Article: Valentine's Day Dinner

“Momof**kyou, or Happy Valentine’s Day from David Chang”
Valentine’s Dinner at New York’s ‘Coolest’ Restaurant

by Salvatore Brown

(The Revision)

    We dressed and readied ourselves separately, deciding to meet at her place first and then take the subway to 163 1st avenue at 10th street in the East Village. I marched, on my mission, from the train to the steps of her apartment, sweating in the nicest of my clothes and milling over in my brain the upcoming events of the evening. We met on her steps. She was thrilled, and looked beautiful in that white sequin dress I like so much.

“Happy Valentine’s Day”

“Happy Valentine’s Day”

    “Ready to go?”

“Yeah”

    We held hands all the way to the subway. That was good. The 6 train was a straight shot down to Astor Place, from where we’d be able to enjoy a short, leisurely walk to 1st and 10th. That too, was good. The subway ride passed quietly: we sat close but didn’t laugh and bullshit the whole way as we used to do.

    I continued to sweat. I had worn a tie and buttoned the top button, which I never do because it’s so damn uncomfortable. It makes me feel like I’m asphyxiating. I thought she appreciated the tie, though. I hoped so.

    We held hands again on the walk from Astor Place to 163 1st ave. More hand-holding and less laughing: that was… I wasn’t sure. If things were over between us, they could at least go out with a bang. I had paid $250 up front for the two of us on a debit card; that should have counted for something. I was unsure. But I had some faith in my ability to accomplish my mission. I was hungry too. Not $125 worth of hungry, but hungry nonetheless.

    See Valentine’s Day had to be really, really good. Because with a laundry list of romantic mishaps under my belt, I couldn’t afford to botch yet another important event. On her birthday scores of her friends and family flew in from across an ocean, and I blacked out drinking-- not vomiting, obnoxious blackout, but an out-with-the-guys, act-like-a-fool kind of gag. And I had performed a truly stunning array of other assorted relationship no-no’s, of which the birthday incident was thankfully the worst.

    I thought that my Valentine’s Day plans were foolproof. I was intent on redemption. In the week before the date I had approached my mission like it was stealing the Mona Lisa: every extra moment I could spare was dedicated to meticulously researching the newest and most interesting restaurants, and when I found one I promised myself that I would get a reservation for Valentine’s Day if I had to kill for it.

    The restaurant I chose didn’t exactly make it easy.  “Momofuku Ko,” a new restaurant in the East Village, Zagat’s “best newcomer” in 2009, the magnum opus of infamously radical New York super-chef David Chang, was our Valentine’s Day destination. I was really aiming high with this place—it was way too cool for me, or at least that’s what everything about it told me.

    In keeping with Momofuku Ko’s aura of aggressive exclusivity and carefully calculated mystique, the reservation system was a real pain in the ass. At exactly 10:01 AM on Monday, February 8th, I was staring forlornly at a weekly calendar covered in angry red x marks. There were no seats left. I was pulling out my hair. The lottery-like reservation system had opened a mere 60 seconds ago, and I was already too late. Momofuku Ko only offers reservations on its own website, on a first-come-first-served basis. The process amounts to a frenzied competition of will and dexterity: each morning at 10:00 seats become available only for the date six days following, and the race ensues. Once you create a Momofuku reservation account the week’s calendar is laid out before you, with time slots marked with a red “x” for filled and a green check mark for available. By 10:01, my hundreds of faceless internet opponents had already crowded me out of relationship redemption. But then I logged back into the system, sighing, and was miraculously graced with one green check mark on Feb. 14th, at 9:20PM. I clicked, then rushed to fill the lengthy online reservation form.

    Momofuku’s owner and brainchild, David Chang, opened his first restaurant in the East Village in 2003. This first was “Momofuku Noodle Bar,” followed by a “Bakery & Milk Bar” where patrons come for Chang’s acclaimed “pork buns” and baked treats. Some favorites are: “crack pie” (crack because it’s so good, apparently), and the “compost cookie,” made with butterscotch chips, chocolate chips, pretzels, and potato chips-- Chang is known for his unique and innovative combinations of atypical ingredients. His popularity is so widespread that it warranted a Charlie Rose interview. Charlie says the restaurateur has “taken the food world by surprise and applause has followed. He’s already won two James Beard Awards--the Oscars of cuisine--and both ‘Bon Appetit’ and ‘GQ’ magazine named him ‘chef of the year’ in 2007.”

    Momofuku Ko is the most recent, hip, and frustrating addition to Chang’s empire. It spearheads a new generation of culinary hipster pomp. The website is as ardently understated as the restaurant: “we try and serve delicious American food,” it says. Ko’s food is more accurately a global synthesis with a special focus on Asian and French, especially in preparation. The menu is a fixed-price, 10-course experiment in taste-bud molestation.

