I have to say upfront I wasn’t paying attention and borrowed the wrong book from the library. I was looking for Ted Chiang’s latest and my freaking Libby showed this even though I typed in Ted Chiang. I wasn’t paying attention to the author’s name when I put it on my hold list. Imagine my surprise when I opened this up and it starts talking about Chef David Chang. I know of him since I have seen some of his tv shows, and honestly my impression of him has always been wow he seems grumpy. Well now from this memoir I know, he is grumpy, kind of a self professed horse’s ass. His anger seems to be the driving force through most of his teen/adult years.
I always have found the restaurant industry fascinating so you get to read about Chang’s early life growing up in VA (nope, had zero idea that was where he was raised) how he changed from being a golf superstar to a middling student. And how he changed careers when he graduated from college. I liked seeing where his idea for Momofuku came from and how he and one guy started cooking what they wanted to eat and how things took off from there. And though Chang had success and kept opening up different restaurants and even created a quarterly journal called Peach about food writing, you can read and see based on incidents how he was still not trusting or believing in his success.
Some of the things that Chang gets into is how is bipolar and how that led to a lot of irrational anger at others and himself. There are some chapters where he discusses how he went into therapy and had coaching to deal with how this caused him to not be able to control his anger in the kitchen. I think that it was interesting to read this, but at times when Chang shows what he wished he had said instead of what he did and how lucky his people should be that he’s gotten better at things like this, I kind of went, have you though? I think most of this book to me shows that for all of his age and wisdom, I don’t really know if Chang truly got things. I also liked we got some insight into chefs we have heard about (Tom Colicchio, Anthony Bourdain, etc.) and honestly any mention of Bourdain and the last email he sent to Chang made me miss that man more than I thought possible.
I will say though the main reason why this gets three stars from me is that it jumps all over the place after a while. And sometimes I had a hard time reading when he would dump in emails or texts to show what he was saying and what others were saying back to him. I think things course correct towards the end of the memoir, but it took a while. I would sum up that this memoir started off strong and then faded. The epilogue felt a bit off too. It felt like a tamed version of Chang was speaking about COVID-19 and the Trump presidency. It didn’t feel real to me. I did enjoy the 33 Rules for Becoming a Chef that he truly ends on since that felt more like him again.
Versus – a book that fits in one of the four kinds of narrative conflict (person vs person, person vs nature, person vs self, person versus society); a book about a legal conflict or a war; enemies to lovers, etc. I think this fits the person vs self when you read this book. It also shows how Chang came into conflict with those who worked for him, his family, the restaurant industry at large, etc.
