I've got Home Cooks in Dining Spaces

On the closure of Momofuku Ko, and a question about what--if any--influence restaurants have on home cooking

This week you’re going to see lots of think pieces about the closure of Momofuku Ko, which held a peculiar status in the late 2000s as one of New York’s first zeitgeist-y restaurants to jettison the formality of fine dining. Writing in the New York Times, Pete Wells describes Momofuku as catalyzing “food’s punk-rock moment,” both in its inventive culinary selections—and in particular its fusion of Korean cuisine with French techniques in service of dishes like ramen, fried chicken, and pork buns—its edgy ambiance and decor (high-tops and shared tables displaced white tablecloths), and its lower price point. For a long time (and many would argue, still today), head chef and restauranteur David Chang occupied a peculiar rock star status, representing everything that gourmet dining might eventually welcome—a younger, more diverse, less fussy clientele, with customers who fashioned themselves as culinary-informed as the folks working behind the pass. As Frank Bruni wrote, Chang’s restaurants each functioned as a “go-to, drop-in mess hall for enlightened food lovers on all budgets at all hours,” intentionally eschewing the formality of fine dining “in tune with [the] unbound times” of the recession. (The naming nod to Momofuku Ando, the inventor of instant noodles, was as much an acknowledgment of high-low culinary innovation as a shift in the spending priorities of the restaurant-going public in 2008.)

As someone who honed her cookbook editing chops in New York City in the late 2000s, I came of culinary age with figures like Chang as fixtures in my consciousness. Even on my book publishing salary, I did my best to sample every restaurant touched by the Chang high-status low-fuss effect. I had to be familiar with the guys who ran these restaurants (and they were predominately guys) because they were the ones who defined what “cool cooking” looked like, ushering out the era of crisp chef’s whites and in the era of sleeve tattoos. But I think Chang’s greatest legacy was not as a style icon, or even as a chef, but as a culinary figure who claimed that he cooked “what cooks really want to eat”. In doing so, he made his customers feel like they mattered as much as restaurant cooks… and made them aspire to similar levels of gastronomic excellence.

But when the Momofuku cookbook came out, I was left surprisingly cold. How exactly was this text, in which a 13-hour recipe for bo ssam was meant to be the “project cooking” standard-bearer, going to translate to my home cooking experience, where most of my tastes were formed? How exactly could restaurants change what people wanted to cook at home? Almost every day as an editor, I’d hear pitches for the next great restauranteur’s cookbook opus—a chance to translate their genius into everyday language, to unlock the secrets of fine dining for the home kitchen. Yet even when I saw these pitches materialized in book form, I left them almost entirely untouched. (To this day, the Eleven Madison Cookbook lays dust-covered on my bottom bookshelf—one recipe, its version of its famed honey lavender duck, briefly referenced and never summoned into reality.)

On a scholarly level, my dissertation is about the intersection of formalized pedagogy and popular culture as it applies to the advancement of home cooking. By studying a wide range of media spaces and culinary authorities across the twentieth century, I attempt to answer the question, “When and how did the knowledge of home cooking come to be treated as knowledge, and by extension, a widely appreciated form of culture?” Promoting cooking as a skilled process has never been a hard sell within the restaurant world—partly because restaurants have been spaces historically (and visibly) run by men, and, when done correctly, hugely powerful engines of economic and cultural change. But when you try to make a pedagogical link between the cookbooks generated from the finest of American restaurants, and the general tendencies of home cooks, you encounter a gap about as big as the missing freeway from Speed. All of which leads me to ask: do restaurants—the best and the worst of them—matter to American home cooks, and more broadly, to American tastes?

If you want to believe that American restaurants feed American tastes, there are plenty of historical and sociological texts to make that connection for you. The historian Paul Freeman chronicles the evolution of American dining habits over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in his book Ten Restaurants that Changed America, and he’s right to cite Mamma Leone’s as spreading enthusiasm for Italian cooking, or Chez Panisse as feeding the farm-to-table movement. Similarly, David S. Shields wrote about this phenomenon as a longer story of the influential tastemakers of the nineteenth century, the first age of American fine dining, in his book The Culinarians. You might even pick up Andrew P. Haley’s Turning the Tables, a magnificent look at how restaurants that once belonged to the superrich lost territory to those that more explicitly catered to middle-class tastes. Yet none of these books make a causal connection between what restaurants do for our tastes and what home cooking does for our habits. If restaurants show us what is possible, and make arguments about what is delicious, how does the experience of restaurant-going change what we cook at home?

