David Chang on the long, hard, stupid way
herbertlui.net
herbertlui.net
Integrity isn't the point:
> It had nothing to do with integrity. I didn’t care about fooling the diners. What concerned me was the precedent we were setting.
The quality of the food isn't the point either:
> The dish was meant to be a difficult pickup that required constant coordination between the front and back of house.
The inefficiency is the point.
Doing it the long, hard and stupid way is the point.
This is a sermon against process improvements. Without seeming to realize that restaurants are a modern miracle of process improvements! How does this David think the kitchen gets fresh ingredients every morning? Where does David think fruit in the winter comes from? How did herbs and spices get so cheap? Because we decided for the past 200 years to relentlessly pursue efficiency. Because we decided not to do things the slow and stupid way any more. That's how!
Where the fast food industry wants to be is a robot that sees you push the button and starts cooking your burger then before you get to paying for it. Robots could do all that, but they are too expensive for the price they need to hit at least so far. (there are also some fraud issues they have to work out) They have to start cooking before you finish the order to meet their fast goals which is one of the reasons people go to fast food.
> I worried about the mindset of the server whose job it would be to parade a stunt chicken around the dining room. I was terrified of our culture stagnating.
It doesn't read to me like he would have any problem with a process improvement as long as the real chicken were still used.
The point is that the diner gets to see the chicken they will eat and understand the process.
The efficient way described in the blog is to instead use a stunt chicken which'll be paraded around the dining room instead of being cooked.
That's not a process improvement when the entire point of the dish is to show the diners what they will eat before they eat it and flex the restaurant's ability to coordinate.
Purposeful inefficiency is beautiful when it's about retro video game console programming or mechanical watches, because that's about spotlighting the process. Both of these are inefficient---modern computers are more powerful and quartz watch keep time better---but are fascinating because the difficulty of programming in assembly or an intricate series of tiny gears have inherent value to some people, far beyond the result of a video game or getting the current time.
It's a complicated finely tuned process to get a chicken from your table to the kitchen and back again. The chef wants employees that value the process itself, which is a fair ask when the process is the product.
I agree with you, that the diner seeing what they are about to eat is an important part of the experience. But Chang seems to be saying that even that is not the point! The results (including diner experience, and the honesty of that experience) don't matter. It is purely about instilling and maintaining a culture.
I don't really buy it, myself. Should they also forge all their knives from iron ore, the long slow way, before being allowed to use them in the kitchen? As other people commented, I think this is more about weaving a story and casting a glamour than anything else.
But if he allows that to happen and the staff internalizes a culture of corner-cutting and misdirection, then eventually they'll start lying to customers and taking shortcuts on things that do matter.
Obviously young and hungry with nothing to lose but your standards one can make certain decisions that build the story and the quality.
Once the weekly payroll is $140k a week plus all the other expenses selling one's name seems justified to keep the balls in the air.
The problem is the idea of the billionaire chef.
Basically, the idea is you don't want smart people who can decide what corners make sense to cut, what process to use to etc.
And this is because you don't want to have to rely on their intelligence. You want to rely on only your process, so you hire those without sense or intelligence as you expand.
It's saying you don't trust your people to make the right decisions. That you don't trust them to understand the difference between a shortcut that does and doesn't matter. The fact that Chang's staff emailed them to say "hey, we've started taking this shortcut" is a reason to trust them. Any deviation from the plan, and they let him know? Great! But he thinks that if he allows good shortcuts, sometime later, they'll start taking bad shortcuts, but he'll never find out, or won't find out until it's too late? It's profoundly insulting.
But at the same time, fighting human nature is hard. Judgment will suffer while under stress, and working in a kitchen is certainly a poster child for "stressful situation". Even with the best intentions, bad decisions will be made, even if they seem like good decisions in the moment.
I still think we should strive for that trust, though. Making people stick to an inefficient process where they can't see the reason for it is how you get detached, uncreative employees.
> I think a charitable interpretation of his point is "I didn't care about fooling the diners about this specific thing."
