to France because a chef would have said, hey,
you're so good, I'm going to send you to my mentor.
But no chef I work for was ever going to
do to me, you know, because I was a hot mess.

(01:03:42):
I was just not good enough. So I just said,
I'm gonna focus on something where nobody's focusing on and
that was romy weirdly enough, that was my thing. I
would get, you know, books from Japan. I'd get going Craiglist,
being like, can anyone translate these books? And I'd put
it the time and understand what exactly what's happening. I

(01:04:02):
would get magazines know what was happening in Ramyen and
Japan at the time. And I got a job working
in Japan. That's a whole nother I lived in a
homeless shelter. It was fucking wild because that's the only
place I could afford to live, right, But I learned
so much there, and I learned a lot about Japanese
culture and how fucking insane it is and fucked up

(01:04:23):
it is living with homeless people. That's a whole nother
podcast that I don't think anybody should want to listen to.
But you know, that proved to be because I wasn't
good enough. I went somewhere else and I got some
domain expertise that literally nobody had. It gave me an advantage,
so come back and at that time, that you define

(01:04:43):
it in your head as noodles ramen. I just want
to run, but I wound up making soba. Tom Kliki
and Marco Kanroy helped me. Got a job at the
park Head Hotel where that lost in translation movie happened.
So when I watched that, all those people around there are.

Speaker 8 (01:04:58):
Real employees that I, oh, really yeah, even the swimming instructor,
I was like, I knew all those people, and I
learned so much.

Speaker 2 (01:05:08):
And when I learned what I learned at that hotel
was instrumental. Because one of the restaurants, the New York Rill,
they were serving food from uh, contemporary New York restaurants,
but made with Japanese ingredients. I'm like, wow, that's crazy.
So that flipped the switch for me a little bit.

(01:05:30):
I was like, wait a second, Like I don't know
exactly how this is gonna play out down the road,
but I'm gonna remember this because I thought you'd have
to make everything as effectively. If you're gonna make a
tiny food, it's got to be with the tinan ingredients.
That like shattered it for me. Anyway, I come back
and uh two thousand and three, I come back to
America and at the time. This is like peak, like

(01:05:51):
beginning of peak fine dining in America, beautiful time in
American dining. In New York, you had Thomas two thousand
and four to twenty fifteen, So at a ten year
period was like peak fancy fine dining. But that was
the beginning of it, and you had many great restaurants
opening up, and I just was trying to get a

(01:06:11):
job at per Se Thomas Keller coming back to New
York after many years opening up the French Laundry, and
a lot of my chef that I worked for was
gonna be the chef there anyway. In the meantime, the
people that I used to work for said, you got
to work for Andrew Carmelinie Cafe Blue because they like
that's how it is, like, you know, people trying to

(01:06:32):
make sure that you develop and do a great chef
and I get my ass kicked there. It's so fucking hard,
so fucking hard.

Speaker 3 (01:06:39):
But give people an idea that that haven't worked in
this atmosphere. What does getting your ass kicked look like?

Speaker 2 (01:06:47):
To this day, It's the hardest job I've ever had.

Speaker 3 (01:06:50):
And but like what like if you said I got
my ass kicked working at the salt mine, so I'd
be like, I could picture that.

Speaker 2 (01:06:56):
It was intentionally run lean. So when I say ass kicking,
it's not physically getting your ass kicked. It's the workload.
That's a fucking kicking the ass, but a workload of
physical Yeah, most places today would probably have I would

(01:07:16):
say that that kitchen you were, each person was doing
the workload with probably three people in this essence, while
there was a butcher, that was about the only help
you would get. A lot of the bigger kitchens, you
have a komi, maybe two komies, like an intern, right,
then coll me comm i s on the French brigade system,
so an assistant. Then you have a like you're running

(01:07:38):
like the meat station. You might have a entre metier,
so someone doing your vegetables inside. So like you're the manager.
It's almost like a bank, right, you're the managing director
of your group, right, but all these other people work
for you, and in a kitchen, it's all top down.
So if you're working the saucier station, you're gonna have
all these other people in a big kitchen doing really

(01:08:02):
high end dining. Cafe. At the time, it was intentionally spartan,
like there was nothing that worked equipment wise that was
done on purpose, right. It was as bare boned on
as an operation staff wise intentional right, because it produced
a certain mentality of like fuck everybody, fuck you, fuck

(01:08:28):
the station, and fuck everything everything by our sheer mental
like prowess, our technique. With everything working against us, we're
gonna fucking wind. And it was that that kind of
hard cad. It was like, I don't I never want
to approach anything to like special Forces, but that's what
it felt. And I was like that kind of fucking

(01:08:48):
hardcore ship. I was like, Jesus is so fucking hardcore.
And it's also dumb shit. I remember, like, okay, like
I got a bundle of sugar cane. You ever break
down sugar cane?

