(audience applauds)

(upbeat music)

In 2004 when Noodle Bar opened

to lukewarm reviews, we decided to go for broke.

We stopped serving the ramen bar standards

and started cooking whatever we felt like.

It was a creative atmosphere, where there are no bad ideas.

I was facing foreclosure, I had nothing to lose.

The bank wanted everything. Total failure,

or complete turnaround were the only options.

Luckily, it was the latter.

After Momofuku opened, we tried to bring that go for broke

mentality to everything we do.

Every dish, concept, and new venture.

Taking risks leads to good new food.

Food so good no one is talking at the table.

That's what I see at our restaurants,

that's what my chef sees,

and we want it to be completely silent.

Even though music's playing,

that's the best noise a chef can hear.

When the customer's not just satisfied, but they're static:

dazed and confused by what they've just tasted.

(audience laughs)

You don't want people to talk, it's not good enough.

After they've eaten something you want them to be like,

Oh my God, what the fuck just happened?

(audience laughs)

Those types of dishes don't come easily.

They often have to be built up and torn down

dozens and dozens of times.

And even when there's a chance they won't connect

with the audience, but would that connection

between the chef and the diner

give the restaurant their vitality?

It's this trust, this give and take.

In over ten years I've learned

what it means to be a business owner and a boss.

So now I place high value on systems,

accountability, and organisation

so we can get that moment more and more.

Every day, my cooks and chefs

have to balance contradictory ideas:

the anarchy that makes the best dishes,

and the order that makes the best business.

It's a paradox that we'll never be able to

easily understand or execute,

because there's a push and pull

between order and creativity.

It's like I'm mandating that we capture lightning

in a bottle, and then carefully label and store that bottle

on the shelf, it's asking the impossible.

As a chef, you're used to being asked to do the impossible.

You're constantly striving to be the best.

The desire sometimes manifests

itself as a kitchen full of yelling.

I can tell you personally, that kind of kitchen space

is where nobody wants to say anything.

They're just too scared.

Any kind of creative process reaches a standstill.

For a dish to grow, you need feedback.

If there's one totalitarian opinion

in the kitchen, creativity withers.

On the other side of the spectrum,

you can have a free-thinking kitchen environment,

like this hippie free-love stuff.

A kitchen where all ideas are good ideas,

and every dish is executed.

This feel-good zone is equally quiet

because cooks are afraid to express criticism.

Constructive criticism is a crucial ingredient

in any good dish.

There's dishes where people just don't know what to say.

Great dishes need to run a gauntlet for ideas

that is both tough, and fair.

I used to go back and forth about whether I needed

to be more militant, or more relaxed.

But I've realised our restaurants work best

when they're both simultaneously.

An environment where cooks have thick skin,

and a high level of empathy.

Being in that zone, that fleeting moment

where everything is in balance is rare.

In that moment, food becomes more delicious.

It can be a 10 or 20 course degustation, or a fish taco.

That zone is when you're delighting customers.

It's like balancing a tipping chair.

We've had periods of too much doubt

when we were constantly over-correcting,

and failing to hit that mark.

If there wasn't enough efficiency and structure,

we'd bring in a sous-chef, an enforcer,

a hard-ass, a drill sergeant.

Someone that came from an old school,

French, punch you in the face kind of kitchen.

And those kitchens really did exist.

Not so much these days.

If there was too much structure and order,

we'd bring in somebody that just came back

from cooking abroad, from a magical place

like Mugaritz in San Sebastian,

Fat Duck in England, in Bray,

or elBulli in Roses, Spain.

With their mind full of new ideas,

and their heads in the clouds.

In the golden, early days of Noodle Bar

it was just me and a few cooks,

and once we ditched the gyoza and the edamame,

we started serving dishes with the techniques I learned

at various New York top restaurants,

and cooking abroad in Japan.

We created refined food with extraordinary ingredients

that wouldn't normally be found in a restaurant

in our price range.

I just believed good food should be for everybody,

I got tired of cooking food on the Upper Side

for really rich people.

And if you travel abroad, you'll see that good food

is for really everybody, and cheaply.

And we temporarily found that sweet spot

between polished and uninhibited.

We honed in on a particular kind of deliciousness

that arose from that conflict

of my high-brow and low-brow tastes.

Just because cooks make fancy food at fancy restaurants,

doesn't mean that's what they want to eat.

If anything, Noodle Bar was an expression

of fuck you, this is what I'm cooking.

(audience laughs)

Not exactly the classic definition of hospitality,

but I felt that hospitality needed a kick in the ass.

We were in pursuit of a new kind of hospitality

that was meaningful to us and the diner.

We happened to stumble upon it at Sohm Bar.

At Sohm Bar, my second restaurant,

I was really trying to find my voice

and plan, in fact, for Momofuku, that would establish itself

something other than a one-hit-wonder, which Momofuku was.