The funny thing is I actually do think he should be caring about this. Bringing out a chicken to show customers, and either explicitly saying or even implying that they're going to take that chicken back to the kitchen, carve it up, plate it, and bring it back out is a statement of intent. If you don't do it that way, then that's dishonest in a way I'd consider really bad. If I found out that parading the chicken out to my table was just a gimmick, and that's not the chicken I ended up eating, I'd feel lied to (or at least very much misled), and that would affect my enjoyment of the experience and my desire to go back.
If the end product is indistinguishable, and the user experience is inferior (because it takes so much longer, and customers are just sitting there, waiting, hungry...) literally the only difference is the assertion of management/owner status for the sake of it.
That might have some marketing leverage for a restaurant, but "We write everything in machine code with a biro before hand-assembling it" isn't going to win any hearts and minds in software dev.
Soup from the carcass is delicious, but there isn't time to do that during the meal. Even with a pressure cooker it's going to take at least an hour. (And if several tables order the same dish, you're gonna have a bunch of pressure cookers in your kitchen.)
So... the idea is sound, but I'm doubtful that they actually do it the way they claim. Which would make sense with the "hero chicken" story they admit to.
If they're also using the original poaching stock I could imagine you'll get a pretty stock even in 30 minutes. You'd still need to cook anything else you wanted in your soup -- vegetables, pasta -- though there are tricks for par-cooking these.
I don't own a pressure cooker, so I'm only reporting what I've read. And they do say that a pressure cooker makes better stock in shorter time -- there are things that not even a 10 hour simmer will get since the temperature never gets high enough to dissolve some things. Still, 30 minutes sounds sub-optimal, and I wouldn't expect anything to be even the slighest bit sub-optimal when you're paying two-Michelin-star prices.
And yeah, best read is they already had fully done stock and just add these bones to that and drain off some for you to have. Leaving it in to continue to make more stock.
And entertainment is full of evidence that people don't need or want to see the full process. For example, good editing can make a movie. There is still a market for stage plays, of course. There is always a curtain, though.
And fair that there could be a market for this. Dozens of people, even. My point is that the market is almost certainly as much a stated market as it is an actual one. People want to be somewhat entertained, sure. And they want a good meal. Seeing the exact chicken that they are about to eat as it makes its way through the kitchen feels unlikely to be a deciding factor.
In other words, it's not actual inefficiency so much as a hard-to-recognize spending on buying another asset, namely the marketing/advertising effect of conveying "luxury" or "successfulness".
Sort of like peacock feathers: They're "inefficient" from the perspective of abstract aerodynamics, but from a holistic and practical perspective...
What do you mean by "understand the process"? You only get that if you are in the kitchen with the cooks. Only open restaurants where you can see the cooks cooking help with that. Seeing a dead chicken ahead of time doesn't teach a guest anything. It is merely a flex, a story the restaurant sells to increase the price of a meal.
Because you are absolutely right, doing things that are inefficient and stupid for the sake of it is absolutely dumb.
> I worried about the mindset of the server whose job it would be to parade a stunt chicken around the dining room. I was terrified of our culture stagnating.
This is where it makes sense. He does care about integrity. If you foster a culture of faking little things like this it can eventually grow into a culture of faking the big things that actually do matter.
This seems to be the key quote. As a restaurant owner, as with any other type of team leader, his job is managing how the team's attention and energy is spent. Reading charitably, he doesn't want to formalize slack time into the system, because he thinks that slack will be eaten up by something else with the next process change, making the whole operation more brittle (also specifically in a restaurant setting, maximizing kitchen throughput is _not_ the same as maximizing efficient operation)
I could of course be reading too much into this, but from my own experience, it's the same difference between a sensible ad hoc meeting culture and being forced to use "efficiency" tools that inevitably make meetings less productive.
quality is entirely the point, nowhere does he suggest quality is compromised; his staff's alternate idea was not reducing quality. he's making a different point.
Yes. This is what passes for "fine dining" today.
Starbucks used to make a thing of this. The process of making drinks was deliberately made manual and complicated to give customers the impression they were getting their money's worth for overpriced coffee. That was part of the Starbucks mystique, when they had one.