Speaker 3 (01:08:59):
Well, I mean as no, I mean, now there's any pressure,
and I've seen it done, you know, like I've husted
rice too, but I mean I rust like a handful
of right.

Speaker 2 (01:09:07):
So this menu and it's awesome, man, and I love
a see and Danielle. It's just like was a formative
period for so many of us. And in that kitchen,
you know, rich Teresy, Mari Carbone opened up the car
like toresa carbone. So many cooks came.

Speaker 1 (01:09:23):
Over come around to why why are you breaking down
sugar game?

Speaker 2 (01:09:26):
So like each station is you have four menus and
a special menu. So cooking so stupid. Where the better
you are, the more work you get too, right, which
is crazy. So in these four tasting menus, you have
a voyage, you have a seasonal, you got a vegetarian,
and then you got a classic, right, a classic French menu,
and plus you have daily specials. You are responsible for

(01:09:48):
like ten to twelve dishes potentially with nobody helping you out,
and you got to feed and you might be you're
working one service and dinner service on five of those days,
so you need to prep out for maybe two hundred
and fifty people a day potentially, you know, ten courses

(01:10:10):
for two hundred and fifty people. That's a lot of
work and a lot of inch kit work, knife skills
and stuff like that. And everybody's that way. Everybody's got
this crazy workload. Going back to the sugarcanes, it was
called sugarcane shramp on the Village menu, and it would
come in. I would dread about it the next morning
because I'd be like shit, we don't have a band

(01:10:32):
saw that would have made it easy. I have no
tools whatsoever to break down sugarcane. You know what I
have have two cleavers in a mouth. Now only do
you have to break down all the sugarcane which you
haven't seen. It's like, you know, eight feet tall and
there's like one hundred of them. That's yeah, so fucking
it's just so stupid, huh. And you're reducing that to

(01:10:54):
like skew it. You break it down, and it's got
to be a perfect toothpick that can skewer a shrimp.

Speaker 1 (01:11:02):
And they're buying it like like some dude cut it
out and.

Speaker 2 (01:11:06):
Eats like an hour's worth of work in one bite.
You're like, fuck, oh kid, so like shit like that, right,
and and like that's just one dish, and everybody there
had super labor intensive dishes. Is the money good inness
at this level?

Speaker 1 (01:11:22):
No?

Speaker 2 (01:11:22):
I think I got paid eight dollars twenty five cents
an hour.

Speaker 1 (01:11:24):
So you're hourly.

Speaker 2 (01:11:25):
Oh yeah, and what's the promise? Nothing? No one gets
into this missiness to make money. You just want to
be have street crab. You want to be the fucking
baddest best person there. Yeah, anyway, and your social life
is proud to be baked into it too.

Speaker 1 (01:11:40):
In a weird way.

Speaker 2 (01:11:40):
There's no social life, that's what I'm saying. It's like
just drinking.

Speaker 1 (01:11:43):
Yeah, it's just meaning that when you fall into the
I never worked in the restaurant business book, when you
fall into this world, that sort.

Speaker 2 (01:11:52):
Of becomes your It's not that way anymore. Oh, it's
not no way. That's who you hang with, that's how
you date like that, thankfully. In one regard, the work
life balance is way better, and it's just the way
it was back then and it's not anymore.

Speaker 1 (01:12:08):
But man, we would work like the industry's little friendlier.

Speaker 2 (01:12:12):
Oh it's become way more professionalized. Yeah, but I don't
there's no bigrudging. That's just the way it was, and
I'm happy that I was able to like experience that.
But man, we would get off work at like I
don't know, break everything down one o'clock. We would get
there maybe six o'clock, six thirty. So sometimes like you

(01:12:35):
go out just enough and then you'd go back, you drink,
and then you would sleep in the locker room and
wake up and just do it again. Surely, Yeah, that's
not hyperpole like it was a lot back then because
no one cared about it. It was like the least
cool profession. There was nothing fabulous about cooking, and it

(01:12:55):
was a lifestyle that people chose. And I was not
good in that kitchen either. I was very I struggled.
It was so hard for me. Well, what made you
not good? I wasn't as good as everyone there. It's good, fast,
good as everything. Good is also mentally just being organized,