Perhaps the way to answer this question isn’t through tracing recipe replication—ramen from scratch is still a niche experience for home cooks—but by tracing the rhetoric of excellence from one sphere to another. The anthropologist Isabelle de Solier frames what we do in restaurants as “serious consumption,” critically and sensorially engaged in the work of dining out. Yes, eating at a restaurant is, as the food writer Reem Kassis points out, a foundationally transactional experience, but it’s also one that allows us to focus more intentionally on the journey our food has taken—and the journey we go on as a result. When we think about how eating food turns into talking about food, the pivot depends on framing food as an aesthetically complex experience, one that requires we bring our whole sensorial selves to the table. Cooking in the era of restaurant-going, however, does something different—it flips the script to orient us towards production, but frames the work we are doing as pleasure-oriented. This kind of “productive leisure” converts the grueling task of meal preparation into something informed by recreational cultural pursuits—we no longer cook because we have to, but because it gives us creative and intellectual fulfillment to bring food into being. When we eat at restaurants, it’s our discernment that becomes refined; when we cook, it’s our capacity for creation that is challenged.

So how are these contradictions collapsed in the Momofuku space? Chang’s emphasis on preparing what “cooks want to eat” suggests that very few restaurants give chefs the chance to make fulfilling, pleasure-forward food. So when you’re sitting down to eat at a Momofuku joint, in theory, you’re eating something that the chefs know intimately, and are supposedly infusing with enthusiasm and love. (This runs at total odds with the many credible accounts of the abusive workplace environment Chang fostered, so perhaps culinary rhetoric doesn’t translate so well to professional leadership.) Restaurants like Momofuku suggest that how we eat reflects both our aesthetics and our creative competency—even if we couldn’t handle being called into action in the kitchen, we’d like to believe that knowing what tastes good is half the battle.

There is certainly a link to make between what fine dining can inspire in us and what we can execute in our home kitchens—but the actual work to build that link rarely happens at the hands of restaurant chefs, even when they commit themselves to a cookbook contract. There’s a reason that the person who bridged the gap between home cooks and French cuisine did so via the airwaves of an educational television station, dressed in pearls rather than chef’s whites. The conversation of taste into talent requires the slow, deliberate accrual of skill, of converting formalized knowledge into embodied knowledge, of turning the kitchen table into a site of pleasure and creativity. Perhaps Momofuku seeded a revolution in food by reminding fine diners that ramen had creative culinary value, that their kitchens didn’t have to look like restaurants to churn out great results. Restaurants may function as beacons of taste, adding to what the sociologists Josée Johnston and Shyon Baumann call “culinary sacralization.” But they can also, on occasion, challenge the notion that chefs are fundamentally different from cooks, especially when what’s on the menu foregrounds pleasure and familiarity as key ingredients in the creation of art. If Julia Child turned boeuf bourguignon into beef stew for millions of viewers, I’m happy to imagine that the inverse might one day be possible, for home cooks to convert barbecue pork into bo ssam.

Recommendation: I’ve been working hard at getting the SAVEUR holiday book guide ready to go, which means making some tough choices about what will and won’t be in the final roundup. (I’ll post it when I’m done—they are truly all marvelous titles!) One that sadly I can’t feature, but absolutely devoured reading, is the cookbook Maman & Me, co-written by the mother and daughter team Gita Sadeh and Roya Shariat. This book radiates warmth, not only in the stories and recipes featured—can’t wait to try their version of adas polo, rice and lentils tossed with spices, raisins, dates, and chopped walnuts—but its the visual aesthetics. There’s something so comforting and recognizable about seeing a giant plastic jug of vinegar being poured over a container of crushed vegetables for pickling, or a roasted salmon recipe that uses ranch dressing as part of its particular culinary alchemy. With Sadeh and Shariat as such lovely and welcoming shepherds, I’m excited to explore more of their take on Iranian home cooking; give this one a read.

The Perfect Bite: This is more of a reading rec than a dining rec, but since reading Helen Rosner’s ode to chicken fingers in Guernica several years ago, I’ve had an entirely new appreciation for their perfection—proof that, as I demonstrate in this newsletter’s title, there is no single entry point for culinary discernment, whether you learn from the martini down or the French fry (or chicken finger up). And particularly when enjoyed on a disconcertingly warm October Saturday in Boston, my paper basket of chicken fingers, dipped in honey mustard dressing, perfectly hit the spot.

Cooked & Consumed: I’m currently in between batches of stock in my freezer (hence why I’m hoarding chicken bones and vegetable scraps), and so I’ve been defaulting to canned beans as the ultimate stretcher of our weeknight dinners. Cannellini beans took two turns in my kitchen this week, once as a side (pan-seared with rosemary and garlic) to a plate of grilled halloumi, kale stalks, and root vegetables, and once as a fold-in for pasta with roasted broccoli and fennel pesto. Especially after an unusually meat-heavy month, and in anticipation of the bellyache to come with Thanksgiving, I don’t mind ceding some spaces during the week to non-animal proteins, especially when they’re this versatile and delicious.