This meant I had to reach further, work harder,

risk more than I ever had at Noodle Bar.

And I could not have failed bigger

than I did with this Asian burrito.

I'm not going to put a photo up.

(audience laughs)

In the end, it was blessing in disguise.

It allowed me to feel completely free in creating

new combinations of food, flavors and techniques.

I had nothing to lose, we were liberated.

If we were going to go out of business

again, we were going to do it in style

with that very real perspective of losing everything

including the shirt off my back.

Following the culinary status quo,

the traditions of what I should

and shouldn't do, just didn't matter anymore.

All our bad ideas started to seem like good ideas.

And somewhere in that mess, I knew

we could find something really delicious.

Like most cooks, and people who like good food

I liked sea urchin, I love sea urchin.

I wanted to serve it at Sohm Bar,

but in a different way than serve it raw or on rice,

as you might see in a Japanese restaurant.

Those are very well understood

ways of eating it, and I thought cooking it

would be an abomination.

Cooked uni, you know, you see it sometimes in pasta

or risotto, but that's not something

I wanted to do either.

So, I started working on a dish.

Eventually, I realized I could maintain and highlight

the purity of the sea urchin,

by serving it in a dangerously contrasting environment.

I cooked black top yolkar pearls,

like you'd see in bubble tea, and pineapple juice,

and served them in bowl ripping hot.

Way hotter than anybody should ever eat.

I had a deal with trying to get the best sea urchin

at the time, because Provares don't want to sell

a place called Momofuku, especially with really good

Santa Barbara sea urchin.

And I put that next to the tapioca.

We turned tofu into this whipped cream,

very light, in a cloud, and put that on the uni.

There was furikake, this Japanese rice seasoning,

scallions, yuzo kosho for citrus-y spice,

apple juice for sweetness, which is also high in malic acid

just sort of opens up your palette.

It was a full throttle dish,

that never should have worked.

And I would never have done this dish

in any other state of mind.

And I would not have made it,

it, it just made me feel like I needed to vomit, you know?

(audience laughs)

Trying to serve something really delicious,

and trying to vomit because it was hot and cold,

it was crunchy and soft, sweet and spicy.

But after dozens and dozens of iterations

the last one felt like magic.

This dish was the catalyst for the rebirth of Sohm Bar,

which launched Sohm Bar from being this

really failed venture of an Asian burrito,

into eventually a New York Times three star restaurant.

And we kept on pushing, and pushing, and pushing

where we reached its highest, number 26 in the world.

And again, it's like, that's something I found in myself

feeling that nausea, that I have to vomit,

is actually something I found in every dish

that has been really instrumental in my life. (laughs)

(audience laughs and applauds)

You know?

And that's sort of what I'm trying to

all of my chefs to do, right?

That's for me to understand, and not everybody wants

to go down that path because it's a hard road

and I feel like I'm growing when I push myself

through those limits, emotionally.

And I get the best out of myself.

But, there's some people that don't understand that.

And they didn't understand that dish.

Critics liked it, chefs loved it,

but it's hard to explain to younger cooks,

or new people, how to make a dish like that

because you sort of have to lose yourself.

All our restaurants, for the most part, are open kitchens.

You can see everything: how they eat, and how they react.

And I can always change a few things

to evoke a different response.

Little more spicy, a little different knife cut

on a vegetable, different texture, didn't matter.

Because I can sort of tailor it as we go.

And I always try to go back to that uni dish

because there are two things at the same time

and somewhere in that dichotomy

was the secret path of new deliciousness.

Again, at that time, I did not know

how to explain any of this, I still don't know if I do.

But as we continue to grow,

I can no longer be omnipresent at the restaurants.

Each restaurant is a collaboration

between myself and the chefs.

Cooking is hard enough, managing people,

for me, is next to impossible.

Especially since I can't dangle an attractive bonus,

stock options, in front of them as an incentive.

I can only promise they will get better at their craft,

learn better techniques, and be part of a winning team.

So, I learned to let go a little bit

and give chefs the tools to find the balance on their own.

Recently, one of my head chefs put this dish on the menu.

A beef tongue sandwich, on rye, with bone marrow soup.

And, I can't remember what exactly happened

other than I saw it in service, and I lost my shit.

(audience laughs)

And he loved the dish.

And it just was, the pick up was stupid

it was too long, and for what went in it

there wasn't a return.

And, you know, like most young dishes

to a young chefs heart, it plays

upon something he grew up eating.

But it was too over-the-top, it doesn't look complicated

but there's a lot of stuff going on there.

It's too complicated.

It relied on nostalgia, instead of actual appeal.

Talking about its story adds up,

but just because a dish makes sense

doesn't mean it's going to work.

And it just definitely didn't work.

The bone marrow soup, your fried cornichons,

I still can't believe we served it.

And worst of all, it was a safe move for him.

He put nothing at stake, he was not reaching

for high or low, he was reaching for the middle.