I am subbed to /r/KitchenConfidential sub (a place where chefs and kitchen staff hang around) and there is a constant trickle of anecdotes of Chang being one of the greatest a*holes they have ever worked for.
He doesn't teach. He screams, denigrates and have anger episodes that keep everyone in the kitchen in a constant state of fear.
For example - https://www.reddit.com/r/KitchenConfidential/comments/1c3l66...*
Worse, as most of their asshole behavior seems to stem from the fact that they are buckling under pressure. Pressure that they themselves are causing.
Now I'm curious if this is reputation that is legit, or just one that everyone parrots. :(
From the moment you walk in the door for your shift, you are already hours behind. You will be given a couple of hours to prep an insane amount of food from scratch, often bouncing between 5-10 stations at a time to make it happen. I worked at a place that I was expected at all times to have food cooking on a giant flat top, charbroil grill, multiple ovens, 6 burner sauté range, deep fryers, steamers. While all this is cooking you also need to be doing the cold prep of cutting, measuring, weighing and portioning all of this prep work.
After you finish this, you will have a little bit of time to start a mad rush to set up your actual station for the service. I worked at a place once where this was a two hour ordeal to set everything up while basically working at a slight jog the entire time. And all of this can be really heavy when it comes to moving around large buckets and containers of ice, for example.
Finally, once service starts on a busy weekend for example, you are now looking at a 4-5 hour rush with a minimum ambient temperature of 95 degrees, where you will be absolutely slammed with multiple orders all coming in steadily, requiring a tremendous amount of skill to balance the timing of all this. Think about how hard it can be just to time a main protein with a couple of side dishes when you are just cooking at home for the family, and now imagine having to cook that same amount of food 300 times within a few hours. There will be no break during any of this either, standing and running around the entire time.
Once the service rush is finally over, you might think that your day is winding down, but think again. You now get to start the multi hour process of breaking down and cleaning every single thing you dirtied over the course of the night. This will also be a somewhat fast paced time of the night as labor costs are always a concern in the restaurant industry, so there is no time to slack here either.
Finally the shift is done and you can go home after 10-12 hours, stuff your face with a peanut butter and jelly, and do it all again tomorrow, since you work 6 days a week, every holiday, every weekend.
I am a software engineer now and I can confidently say that I have never had a day in this profession even remotely close to as stressful as just a regular Tuesday could be in the restaurant industry.
That is, you are correct that it is higher stress than a healthy software job. It doesn't take a lot of searching to see that "grind" for game devs is absurd, though. And I'm sure you can find stories of toxic teams in any big company.
That is all to say, a ton of that pressure being "high stress" is specifically from people buckling under the pressure. I think it is fair to say that working an active event at the likes of Amazon can be as pressured as any food service work. Doesn't mean it has to be high stress.
I didn't even include the stressors involved in wondering if your pay was even going to cover your bills for the month, or stressing if the restaurant was just going to close its doors on you overnight. Never heard of a tech or construction company doing that, it happens all the time in restaurants. And I was specifically talking about my time in actual restaurants, not fast food chains or fast casual. I can't speak to them. I am talking white chef coat, table cloth with reservations type of restaurants.
I'm not arguing that tech work can't be stressful or hard (or any other job), from a skill level the tech work is much more difficult. But you asked if a the high stress stereotypes are true, and as someone that has worked in around dozen different industries over the years, restaurant work is far and away the most stressful of the bunch, it's not even remotely close. Not arguing that it should be that way, but it certainly is.
Similarly, worrying if your pay will cover bills is not at all unique to the industry. Having lived on bounced checks for a time, I agree that sucks. I've also known friends who had their paycheck bounce. An absurd amount of stress that makes zero sense.
So, my pushback here isn't that I think you are wrong. My pushback is I see no reason it has to be true. Basically, your last point. There is nothing intrinsic here that dictates this is a high stress job. Certainly the stakes are lower than something like an ER. The folks I've known that work ER complain less about the stress of their job than folks I have known that did food service, though; and that just doesn't make sense.