(01:13:16):
never being in the weeds, not making any mistakes, being
efficient with your time. You know when I can see
it when it's like a dance, right and like literally
a professional choreograph dance, a ballet. Almost when a perfect
kitchen is running, everyone's doing their thing. There's no talking,
there's humor. Health kitchen, in my opinion, is always someone

(01:13:38):
making another person laugh, right. Laughter is a huge part
of it. But at the same time, it's like you're
seeing a good team. It's efficiency. Nobody's moving in a
way that you don't have to. It's efficiency movement. It's
dishes coming up perfect, everything's tasted and great, all these things,
And for me, I just it wasn't wasn't my was

(01:14:00):
my bag And I had a lot of shit happening
in my life too, right, So I was like, I
gotta fucking unplug. I can't do this. So in that intro,
m I go home, help out at home my mom,
I'm like, you know what, fuck this, I'm just gonna
I'm just gonna try to you know. You know. September
eleventh happened too. Yeah, that was also a big thing.
You were in the city then, oh yeah, yeah, that

(01:14:21):
was Like I remember coming out, I was in the
basement of craft. I mean, even though it was a
year and a half, so after spending eleventh like three
months later, New York was still fucked up for like
eighteen months twenty four months after it. But I remember
I'll never had leaving like seventeenth Street Meting Square and
seeing people covered in dust. Yeah, I was just like,

(01:14:45):
what the fuck's happening, and so all these things And
again I had all these things happen. Sure it wasn't
like for me. It was difficult, and I just was
like I needed something else to do. So I was like,
fuck it. I was extremely depressed, and I was like,
you know what. A lot of my friends at the
time were going to business school. It was like twenty
five to twenty six, and I remember like, Oh, they're

(01:15:07):
getting loans out or they're getting figuring out. Oh, it's
probably like two hundred grand for two years. I was like,
I'll figure that out on my own. I'm gonna even
though I have no idea what I'm gonna do, even
though I've never even achieved, right, I've been cooking profession
four and a half years, nobody would do anything like that.
I also knew that if I continued in that path
of what it was, the traditional way how people open

(01:15:30):
restaurants was exactly this way, especially if you worked at
a place like Danielle or Cafe Ballut. A wealthy patron
would come in many times, get to know the chef
and be like, hey, you know, I want to open
up at a restaurant in Palm Beach, you know what
anyone and the chef will be likeyeah, I got a
great cook. Here you go.

Speaker 1 (01:15:50):
That's how you get your own opportunity, and their motivation
is in some respects social.

Speaker 2 (01:15:55):
Exactly, and for a cook, that's how you got a restaurant.
So you became a chef. There was this is a
different time and era, even though it was that long ago,
and I remember looking again, I'm a very competitive person.
Like the field, I'd be like, I think I'm like
number fourteen here, honestly.

Speaker 1 (01:16:13):
Like it's gonna take fourteen patrons.

Speaker 2 (01:16:15):
And even then I don't think i'd be nominated, right.
I was like, there's like fourteen people ahead of me
talent wise on the ladder, so I gotta just do
something else. And that's when I was like, screwed. I'm
going to open up a ramen bar, a noodle bar
which didn't exist, and I tried to work. This is
how where the state was in noodles and ramen in America.

(01:16:41):
In two thousand and three, I had to work at
Bally's Casino and Landing, New Jersey to work at a
noodle bar because there was not one on the eastern seaboard.
It was like it was just to see what it's like.
But at that time, what years is again, two thousand
and three.

Speaker 1 (01:17:01):
Was there.

Speaker 3 (01:17:04):
It was kind of like the ethnic explosion. No, so
was it that that, you know, the the sort of
cultural elevation of you know, the the Taco truck, the
bond Me joint.

Speaker 2 (01:17:18):
It was there. It just wasn't cool, Okay, the gatekeepers
were still was there not as like not like the
cool kids were all going to It wasn't yet. Food
wasn't even cool. There word food. He didn't exist. There
was no cell phone. There was no cell phone, there
was no smartphone technology, and there was no chat rooms,
no blogging. That all happened around two thousand and three.

(01:17:39):
Two thousand. Breaking out was hard, and it was all
about being in the New York Times and traditional gatekeeping.
And while it was there, think about how hard it
would be to learn in your city when there's no internet.
It was so hard. So I mean, I come back
and we opened up. Nobody wanted to work with me.

