Street Food, Asian American StyleOppositional Taste in Post-Millennial U.S. Food Culture

Martin RobertsUniversity of Derby, U.K.mroberts1@gmail.com@mroberts711

Inter-Asia Cultural Studies ConferenceAirlangga University, Surabaya, Indonesia8 August 2015

I knew Id call it Momofuku, which translates from Japanese as lucky peach. Thats where the logo came from. Its also an indirect nod to Mr. [Momofuku] Ando: I owed him for a thousand meals-in-minutes and besides, its a fucking killer name. Maybe the best first name ever. The restaurant was, for me, a fuck-you to so many things. Mea Korean Americanmaking Japanese ramen was ridiculous on its face. Mea passable but not much better cookopening up a restaurant while my peers, guys I worked with who were so much more talented than me, were still toiling under other regimes, paying their dues, learning. It is no accident that Momofuku sounds like motherfucker.

David Chang, Momofuku (2009): 28, my emphasis.

[T]he word chef can in fact be a derogatory term. What a joke, what a meaningless term it is these days: a fool in a black chefs jacket who has no fucking clue about anything. But when you work in a kitchen, your boss is your chef, and you call him or her that. When they deserve it, its an honor to call them that. When I meet with or talk about my mentors, Im likely to call them chef: like me and Uncle Choi, I recognize theres a si-fu and a kung-fu, and I dont want anybody to think that I dont know the difference (Momofuku, 217-218).

David Chang, Momofuku (2009): 217-218.

dont be a fucking hooliganthank you grasshopper