I'm sort of surprised that he didn't worry about integrity, since it's literally an example of lying to your customers about the food they're paying for. Fooling is a pretty light word for what others would call false advertising: you tell people you're making soup out of the carcass you just ate from, and then you just don't do that. I imagine that could also have an effect on the restaurant's culture as well. I understand that fine dining is partly theatrical, but don't charge me a premium for doing something you're not actually doing and then say "fooled ya!"
The guest is paying for an overall experience. There are plenty of experiences where a guest is happy to pay to be lied to, like a magic show or a strip club or the Olive Garden. As long as the totality of the experience is providing enough value.
Now if you specifically chose the restaurant because of their honesty (for whatever that means), then it’s a different story
I think in the context of the quote, that "something else" was meant to be some extra long, hard, stupid work. He didn't mean doing something to make it up to the customers. He's worried about the mindset of his team: he wants them not to take shortcuts, but only because doing that will make them worse at their jobs in an indefinable way.
He has slapped his name on so many subpar food goods that were a total disappointment that I actually have started avoiding things marketed under his brand name.
He might do things the hard way in his restaurants, but they certainly aren't ensuring tasty or high quality goods under his brand. I would rather he do things in a way that makes sense and provides the best tasting food.
More broadly, the point is that you should take advice only from people whose successes you want to emulate. The actual advice I get out of this article is:
Tell stories that paint the picture you want your customers to have about your product.
He has used that reputation to start selling groceries under the same name. They are not very good in many cases, but he is able to charge high prices because of good marketing and his famous brand (Momofuku).
As an example he sells, what I judge to be not very good ramen noodles, for $4/pack. That is a lot of money for mediocre ramen noodles, even if it does have a famous name on the package.
A successful business is one that makes profits, not one that makes high quality goods. A profitable business can be retained for the profits, or it can be sold to some other entity. A chef, meanwhile, only makes money while they work.
Momofuku Ko closed recently. I went once around 2016, partly exactly because of his name and brand. It was ok but nothing memorable, I think he wasn’t even there. I guess the closing probably aligns with his goals of maximizing a brand / money, and not actually cooking good food.
It looks like they've closed nearly every restaurant they had except a couple Noodle Bars in NYC and Vegas and some other restaurant. Rough times for that industry. Ssäm Bar was a pretty good place, sort of shocked they couldn't keep the lights on there.
This attitude is the root of the problem with business culture in America today. A business needs to be profitable and make good quality stuff to be truly successful.
All this to say, going big doesn't necessarily mean blowing out all your quality.
Even at $3.23 for the bulk price, it is an expensive bowl of ramen.
I buy my chili crunch from an asian market, and both their fresh stuff and their packaged imported stuff is cheaper and tastes better. David Chang's advantage is that he is selling in normal grocery stores so there isn't really competition. Put his stuff on a shelf at an asian market where there is 5 or 6 different brands and a consumer base that has been buying this for years, and they won't sell.
God, don't get me started on how insane his asking price for the "restaurant grade" soy sauce is. This is all subjective opinion on the quality and cost of good, of course. But the costs per ounce are very easy to shop.
Professional marketing copy like this costs money. When Chef Chang says "Buy it!" the only response is "YES CHEF!".
And while it definitely is good quality, it isn't mind blowing. And I personally prefer other brands instead! It's also, to my taste, much more Americanized. Much more refined sugar and using a different less complex method for the umami.
It's still delicious, but I personally won't be getting it again.
Turns out they're so boring and flavorless that 2 packages have been sitting on the shelf for 6 months. I thought I would have an idea what to do with them but so far no. I keep home toasted/ground Szichuan peppercorns in my pantry so I can get any level of "tingly" that I want but come on, there needs to be something else.
Ratatouille is one of my all time favorite movies, but if you read it as a metaphor for director Brad Bird's own career, it's hard not to feel like it lets Walt Disney off the hook. Often in real life, the creative genius who founded the enterprise and the sycophant who has taken over it in his absence are both assholes. Though Ratatouille does touch on this by making Gusteau an idealized figment of Remy's imagination, who is shocked when he hears that the real man had a child via an affair.