(01:18:02):
I had to hire. I got my first partner, Kein
Obanka from Monster dot Com, who his girlfriend saw because
she was in the corporate job and he had just
come from Austin, Texas and he wasn't getting the love
from working. He was trying. He came to New York
because he wanted to get the street car working out
the best kitchens too, but they didn't give him any love.
So he's like, screw it, like I'll work with you.
And that's how it all happened, and we almost went

(01:18:24):
up business. I raised one hundred thousand dollars and we
were going out of business. So I felt like at
that time, every day was like it felt like we're
not going to make it to the next day. You
go through your investment, not just day like how I
was living too, so hardcore and hard But there's a

(01:18:45):
I can't remember who wrote this passage, but it's like, hey,
like everything we did was like a one way ticket.
We ain't coming back. And that's how we made every decision.
And by doing that, we made every decision not supposed
to do. And some of those decisions were so counterintuitive
that they became mainstream decisions today of how you would

(01:19:07):
operate a restaurant. So a lot of it was trial
and error, making mistakes, a lot of luck. We were
so lucky, and I won't bore you with all the
different things that happened along the way. About six hundred
square feet the size of one car garage, and we
we went off. I remember three months in, I didn't
even know what sales tax was. Iknew nothing. I remember like, oh,

(01:19:28):
I gotta pay taxes on this? What the fuck done
your business? What I made? You know, it's like so
so dumb and such a novice at anything that happened,
but you know, every day was a war, felt like
a challenge, and I remember being told that we had
about two weeks left of cash, right and at the time,

(01:19:51):
there's a lot of cancer in my family, and I
was like, huh, I've seen it happen enough where someone
has given some kind of like can't diagnosis and then
they started fucking like shit, like I gotta do things.
I gotta like live, I'm gonna do anything I can.
So at that time, I was thinking we were still
trying to operate in the confines in the structure of

(01:20:12):
a traditional restaurant. But when that diagnosis came in that
we're going to fucking die, We're like, fuck it, fuck it, man,
let's just go. Let's do whatever the fuck we're gonna do.
Happened to Coenciwa Spring, So we stopped being whatever we
thought an Asian noodle bar needed to be. We just
started to make good fucking food. And that's how it

(01:20:33):
all happened. Caught lightning in a bottle. We're blessed to
have some of the best and brightest working there, and
it just happened, man, And it was a It was
a wild time, that's for sure. What was was your
first place, MoMA Noodle bar. Yeah, one six three First Avenue,
uh six hundred square feet upstairs, yeah, all in. I

(01:20:54):
live next door and that was a lot. I mean,
that was a long time ago. But there's just no
way you could have predicted that it would have happened. Yeah,
wild wild Rye. At that time. You you probably didn't
do anything just for the fun of it. Ten years
of my life, I felt, I honestly would tell myself,

(01:21:16):
especially when I I think the important thing that happened.
I started getting like mental help too, but I would
tell myself, I work in a coal mine. That's how
I viewed my job. I'm working at a coal mine,
and that's my job.

Speaker 4 (01:21:30):
Living next door, you probably saw the sunlight every day.

Speaker 2 (01:21:33):
And I did. I never slept because our kitchen was
so small and we're be king. We started to get
super busy. I had to cook all the food at night,
so from like I would go back, you know, i'd
probably go to bed, and I'm not going to bed.
I was at the bars, for sure, but I would

(01:21:54):
wake up and cook things at night in the in
the convection of them we had downstairs. And get ready,
and that happened. God, it's hard for me to rect
like recall all that happened because it was fucking insane.
I worked like a crazy person. No, I remember, like nobody,

(01:22:15):
I'm not going to fail because I did not work
as hard as I possibly could. And I remember thinking,
if I have to, I remember, even before opening it up,
if I have to declare bankruptcy, then so who cares you?
You know, it doesn't matter.

Speaker 1 (01:22:29):
One way ticket.

Speaker 2 (01:22:30):
Everything was like, let's go burn. Everything was all in,
let's go. And you can do that for for only
so long before it catches up with you.

Speaker 3 (01:22:43):
Yeah, what do you think of like now when you
hear people talk about uh, work life balance and and
uh you know this this emerging movement.

Speaker 1 (01:22:57):
Against perfectionism, right.

