Eat a Peach

David Chang, the chef and founder of the Momofuku restaurant group, opens his memoir with characteristic self-deprecation, confessing that he resisted calling the book a memoir for years and that a consumer survey revealed respondents' least favorite elements of his proposed cover were his face and his name. He warns readers that his memory is imperfect but insists the account is as honest as he can offer.

Chang grew up the youngest son of Korean immigrant parents in Northern Virginia. His father, Joe Chang, embodied what Chang describes as "tiger parenting," a style of conditional love enforced through relentless criticism. When Chang broke his femur in a go-kart accident at age seven or eight, his father refused to take him to the hospital for days, instead commanding him to walk. His mother finally took him to a pediatrician, who discovered the fracture. His maternal grandparents practically raised him while his parents worked, and his grandfather, who had lost everything during the Japanese occupation of Korea, instilled in him an appreciation for Japanese culture. The family was deeply religious Presbyterian, and church served as the center of Korean immigrant community life; Chang progressed from sincere believer to skeptic. He attended Georgetown Prep, a Jesuit boarding school, where he felt alienated from every social group and internalized a deep sense of inferiority. He had been a childhood golf prodigy, but his game collapsed under psychological pressure and his father's relentless comparisons to a rival. He graduated from Trinity College near the bottom of his class with a religion major.

After college, Chang worked briefly at a financial services company, hated it, and quit to attend the French Culinary Institute in Manhattan. He landed a job at Tom Colicchio's restaurant Craft, where chefs Jonathan Benno and Marco Canora mentored him, and persisted without a day off for a year. He then moved to Café Boulud under chef Andrew Carmellini, but his mother's returning breast cancer and a family business dispute fractured the Changs. Under this strain, Chang experienced his first full-blown depressive episode of bipolar disorder and began wanting to die.

Chang describes a long history of suicidal ideation stretching back to high school, including reckless behavior and a near-fatal New Year's Eve accident. He approached the matter with grim rationality: He would see a therapist, and if they could not talk him out of suicide, he would proceed. After one unsuccessful attempt with another doctor, he found Dr. Eliot, a young psychiatrist whose direct expression of concern made Chang want to continue. Over months, he unloaded about his childhood, fear of abandonment, rage, and feelings of inadequacy. His sole breakthrough was private: If nothing mattered and he was ready to die, he had nothing to lose. He framed opening a restaurant as an alternative to suicide.

In the spring of 2004, Chang had no money, no space, and no willing staff for a ramen restaurant, a concept most Americans associated with instant noodles. He found a tiny former fried chicken shop in Manhattan's East Village and approached his father, who immediately loaned $100,000. Chang began taking the antidepressant Lexapro at Dr. Eliot's urging. His first essential hire, Joaquin "Quino" Baca, responded to an online job ad.

Momofuku Noodle Bar's first months were disastrous: mediocre food, confused customers, and constant infrastructure crises. Chang stopped seeing Dr. Eliot due to cost and replaced therapy with bourbon. After a disappointing meal at a trendy competitor, Quino declared they could do better, catalyzing a turning point. They threw out their cautious menu and began cooking what they actually wanted to eat, drawing on their Korean and Mexican American upbringings. Chang realized they were at their best cooking for people who truly knew food.

Chang secured a loan for a second restaurant, Momofuku Ssäm Bar, which opened as a fast-casual burrito concept and immediately flopped. His father secretly took a lien on his own businesses to lower Chang's loan payments. With sixty days of capital remaining, the team abandoned the original format and began serving a late-night menu of dishes chefs wanted to eat after work. A two-star review in The New York Times saved the business; a year later, critic Frank Bruni upgraded it to three stars. Chang won the James Beard Rising Star Chef award.

Infrastructure failures at Noodle Bar, particularly insufficient hot water, led Chang to open Momofuku Ko, a twelve-seat tasting-menu restaurant, since Department of Health requirements meant any new restaurant at the same address had to serve far fewer people. A desperate one-faucet plumbing fix saved Noodle Bar's inspection. Christina Tosi, introduced by chef Wylie Dufresne, became indispensable to the expanding operation, building food safety plans and eventually launching her own bakery, Milk Bar. Ko earned two Michelin stars only seven months after opening, though Chang's immediate reaction was dread rather than joy.

Chang entered the international chef circuit, forming a transformative friendship with René Redzepi, whose Copenhagen restaurant Noma was redefining Nordic cuisine. His public profile soared with television appearances, a Time 100 listing, and a controversial remark about San Francisco restaurants "serving figs on a plate with nothing on it," which alienated the Bay Area food community. He co-created Lucky Peach, a food magazine with writer Peter Meehan and editor Chris Ying, which earned immediate acclaim but never turned a profit and folded in 2017, with Chang bearing the public blame.

At thirty-five, Chang hit a devastating low. He opened Momofuku Seiōbo in a Sydney casino, where distance from accountability unleashed his worst behavior. Both parents received cancer diagnoses on the same day. A seventeen-year-old mentee he had been grooming for leadership died of an accidental overdose, and meeting the young cook's parents became the most difficult thing Chang says he ever did.

Dr. Jim Yong Kim, president of Dartmouth and later the World Bank, became Chang's hyung, a Korean term for an elder-brother mentor, and connected him with executive coach Marshall Goldsmith. After interviewing thirty people close to Chang, Goldsmith delivered a devastating verdict: People were succeeding in spite of Chang, not because of him. Goldsmith's central instruction was to listen, acknowledge errors, and put others before himself. Chang decided to go off his medication against Dr. Eliot's advice, but this triggered manic episodes and intensified anger. Dr. Eliot eventually confirmed a bipolar diagnosis with "affective dysregulation," meaning Chang's mind interprets minor mistakes as personal attacks, triggering a loss of control.

Chang met his future wife, Grace, at a rooftop barbecue. Her composure and their shared Korean American background gave him stability he had never known. They married and had a son, Hugo. Chang opened Fuku, a fried chicken restaurant designed as a commentary on Asian American stereotypes, and Nishi, a conceptual Italian restaurant using almost no Italian ingredients. Nishi received devastating one-star reviews from every major critic; Pete Wells of The New York Times suggested Momofuku had had its moment. Grace could not sleep the night of the review, worried Chang would hurt himself.

Chang confronted his blind spots regarding gender equity after the #MeToo movement, acknowledging he had been a "poster child for the kitchen patriarchy." Marguerite Mariscal, who joined Momofuku as an intern in 2011, led a company-wide reinvention and became CEO just before her thirtieth birthday. Chang opened Majordomo in Los Angeles, returning to daily kitchen work, and tapped Eunjo Park, an untested cook, to lead Kāwi, his most Korean restaurant yet.

Chang describes his last meeting with Anthony Bourdain, the chef, writer, and television host who had been a friend and influence throughout his career. Over four hours of drinking at a pub in spring 2017, they talked; afterward, Bourdain emailed: "Be a fool. / For love. / For yourself." Chang and Grace learned she was pregnant the day after Bourdain's death in June 2018. At Hugo's baek-il, the Korean celebration of a baby's first hundred days, Chang asked his eighty-year-old father why he had not taken him to the hospital after the go-kart accident. Joe Chang answered: "I don't know what I was thinking. I'm just dumb." In the epilogue, Chang revisits his criticism of Alice Waters, the chef who pioneered California's farm-to-table movement, realizing that the simplicity of her cooking was only "obvious" because she made it so. An afterword written in June 2020 addresses the Covid-19 pandemic and the George Floyd protests, framing the book as a record of the food world's excesses and blind spots.