There’s one interpretation of the idea of business as not selling products but stories. Apple knows this and clearly exhibits it with every product demo. It’s all a story. One that I enjoy.
But low priced groceries also sell a story, about how a beleaguered mother can save a few dollars here in order to avoid bouncing a check or to buy herself one nice thing. Or a kid who wants something sweet and already blew their allowance on video games. A pattern they will repeat again every few months since it worked before.
Chang is definitely selling two stories and it sounds like they are a bit discordant when taken together.
Some people, like Chang, may know it and treat it transactionally as such. $X for a star, which leads to Y amount of exposure. Others, may know it or not, but treat it like a goal in life either way. It's very possible of course that many of the former start as the latter people until they later [realize/sell out/give up].
I guess it makes sense. The world is more competitive. Information is freely available. You need to find some other moat. With information and access to everything, a moat that might have been quality or talent, is more easily captured by buying the signal (which to be clear can include buying and maintaining the quality). Then once you have the signal, well, it's up to you whether you still need or want the quality. When push comes to shove, it's probably the case that the signal is worth more than the quality.
In isolation, sure, but losing money in one area to make money (or some other form of currency such as fame) in another sounds a lot more reasonable. That's what a loss leader is.
Many of the chefs pushing for Michelin stars likely are not in their right mind.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kristinwolfe/2024/07/31/real-ta...
Seems to be considered fairly biographical.
Also, I spent a decade working in restaurants, I never met a single back of house employee that was in their right mind (myself included). It’s an entirely different breed from the HN set.
Maybe we need to just opt out and make our own yardstick.
Word of mouth is probably best, followed by online reviews, if that doesn't work.
That is true, but I've often seen that misconstrued (not by you in your comment) as somehow saying "Oh, Apple's success is just marketing! I can get feature XYZ for much lower elsewhere!"
Except that while Apple has generally great marketing, they also have generally great products. There is a ton of hard engineering and design work that goes into making a product that is easy to market in the first place. In fact, what the "it's just marketing" crowd tends to miss is that products are not just a collection of features, but are used to tell stories (or listen to stories) in users' own lives. They want to envision how a product will enrich their experiences, and Apple understands that's what they're selling.
In fact, if anything, I think the flop of the Vision Pro (may be quite premature to call it a flop, but I'll put my money on it being a flop) is directly due to the fact that Apple can't tell a story about it. By all accounts it has amazing, cutting edge technology. Except Apple can't tell a good story about what you're actually supposed to do with the thing that people believe and buy in to.
If you've ever used a good chisel without a mallet you know the difference between good and cheap. But the margin for some other tools is less pronounced. I was going to use files as an example but there are some pretty crazy rasps out there today that can hog almost as well as a power tool.
I disagree, and presumably so do the people you're referring to. Apple products are nothing special. They are competently made, but so are lots of brands which charge you a lot less. It really is all about marketing with Apple.
The funny thing is that Apple is usually good at waiting to build and sell a product until customers are ready for it and want it (even if they don't realize they are ready and want it).
Vision Pro is a still just a cool tech demo. A very cool and very impressive tech demo, but still a tech demo. I don't mean that to say that it can't be a useful product, but Apple built it without a real market for it.
Maybe that's ok: maybe they need to build and sell the tech demo now in order to refine the tech so they can get to the actual product, with the real story, that they'll sell 5 or 10 or whatever years from now. Or maybe... yeah, maybe it's just a flop.
What people “want” and what they will enjoy are rarely the same. Giving them fifty models of laptop is what focus groups think will make customers happy but it just fractures your attention to detail. It only makes a few customers happy. Probably less people than Apple’s market share.
My ex used to practically scream at her laptop until I bought her a MacBook. Most expensive present I ever gave but the best investment in peace and quiet.
David Chang and Christina Tosi worked together, and I remember seeing a bunch of their marketing on Netflix
https://rseventures.com/milk-bars-christina-tosi-went-momofu...