Speaker 2 (01:23:01):
I think there's a lot of I think about it
a lot. Now. I don't live that life and I
don't even cook professionally really anymore. I do mostly media.
I sort of needed to. And I don't mean this
in a fucking terrible way. You know this sounds terrible,
But all the things that happened in the pandemic, but
for me, and one of the positives was it helped me,
like really reset. I have two kids, moved out to

(01:23:24):
Los Angeles. We were going to do that anyway, but
it gave me a lot of time to reflect on
that pursuit of perfection. And I think about a lot.
I think about this a lot, particularly with sports. I
wonder if the juice is worth the squeeze. Right. We're

(01:23:44):
so dedicated as a culture to at least I was,
to the pursuit of perfection, to being number one, and
we celebrate that all these self help books and all
these books about achieving greatness. Our society is about celebrating
these few individuals, right that do something extraordinary, But nobody
ever talks about, like you know, the proverbial metaphorical mountain peak.

(01:24:08):
No one ever talks about coming back down. And a
lot of times I felt like, if you get to
wherever you're trying to go, oftentimes for me, was you're
going to celebrate by yourself because maybe nobody wants to
celebrate with you. Yeah, you know. And I found it
to be an extremely lonely journey. And I think about

(01:24:29):
that a lot about work life balance. Maybe I think
we've definitely overcorrected over index the other way, but there's
something to be said about a younger generation be like, no,
I don't want that life that sucks. I don't blame them.
Why would you want to work like the way I did.
We're going, you know, on the upreast side, ninety hours
away because the whole country fall part. I know, but
there's got to be a better balance. And for me,

(01:24:51):
balance has always been what how I think about And
this is again this logical thing I learned in college, right,
this paradox, Right, I believe balances fully committed to two
things simultaneously. It's not about finding an equilibrium fifty to fifty.
I think you've got to be committed simultaneously the two
things and understand work life balance. I'm a big believer

(01:25:13):
in it. But like we have to also work our
asses off at the same time, right, trying to find
a split. I don't know.

Speaker 3 (01:25:21):
That's a great point man about Uh, that's a great
point about balance, being that you're committed to two things
all the way all the time.

Speaker 2 (01:25:30):
We just look at a scale. Think about the physics
of a scale.

Speaker 1 (01:25:34):
Yeah, not the your half one half.

Speaker 3 (01:25:36):
That when I'm trying to sell myself to my wife,
I'll point out to her I'm trying to explain that
she actually has it. You know, it's not as bad
as it might seem. Yeah, she's lucky to have me,
I'll point out. I'll be like, dude, you gotta look
at you know, I'm very dedicated to work and imagine

(01:25:56):
the opposite. I'm super dedicated to my family. Imagine the opposite.
That's gotta be worth something.

Speaker 2 (01:26:04):
Book, what till you got to split it up by
fifty percent? You know what I mean. You can't do that.
I think that is your balance. Yeah, so, I mean
I've side thought about that a lot of different ways.
That balance I see in food, right, I think perfectly.
I'm a weird fucking dude, man, I think about things
in weird fucking ways. Uh, perfectly salted dish is similar

(01:26:28):
to a lot of things I've learned over the years,
particularly from school. But it's not a logical problem. But
perfectly salted dish. If you think about if you put
out ten cups of water each varying scales of salt
from none to too much somewhere in the middle, what
is the middle? Is it going to be like ten

(01:26:48):
milligrams and ten milligrams of salt and water? No, it's
going to be what you think when you taste something
like that's gonna be six maybe it's maybe probably, but
but the actual moment in your head when you think
of balance, it's not ah, this scratch that's itched. Oh,
that's perfect balance. It actually is this living thing in

(01:27:09):
the sense of I taste something salty, and this is
what I try to teach cook. So imagine telling this
as a cook. There's like, who's eighteen years older, Like,
what the fuck are you talking about. He's like, you're
gonna taste it and it's gonna be No, that's under seasoned.
And then you think about it and you're like, no,
that's too salty, and then oscillates back to no, I

(01:27:31):
think that's I could use more salt, and then you
think about it, so it's like, no, that's too much salt.
When it sea sauce, back and forth, back and forth.
That's fucking proper salt. It is taste something. It's a
simple test, and that moment is alive. It's crazy as
it sounds, and that's what you want. That's fucking balance.

(01:27:55):
It is both simultaneous.