Which I am vehemently against.

He wasn't trying to make people forget where they were,

he wasn't trying to transport them to that level of ecstasy

that I want, he wasn't risking anything.

When I was younger, and didn't know any better

I would have thrown that dish across the restaurant,

in a full crowded restaurant, in a fit of rage.

But, this moment in time, in the restaurant,

I just chilled out and I decided to let it play out.

I told him to look at the sales,

I told him more importantly look at the plates coming back

to the kitchen because that tells you everything.

And I knew there would be too many

half eaten dishes of beef tongue and bone marrow soup.

He wasn't cooking for the customer;

he was making the dish for himself.

Even though it looked a little different,

you could get those flavors at any Jewish delicatessen.

And I wanted him to take those flavors to a whole new level

or make it the best version anyone had ever seen,

and that's the mindset you have to have.

I firmly believe that.

It was neither.

Ultimately, he took it off on his own accord.

I didn't have to humiliate him,

and if I had demanded he remove the dish

it would have crushed him.

He wouldn't have learned anything from that experience,

and I would've lost one of the most talented cooks

I had ever hired or had the pleasure of working with.

And we worked and we worked on it, trying to get him

to think about flavors and textures and making food

that would evoke that response from a customer.

And I wasn't looking for immediate return on this investment

it's not instant gratification, and that's hard for a chef

because we get into this business,

because we want everything to be instant.

You know, the here and the now.

But I'm trying to see both short and long term plays.

Long term, he's going to learn

to better critique his own dishes.

And this is a dish that he came up next, a few months later.

And he's trying to build his confidence.

And this is one of the best dishes I've ever had.

And it's sort of the same thing, it's a sandwich.

It's an open faced sandwich, there's texture

from the pickles hears of palm on top,

there's the sardines for a little bit of fat,

and Hozon which we'll taste a little bit later.

It's just a great, great dish,

and very simple and very complicated.

So, I try to make sure that we teach failure

and trying to get better at teaching failure,

we needed to systemize what we were doing.

So in 2010, we launched our Culinary Lab.

And we were in the pursuit of trying to find anything,

we actually had no idea what the Hell was going on.

It was sort of in vogue to have a lab at the time,

and it's hard to fail, intentionally fail,

when you have dinner service, you have customers,

you have plumbing disasters,

they're just the worst things that can happen.

And then in the lab, I could create a structure

where there was this go for broke mentality every day,

where we could document it and take this scientific

approach to food that we had never done before.

This freedom of failure

lead to the creation of Hozon and bonji.

This project started considering every day items

in our kitchen that we didn't quite understand.

Katsuobushi, which is used to make Japanese dashi,

soy sauce, misos, were fundamental,

are fundamental in Japanese ingredients.

But we didn't really know how they were made

and we didn't know if we could make them

in the East Village instead of Japan.

So I had the bright idea that our goal

was to make the best versions of that in the world.

After going to Japan many times,

and seeing how they are making it,

I was like we can do this.

And we started to make soy sauce,

and then we realised, can we make it with something else?

Could we swap it out for New York State grains,

legumes, and proteins that are based locally?

As far as we know, this was the first time

anyone tried to substitute these ingredients.

We wanted to pay homage to these classic Japanese culinary

staples, but at the same time we wanted to destroy them

because we felt we could do it better.

And we're not there yet but we're going to get there.

To us, replacing those traditions

meant steering away and creating our own.

After all, if you fundamentally understand Japanese cuisine

it's not about using the real thing or something authentic,

it's about what's using fresh, and what's close to you.

Really paying respect to the towah around you.

The idea of importing these goods

was the antithesis of Japanese food to me.

So in a way, we started cooking real Japanese food.

Because we were making all our own products.

The results were astounding, a holy shit moment.

Hopefully you'll taste that outside.

These products did not fall into our laps,

they were a lot of work over four years

of research and development and currently used

in restaurants around the country.

The Lab was given the freedom to fail,

fail big, you know? Really fail big.

And the space to refine as they went.

The freedom to create this type of structure

to understand and to evolve is the only way

Momofuku, my cooks, can evolve.

Preserving that as an environment is out number one goal.

As a chef, you learn to salt to taste.

Everyone's cooked here, everyone's salted something,

and you taste as you go, and you taste,

and you dress seasoning, you taste and you dress seasoning.

Eventually, it becomes intuition.

No one is born with it, you learn from over seasoning,

and you learn from under seasoning.

My role as a chef now is to not provide the tools

to measure exactly how much salt,

because there's some restaurants that measure

exactly to the milligram, you know.

I want to create that intuition

where people feel like they're in that structure

and chaos, and I think in that dichotomy

they're going to be able to know what really great food is.

And when new cooks ask me how much salt

they need to add to a dish, I tell them to over season

and under season, at the same time.

I try to apply that paradox to everything that we do.

Thank you very much.

(audience cheers and applauds)