In 2015 the location in East Village was still GREAT. Interesting deserts, seemingly made by hand, with high quality ingredients
Then I go back a few years later, and it's this CHAIN and the food is inedible. I take one bite, can't eat it, and throw it away
It just tastes like sugary processed food now, like Twinkies or Chips Ahoy or something
I also saw Milk Bar products in Whole Foods, bought it, took one bite, and threw it away, and never bought it again
It's just weird to me that a chef would let the quality sink so low, so fast. Usually the "founders" care about quality, and are mission-focused
I always thought that process took decades, and changes in ownership. (Actually I am re-reading Pollan's account of the "big organic" Cascadian Farms brand now -- another very interesting case of counterculture going mainstream / industrial, but the change was more gradual I think)
Edit SC -> DC (David Chang)
They were so lazy that they didn't even make anything in Boston. It was all shipped over from NY. Stale and tasteless cubes of nothing wrapped in plastic.
Neither Christina Tosi nor David Chang have any integrity. They just peddle whatever garbage they can to people while building their own brand.
A year or two ago that Milk Bar location finally died out and was replaced by Joe's Pizza. Another NY chain. But one that is the opposite of Tosi/Chang in every way. Authentic. Careful. Customer-focused. Great NY-style pizza made on the spot with the same ingredients. Joe's is just as good in NY as it is in Boston.
Good riddance to Tosi and Chang. I now actively avoid anything associated with them.
It's basically like they bought some Chips Ahoy from Target and devoted an entire store to reselling it, with prime real estate
I mean maybe part of that was a pandemic thing, but I remember thinking how bad it was before the pandemic
You can open a second location of a bakery and maintain the same quality ...
Anecdotally more than 5 locations seems to be a problem (my guess is some kind of management scaling issue like Dunbar's law)
But it seems they never went through the phase of 2 or 3 locations, or just quickly zoomed past it into packaged and preserved foods. With the actual stores also selling packaged foods
Maybe she had enough friends in the restaurant business to know that managing 2 or 3 locations is probably a hell-ish part of your career (???)
i.e. maybe you are doing a lot more work, not getting to actually make any food, and you might not make as much money (e.g. each new store is a big risk I imagine)
You can teach someone else the recipes, and plenty of people know how to bake
So I don't see the problem with making 3 stores at a high quality
https://www.justia.com/intellectual-property/trademarks/enfo...
"a failure to enforce a trademark by monitoring the mark for misuses will result in a weakening of the mark and loss of distinctiveness, which can lead to a loss of the trademark"
Then the outrage dies down only to have the cycle repeated a few weeks later.
It’s like trying to trademark “breakfast cereal” or “hot sauce”.
If it had gone to court he would have lost eventually since other people had been using that name earlier for the same product, and it was too broad
He didn’t invent the food, and started going after small brands and people that had been selling it since before he had tried registering the trademark.
He did eventually back down.
Isn't that just called advertising? This is so blatantly obvious, it doesn't sound like much of an advice.
I wasn't saying that this is a particularly insightful message. I was saying that the message I took from this story wasn't about doing things the hard way. Its a meta lesson about messaging and showmanship.
I'm not defending Chang nor trademarks, just pointing out how they work legally and the flaws in the argument you're making.
Remember, people called windows "windows", but they didn't sell products called Windows till Microsoft started and trademarked it.
Here's a summary from NBC News:
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/david-chang-momof...
There is no such obligation. Yes, if you don't enforce a trademark you can lose it, but it isn't like you will be subject to fines or something if you don't. This is a ridiculously generic trademark that never should've been granted, and if Chang (or his lawyers) were good, decent people they would've just let it be. The trademark would've lapsed, and everything would've been fine.
Your second sentence kinda refutes the first, doesn't it?
I mean, if your company gets a cease-and-desist demand from the owners of the Chili Crunch trademark, and ends up buying the trademark to continue running your business, it seems like a Pretty Bad Idea to not hold on to that trademark.
I know you think the trademark should never have been granted, but the USPTO did grant it, and Chang's company did get a C&D from the grantee. So, if Chang's company ever let that trademark go (e.g., to be "good, decent people," as you suggest), the history of this particular matter suggests that someone else could easily pick the trademark up, and probably would (not everyone is "good, decent people," right?), and would then start sending cease-and-desist demands to extract fees.