Speaker 3 (01:28:00):
That's good man, that's great. Hey, well, there's one last
thing I wanted to ask you about it. Talking about
balance is uh part of what you know, part of
what a little bit of our behind this is a
little behind the scenes here. I like to interview and

(01:28:23):
I have on gas. I especially love to interview and
have on gus who've you know, excelled in their fields
or done something really cool. But what makes them eligible
is that the litmus tests they have to participate. In
my mind, they have to participate in the fields, you know,
the disciplines hunting, fishing, or else's place to just be

(01:28:47):
a ship show, you know, there'd be no way to
control who comes through the doors. So during those years
of just hustle and driving yourself, you know, to the
mental edge, at what point did you When did you
find fishing like your growing up version of fishing?

Speaker 1 (01:29:09):
When did you find fishing?

Speaker 2 (01:29:10):
And what did it?

Speaker 1 (01:29:12):
What does it come to mean?

Speaker 2 (01:29:13):
There was a break. I mean when I first started
fly fishing, what I realized was I liked it because
you and I did jiu jitsu for a while. So
I say, it's not chess. It was like jiu jitsu
with nature. Right, every situation's different, It's constantly changing, and
no matter how expert you are, if you really are
thinking about it. You're like, I don't know, fucking shit,
like this is impossible. But I'm also an addict and

(01:29:35):
I'm adrenaline junkie. And you know when I first understood,
I caught my first trout and it was like that
fucking big but I did it on my own. There
was no guide. It was like the best feeling in
the world, and I was like, oh, I could do this.
I like this. I didn't think it was something I
was going to continue to do. And I actually, even
when I'm into Japan, I got like a through eight rod.

(01:29:57):
I was going to do it. I never got a
chance to do that. And when I started cooking, there
was like three or four years ago I had a
rod ready to go. Man, I never never went because
I wasn't near I was in the South, not near
the North. Even still, let's be honest, I probably would
have gone anyway, And it took some time for me
to get back to At the time, I was doing

(01:30:20):
a lot more winter sports too. But once I started
to get back out to the rockies to fish, that's
what I worked towards. Those are like my one like
ten days of like I gotta fucking get there. If
I don't do this, I don't know what the fuck's
gonna happen. I got to get there. I don't even
know how am I gonna get there? Or you're not
I can afford it, but I gotta do it. And
that just became something I continue to do on an

(01:30:42):
annual basis. Yeah, sometimes buy annual basis and uh, at
some point, like Mike Dawes who's at West Bank Anglers
now and Jackson, you know, I would continue to go
and made some more money and I would you know,
have more trips and and such, and then I got
my brother into it, and then I just sort of
made the not that I listen, I am not someone

(01:31:04):
that ties their own flies. I don't actually don't have
the deck stay to do it. And there's so much
more for you need to learn on trout fishing. But
I got to New Zealand mm hmm, and I was like,
what the fuck is this South Island? Have you been? Yep?
It's the best man.

Speaker 1 (01:31:21):
Well, I was ship talking New Zealand earlier today. Well,
you know, I said, just earlier today, I was telling someone,
I said, when I'm on a plane that long, and
I got off the plane I want ship to be
way different.

Speaker 2 (01:31:37):
It wasn't different enough. And I'm like, man, these guys
are this is a lot like I'm home, but not
for trout fishing. Though it's the same. It's not the
same thing. It's not.

Speaker 3 (01:31:48):
It's like, it's like, you mean to tell me that
I came this far and there's still rainbows and brown trout.

Speaker 2 (01:31:54):
Yes, but it's not the same. There's no gus that
I want to see people's bones in their hair, man,
I want to see like you know, dude, for me,
it's so different. I disagree.

Speaker 7 (01:32:03):
Man.

Speaker 2 (01:32:04):
I think for me it was totally different, different, different everything.
And they don't follow any of the same batterns of fish.
And I was like, whoa, And it's syecasting the first
time I did syecasting for real. You get seycast in
a spring creek, but like fishing to like an eight
pound brown trout that's in like six inches of water
in the middle and you just had to walk a

(01:32:25):
ship ton to get there. There's one brown chot per Colombia.
Now you're making it seem cool, yeah, because it is cool.
I liked it.

Speaker 1 (01:32:32):
I had a great time, did stuff there. I'm sure
I'll go again.

Speaker 2 (01:32:36):
But like I said, I just felt like when I
got off the plane, I was a little bit dismayed
that they all because then they smoked my legs. So
that was when I was like, you can, you can,
you can hunt for fish. And that's when I was like, okay,
dads got me on to saltwater fishing and did bone

(01:32:56):
fish and there's great bone fishing and Andros and Seychelles
and other places. But you know, within ten hours that's
like my wheelhouse and for travel, I was like, all right,
like we're gonna I need something more. And that became
like permit fishing, and listen, I think I'm like permit specifically. Yeah,
I got permit fever man. And I think I think

(01:33:18):
I'm a good angler. I will never think I'm ice
when I I mean, I just went. I caught more
permit than anyone on the trip, and everyone's a good angler.
But I'm not like the pros man. I'm not even
I suck compared to the best man. So I think
I'm pretty average at it.