    Despite our doubts, the man behind Momofuku Ko and the restaurant’s governing ideas fascinated my girlfriend and me (things were going well-- she was excited, I was out of trouble). In his Charlie Rose interview, Chang stressed how he wants to make fine cuisine more accessible to everyone. In opposition to the forced flash of his new masterwork, we couldn’t help but notice the slightest strain of noble intention peeking through the restaurant’s polished veneer of cool. The reservation system, albeit endlessly aggravating, could potentially be an effective tool for evening the playing field in a foodie frenzy where getting to the best food often means having special connections or just having lots of money. Granted, Momofuku Ko is not cheap, but the unique online reservation system assures that if one can scrape together the funds for a special occasion, and has patience and a quick draw on the mouse, he or she can eventually secure one of Ko’s only twelve coveted seats. And so as the two of us bonded thankfully in the few days before Valentine’s Day over our growing interest in Chang’s aims, the question arose: was Momofuku Ko’s secrecy shtick just another smirking wheeze of hot air, or the only way to protect a good thing and keep it available to the normal, good-food-loving public?

     And so, we went. We were still holding hands, and still not laughing, but there we were in front of the unassuming entryway to eat the chicest food we’d ever have. The door opened into a small, spartan space with 12 backless wooden stools facing one long counter behind which a few chefs in backwards baseball caps busily cooked for the hour’s lucky 12. The wait-staff were kind if not a little tacit, which I expected. The other patrons, that supposedly “casual” crowd, weren’t so casual, which I also expected. The woman sitting next to us had on the biggest diamond ring I’ve ever seen—so much for equal opportunity eating. “Good thing I wore the tie,” I thought to myself, even if it was slowly choking me to death. The chefs were cold and the atmosphere of the open kitchen somewhat stressful—I was starting to see my mission slide mockingly from my clammy hands.

    The chefs worked mechanically and rapidly, only speaking to patrons when reciting the extravagant descriptions of each new plate they prepared. The chef closest to us was a New Yorker named Andy who had wide, unblinking cocaine eyes and a backwards baseball cap. He seemed to take his job very seriously, and moved throughout the open kitchen like a maniacal robot. “You guys seem pretty intense,” I asked. Looking up only briefly he responded “It doesn’t feel intense,” and then conceded, “We’re all working to ‘turn over’ the restaurant.”

              I pressed on, determined: “How’d you get this job, did you audition?”

He said his interview had been to cook in front of David Chang, a mere three months ago.

              “Did you go to cooking school?”

              “I’ve been working in restaurants since I was 16, somewhere along the way I guess I just figured it out,” he quipped.

              The soundtrack playing throughout the night came from an iPod in the corner of the room full of Beach Boys, Dylan, and Beatles tunes. “Who chooses the music, everybody?” I asked.

              “David Chang,” said Andy—he continued to use Chang’s full name throughout the night in the little I got out of him. I asked him about the menu:

              “We change it every three months.”

              “Do you all collaborate on it, like in a sort of think tank?”

              “No, we just work.”

    But luckily for me, the food was fantastic. That night Andy presented to us, among many other strange and delicious dishes, “crispy chicken skin and Italian black truffles atop pasta with snail sausage.” The strangest, by far, was a foie gras shaved over lychees. Using a cheese grater, Andy shaved the pink block of duck liver over those lychees with reckless abandon-- but only after deftly wiping down the plates with a tasteless combination disinfectant/stain-remover. The presentation was immaculate. The portions were so small yet so full of flavor that I questioned my previously unswerving loyalty to my grandmother’s massive bowls of pasta.

     I went to the small bathroom periodically, nervously adjusting my tie. It was adorned with a bookshelf showcasing culinary classics and ultra-specific cooking guides, from a whole tome on “Polish Sausages,” to “LaRousse Gastronomique” and “Grand Livre de Cuisine.”

      We started to feel like our incessant questioning was unwelcome. Maybe we were being too forward: the other chefs seemed to be looking at us strangely. Had we drunk too much wine? Did they think we were reporters, agents of infiltration, usurpers of cool? Were we just too friendly?

       We paid the bill, grimacing, and left under the watchful eyes of David Chang’s protégés. We had eaten incredibly well, and my girlfriend was getting defensive of me over Andy’s laconic and derisive treatment of my questioning. That was definitely a good sign. The first thing she said as we left was: “that would be a good place to walk into with a bomb.” But we had connected with one another underneath Ko‘s scrupulous gaze. And we had had a few moments to touch glasses and laugh together; my Valentine’s dinner had, in the way it needed to, accomplished its aim.

       Sadly the answer to our question is not, at least right now, as simple as David Chang might hope. Our Valentine’s Day dinner at Momofuku Ko cultivated mixed feelings. The place felt more formal and insular than the classiest of upper-east-side restaurants we’ve blown all our spending money on in the past. We felt less welcome in Momofuku Ko than we had in any other establishments with actual dress codes and much longer histories of culinary accolades. Perhaps in his other restaurants Chang’s haute-cuisine-for-the-people mantra might be less convoluted by the realities of fine dining in New York City. Because the lengths Chang has had to go to in order to let (almost) anyone into Momofuku Ko, and the nature of exclusivity especially in a place like the East Village, seem to be working together against him, damning what he’s said to be his original purpose. The staff radiated an unsheathed, hostile sense of entitlement that, even when coupled with a surprising and fantastic menu, was not palatable. Whether or not David Chang suffers from the same phenomenon is simply irrelevant.