So I'm having a hard time faulting Chang's lawyers for avoiding the obvious trap.
> Petitions to cancel based on abandonment may be filed at any time. Often, a petition to cancel due to abandonment is filed because the attacked registration was cited as a basis to refuse a third-party’s later-filed application. In such a case, the Applicant may file a petition to cancel to overcome the refusal to register. If successful, the cited registration will be removed as a bar to the later-filed application.
Source: https://www.trademarklitigationguide.com/petition-to-cancel-...
Consider, for example, the somewhat infamous Flappy Bird trademark that was recently picked up by Gametech Holdings, LLC. That firm petitioned the USPTO to cancel the existing registration by Dong Nguyen Ha on the grounds of abandonment. He lost the trademark, and they were able to register it:
https://ttabvue.uspto.gov/ttabvue/v?pnam=Dong%20Nguyen%20Ha%...
Unfortunately, from a restaurant’s point of view, they may care about customer satisfaction, but their incentives are to get more money per visit. A lot of things restaurants do make more sense from that perspective.
For example, large portions can be seen as a way to justify moderately higher prices while keeping customers feeling like they got good value for their money. Elaborate, unnecessary service is a way to justify really high prices.
And nowadays they care less about perception, so they just add extra changes.
The thing I like about this article is that you should be concerned with these things. You should make active decisions about quality, culture, integrity, the way you produce things, etc. You should not skip to "the long, hard, stupid way" or the shortcut in your proprietary process without consideration. Even the thought that there could be more value in an inefficient process is worth considering if you haven't before.
-- Granny Weatherwax
-- Lao Tzu
The problem with Momofuku Goods (No idea about ther resaturant group) is that they aren't even good to the unrefined palate. I'm not particularly tuned into the asian cuisines that he specializes in, but I can tell you that his packaged noodles are pretty middling even by grocery store ramen standards.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_Prodigal_Son
Different parts of the bird take different times to cook, so for food quality, cooking a bird as a whole makes no sense: either the breasts are overcooked, or the thighs are undercooked. There is just one reason, which is that cooking the animal whole makes for an arresting presentation. Then, you'd carve the animal tableside (like is done for Peking duck, see one of the other comments).
This requires having waitstaff that can carve a bird or having cooks that are presentable to the guests, and extra space in the dining room.
Clearly, David Chang is taking a shortcut already by carving the chicken in the kitchen.
1. jobs that are monetarily incentivized in this way are quite common though.
2. for certain kinds of jobs, if an employer desires employees to go the "long, hard, stupid way" while short-cuts lie in plain sight, the employer might wish to incorporate forms of incentives and disincentives into their payout system rather than rely on their employee to "just do it".
My family were regulars at a local Chinese restaurant for years.
One of the dishes we usually ordered was Peking Duck.
First, the waiter brought out the cooked duck on a trolley and carved up the duck, arranging the cut pieces of duck meat on a dish. The duck meat, pancakes/tortillas, sauce, and condiments were placed on the table.
At this point, the duck carcass was taken back to the kitchen to be prepared for the second dish - this restaurant just carved up the duck carcass and brought out the cut up duck carcass as a second dish.
My family were never that interested in the remaining pieces of duck since there was little meat on them.
Instead, my dad would ask the waiter to be given the duck carcass to take home so my dad could prepare the remaining duck meat his way (call him old school).
One time, after the Peking duck was presented and my dad had been given the duck carcass for later enjoyment, another waiter came out holding a dish filled with cut up pieces of duck.
But OUR duck that we ordered was in a bag near my dad.
The waiter claimed that the duck dish was for our table.
So where had the duck for the dish come from?
Personally, I think the Japanese ryokan tradition is amazing. It's obsessive food, and you /can/ taste the difference. I thought it was mindblowing even as a 20-sth dude in the early 2000s that grew up with Zagats in Atlanta.
The difference is spending 30 minutes (Chang) vs 30 years (ryokan).