Speaker 1 (01:33:34):
And it's not what I've never I thought, I've never
caught a permit.

Speaker 2 (01:33:37):
I hate I hate it though I don't love it
because it's so fucking frustrating. It It drives me insane
because it's so goddamn hard, and that's why I love it. Man,
I'm after that pain.

Speaker 3 (01:33:53):
Yeah, I would tell you a funny permit story to
have me. Recently, we were spearfishing in the Bahamas and
we're probably forty feet of water at surface, and here
comes a permit.

Speaker 1 (01:34:04):
And he goes into a cave.

Speaker 3 (01:34:07):
I was like, and I was standing to the guy
I was with, camer Kirkconnell. We're talking about it. You know,
he stick her heads about the water and I'm like,
holy shit. He goes, no, man, that's normal permit.

Speaker 1 (01:34:14):
Shit. For that permit to be on a flat is
weird for him. This is what he's normally doing. Here's
your idea that he like is on the flats. He's
like on the flats for a minute now, and then yeah,
he's like, that's like what they do. Your experience with
them up there is like not his normal plan. You know,

(01:34:34):
he'll check that shit out now.

Speaker 2 (01:34:36):
And then it's funny, man. When I started to do that,
and I remember showing people the reason I got into
some like just shooting some guns at animals and stuff
because I was with somebody from New York and I
showed him a photo of a permit. They're like, you
didn't catch a fucking permit, this very successful person. And
I was like, no, I did. He's like, bull shit,

(01:34:57):
where's the photo photo? It doesn't count? And I got
like thirty of them. He's like, oh fuck. And he
took me on all these fucking fun trips. Really, that
permit fishing has opened my doors to a lot of things. Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:35:09):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (01:35:09):
The one permit I've been on a boat to see
landed was even disappointing. My brother Danny wearing bleeze, huge
school of permit come by. He hooks one. We're jumping
up and down, hoot and holler and high five, and
he gets it in. It's foul hooked in the fin.
Man even like you know, it didn't count. It was

(01:35:31):
the most deflating, Like, yeah, we were so excited that
a while, be like, oh just it's like it wasn't
even the one you were at.

Speaker 2 (01:35:38):
You know.

Speaker 1 (01:35:38):
It's like his neighbor got snagged in the fin.

Speaker 2 (01:35:41):
But doesn't seem like you love fly fishing. Though it
doesn't seem like that, does he like fly fishing? I
fly a lot don't talk much about fly fishing. I fished.

Speaker 3 (01:35:53):
I fly fished a lot this summer because we I
camp with my kids. We spend a lot of time
in the summer on a drainage where you're not allowed
to kill cuts, and the fish, the trout, the primary

(01:36:13):
trout that I'm interested in, his cutthroats. I wouldn't cross
the street to catch rainbow.

Speaker 2 (01:36:18):
I like.

Speaker 1 (01:36:19):
I like cutthroats.

Speaker 3 (01:36:21):
I love cutthroats, and you can't kill cuts where we
like to fish cuts, so I don't want to hurt them.
So we just fish them with barblous dries and we
like to sneak up on them, find them. It's like,
you know, catching one that you don't know about doesn't count.

(01:36:42):
We like to identify him, observe him, name him.

Speaker 2 (01:36:46):
How clear is this water fishing?

Speaker 1 (01:36:48):
Very clear? And we like to learn, like at what
cadence does he sort of drop back.

Speaker 2 (01:36:54):
In his hole because you're in Montana and go forward.

Speaker 3 (01:36:58):
And then we catch them and then it's it becomes
deeply personal, and then you let him go. And there's
some fish that I even told my boy I banished
him from catching that fish anymore.

Speaker 1 (01:37:09):
Like that fish, leave that one alone. We're gonna harass,
you know, don't catch him the rest of the summer.

Speaker 2 (01:37:15):
And I find a great amount of pleasure in that, man,
the pleasure I never knew I would find. And I
was trying to find my first permit for you.

Speaker 1 (01:37:22):
But you got that's a real permit.

Speaker 2 (01:37:24):
Yeah, yeah, but I got a bunch. I don't know
where the fuck I put them all anyway, Great, Yeah,
I never thought that that would be my thing. It's
the wildest thing, Rabin man, Like I was. Here's the thing,
Like I go, I go. I'm lucky enough to go

(01:37:45):
trout fishing a bunch this summer, probably like fourteen days
on the river. I go trout fishing to practice my uh.

Speaker 1 (01:37:59):
Permit fishing.

Speaker 2 (01:38:00):
What if the ocean moved really bad? Baby tarping? Like
love to catch a baby tarping, all right, because that's
basically shuamer fishing almost right. So that's the kind of
asshole I am. They're like, this fucking guy, what is
he doing? He doesn't even care about catching the chout?
So what uh?

Speaker 3 (01:38:18):
Because uh, you're an ingredients person, you're a food person.
How often do you catch fish and eat.

Speaker 2 (01:38:27):
It in saltwater? It's snook, snapper, sometimes barracuda, but less
so because of all the risk. Snook is awesome. Probably
one of my favorite eating fish, the snappers you catch

(01:38:49):
down there when you're catching, Yeah, I mean in the manger.
I caught a huge fucking clapper this summer and I
have a photo of it. I don't even know where
it is.

Speaker 1 (01:38:58):
But you'll quick one up.

Speaker 2 (01:39:00):
We grow. We split it open, butterflied it, cooked it
over fire and it was awesome, and ate it with
some tortillas. It was sublime, you know. And snook, I
mean most people don't. It's sort of like a striped bass.
But that's an amazing eating fish. Yeah, that's the only
time permit. I want to eat a permit. But that's

(01:39:21):
a livelihood of all those guys down there and wants
you so bad.

Speaker 1 (01:39:25):
Still hang you for eating permit.

Speaker 2 (01:39:27):
You'd be better. I've eating a person I really do
look for on the water floating permit that a dolphin
is because they don't eat the head. Oh yeah, a
lot of times. So I'm always like hoping.

Speaker 1 (01:39:37):
That, Yeah, let me.

Speaker 2 (01:39:40):
Guilt free permit consumption. So that's because I've heard this
is like talking about like we're talking about a recipe
on the menu, like I've only heard what a permit
tastes like. Yeah, it's like because it eats crab and shrimp.
And clearly I could go eat a fucking pompino or something,
but like something down there or something I dream about it.

Speaker 3 (01:39:58):
Well, someday when you send me a pou, send me
a photo of a headless permit, and I'll know what
I'll know where it happened. All right, Well, David chang Man,
thank you for joining. Next time you're into your grocery store,
I'm talking to you, listeners, keep your eye out if
you're heading out backpack and keep your eye out for
Momo fuku ram and if you want to have the

(01:40:20):
lightweight meal, and then if you want to go for
the real deal, find the restaurants.

Speaker 2 (01:40:25):
Well, we got a you can go to shop down
momofuku dot com and uh, I'll try to get you
guys a discount code. I don't know, Yeah, for sure,
we'll give you this.

Speaker 3 (01:40:33):
And then tell people, tell how people to find how
best to find you, and how to find your restaurants,
and you can.

Speaker 2 (01:40:39):
Visit us at momofuku dot com and all the media
stuff we're doing. Uh at majordomomedia dot com and my
social media is at at David Chang.

Speaker 1 (01:40:48):
All right, thanks for joining man, really appreciate the time.

Speaker 2 (01:40:50):
Honor guys, this was fun. Thank you. Thanks.

Speaker 3 (01:40:54):
Hey everyone, this is still Steve, but I'm not with Dave.
Dave Chang the guess you just listened to followed up
after the show with a kind gift for Y'all's right now.

Speaker 2 (01:41:07):
You can get anything you want from momo fuku at.

Speaker 3 (01:41:10):
Twenty percent off by using the code meet twenty at
momofuku dot com Meet twenty twenty percent off. Get yourself
a big old pocket full of ramen noodles momofuku dot
com Meet twenty for twenty percent off.

Speaker 2 (01:41:33):
Ride on.

Speaker 3 (01:41:40):
Seal Gray, Join like Silver in the Sun, Ride.

Speaker 2 (01:41:52):
Ride alone, Sweetheart.

Speaker 10 (01:41:58):
We done beat this day horse to death, taking a
new one and ride away. We're done beat this dam
horse to death.

Speaker 2 (01:42:12):
H So take a new one and ride on.

Speaker 1 (01:42:25):
H

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Ep. 484: Cooking Noodles and Catching Permit with David Chang