Other long, hard, stupid things I like to do: read novels, take walks, invest my time to learn fundamentals of a practice
Short, easy, stupid things I like to do: skip the occasional long post on hackernews and just read the comments, automate and simplify my work, watch short videos on how to fix broken things, send one-line emails instead of sit through meetings
I think he needs a better way to authenticate the chicken. Maybe he can use the blockchain to show proof of work.
See, that's the moment you've lost the plot. That's where, for me, I realized this article may have been dancing around a good idea, it ultimately fails.
This is the most important question of THE WHOLE THING.
Is it fair or good to FOOL THE DINERS? Would the diners even care?
These are the only two important questions, and he kind of ducked them.
His presented focus is on great experiences for the customer, which demands high operational excellence from his team. His team found a reasonable way to save time, but his reaction was that's the wrong focus. Focusing on saving time will eventually hurt the customer experience (like advertising models lead to enshittification), even if this particular one doesn't.
So they need to re-orient this - either go back to the hard way, or justify the easy way in terms of the customer. To quote, "they wanted to sandbag it, they needed to figure out how they would make up for the lost energy elsewhere."
One shortcut today is another tomorrow and the day after. It's not about the single person either, but rather the culture itself.
Now this is different from improving processes or efficiencies. The incentives and motivations also matter. Take a large group 1 hour before the restaurant closes. For the staff, it's shit, why didn't they come earlier. But for the restaurant it's great news, more money and potential repeat customers.
That’s something I can relate to.
A lot of my personal “secret sauce” is habit, and a lot of habit is synonymous with motivation.
I find that establishing great habits has a kernel of great motivation.
Sometimes, I just do something a certain way, because of the way it makes me feel. No other reason.
Personal satisfaction and Integrity are vital parts of all that I do, and these come from a lifetime of experience.
I heard a great quote from a friend of mine, recently, who is a retired union exec:
What’s the substitute for 30 years of experience?
There is none.
A dish being "fired" means finish the cooking process, eg put into the fire.
When a meat comes out hot from the cooking process, it needs to "rest" a certain amount of time for the temperature to even out and the juices to be reabsorbed before being sliced/butchered. This is time that the diners now need to wait before they get their meal.
So, in David Chang's model, when the dish is ordered a prepared, dead chicken is "fired" and heated so that it finishes cooking. Then, while hot and still in the pot, presented to the diners. It's taken back, must rest outside of the hot boiling pot, and then is sliced into pieces and plated to be served and eaten by the guests. The remaining carcass is supposed to then be boiled down into a stock for a 3rd dish.
However, the resting and boiling steps could be skipped. Why does it all have to be the exact same chicken!? Have a presentation bird, another that is fired and rested (while the other is presented) you can carve and serve quicker, and make a large amount of bulk stock that can be served on order. The only difference is you don't have the exact same bird going through the whole 3 steps to the diners and instead have the 1. dead cooked presentation bird, 2. the carved bird, and 3. stock from a bird from yesterday.
Dead and boiled.
> What is "fired" in this context?
In cooking, that can mean applying direct heat in any number of ways. In this guess, I'm guessing that it means finishing (i.e. doing a last small amount of cooking for color and texture) the bird by roasting or searing.
> Is the presentation bird unrested? What does "rested" mean in this context?
In cooking, resting means to remove the item from heat and let it sit for a while. Food cooks from the outside in so the surface temperature can be much higher than the internal temperature. Resting gives some time for those to equalize. It lets the inside finish cooking using the residual heat on the surface.
> Why does the kitchen need to "butcher" the chicken that's "rested"?
It's a boiled whole chicken. After it's rested, it gets broken down into parts that the diner can eat. For chicken, that's usually breasts, thighs, wings, and legs/drumsticks.
> What does "slowing" the other, presumably presentation, chicken mean?
Resting and breaking down a chicken takes time, especially resting. By having a separate presentation chicken, it means the staff can be simultaneously resting some other cooked chicken and butchering it while the presenetation is being paraded around.
This feels like the crux. It's not arbitrarily doing the hard, stupid thing, but the ones that are based in making the product or process better.
If they just got rid of parading out the chicken in the middle of the process they could stage more things without implicitly lying to the customers, while improving timing. You would just lose some showmanship, which might be part of the brand.