The best bread & butter I ate was the first thing I ate at the best (or at least most culturally relevant) meal I ever ate, at Momofuku Ko.  The dish was the first amuse and consisted of a biscuit with black pepper butter and mirin.  It was a truly remarkable bite and the best of the night.   Best?!?!? Bread?!?!?!? BUTTER!?!?!?! ‘Tis true. ‘Tis because I did not know I was going to be served it.

Let me clarify.

Momofuku Ko doesn’t have a menu.  One is supposed to learn what he is eating when the Chef places it in front of you (Momofuku Ko also doesn’t have waiters).  However, I, like many who had eaten there before me, knew every detail of the meal well before I ate it.  This is the majesty or possible the downfall of the Internet informed gastronomical universe.  I spent the months it took to finally secure a reservation reading descriptions of the typical, atypical Ko meal.  The result was I was ready for the extraordinary smoked hen egg with caviar – I predicted the dropping of the incredible fluke with buttermilk and poppy seeds – I was not shocked by the rightfully shocking shaved foie gras with lychee and pine nut brittle. I know this is a shame however it seems to make sense considering the chef behind Ko (and all its Momofuku sisters), David Chang.

David Chang is a chef created by/for/on the Internet

The blog Hipster Runoff posted a piece in January called “Animal Collective is a band created by/for/on the internet,” which was based firstly on how instead of anticipating the release of their new album Merriweather Post Pavilion, the “world”* was anticipating the leak of the new album. The piece concludes by saying, “Hope yall take some time to think about the internet-world that u exist in, and how Animal Collective is a band that has grown to be relevant alongside web-publishers rise to relevancy. It is a symbiotic relationship.”

David Chang is the Animal Collective of food.  Mainstream critical praise and some TV appearances might come up here and/or there but fundamentally Chang is a star on the Internet.  Early in the recently released Momofuku cookbook, Chang mentions Momofuku bar started to take off when two things happened:

1)    “Robin Raisfeld and Rob Patronite wrote some nice things about us”

2)    They “decided to start cooking whatever we wanted”

These two facts reveal the basis of Chang’s eventual Internet superstardom.  Robin Raisfeld and Rob Patronite are the editors of arguably New York’s** most important food blog, Grubstreet.  Like the food world’s Stereogum, what Grubstreet says influences people and more than anything it influences other bloggers.  A mention by them can create an avalanche of Internet buzz.  As was and still is the case with Chang, the Internet buzz begat more Internet buzz that begat more Internet buzz and so on.

This constant stream of buzz was heartened by the Chang’s second point.  Whatever Chang wanted to cook was what the “world” wanted to eat and to, a greater degree, talk about.  Just like the Internet lends itself to certain types of music, it lends itself to certain types of cookary.  In both cases these types can be described as “ballsier.”

People don’t clamor about a really solid roast chicken breast  – they clamor about being served an entire pork butt***.  Moreover, since Chang opened his first Momofuku (Noodle Bar) in 2003, he has been a forerunner of countless food trends, from pork belly to banh mi to fried chicken.

To that end, Ko became the perfect Momofuku (and in turn Internet) restaurant.  Other than the food, which as I mentioned previously, there was the mystique it cultivated.  You cannot call and make a reservation at Momofuku Ko.  Instead, a week before you and the entire “world” has to go online and hope the Internet God’s show one of the 12 seats open for you.  This completely subverts the idea of the traditional high-end restaurant as being a destination.  You cannot plan a vacation around Ko or really even a weekend. So instead, Ko has become the premier online destination restaurant.  Reading the menu has become almost the equivalent of eating there.  Just like listening to the leak of Merriweather Post Pavilion became the Internet equivalent of going to the store and buying it.  The fact is more than even eating it; Chang’s food exists to be talked/buzzed about.

This is where the previously mentioned Momofuku cookbook comes in.  The “world” was all a twitter**** about it release. Finally, insight into how to cook the much-talked about dishes.  I have had the book for about 3 weeks and one fact is blatantly obvious, most of the dishes are really simple yet completely impossible for a home cook.  The short rib dish consists of mostly just a beef short rib and a pretty simple marinade, however to make the dish involves vacuum sealing the marinade and short rib in a plastic bag and cooking it at exactly 140.2 degrees for exactly 48 hours.

As a stood over a pot of water trying to keep it between 140 and 145 degrees in order to effectively cook a single egg for 45 minutes, it dawned on me this book was not for cooking from.  This book was made to contribute to the conversation about the food.  The “world” loves access to its artist and this book is about access.  There is no recipe I can really take away from it, however I do know Chang went to a strip club the night before Noodle Bar’s opening and how he first learned to use meat-glue and how he decided to use pig jowl bacon.

The uncookability of the book and the general Internet dependence were reflected in the book’s sales.  In its first week the Momofuku cookbook sold 7,759 copies, while Chef Thomas Keller’s Ad Hoc at Home cookbook sold 11,105 copies.  If David Chang is the Animal Collective of American food, then Thomas Keller is the Radiohead*****.  In the aforementioned Hipster Runoff blog post the author asks, “Is [Animal Collective] as approachable as Radiohead?”  He is suggesting that as inescapable as Animal Collective praise seems to be to the “world,” the fact is there is still a world at large who might be completely oblivious to their existence.

So as much as David Chang seems like the one/only of the culinary universe, still more people know who Chef Thomas Keller is and a fuck-ton of a lot more know “cook” Rachel Ray.  Similarly, comparable examples can be used for basically any art form and the Internet.  Like forgetting the forest for the trees, it is becoming exceedingly easy to overlook the fact that there is even a mainstream portion of popular culture anymore. Hell this is an essay created by/for/on the Internet so I am not free to cast the first stone.

• “world” = internet world
• **Grubstreet has recently gone national.  Allowing them to cover Chang nationally daily.
• ***BUTT!!!! GROSS!!!!!?! Pork butt actually means the shoulder (apparently pigs have shoulders).  However, I assume Chang is working on how to cook an actual butt.  And when he does so, the “world” and I will clamor uproariously about it.
• ****PUN SO INTENDED
• *****Though prominently featured on the Internet, both their respective reaches extend well beyond the confines of the blog worlds to a point of a basic universal acceptance as the best their contemporary art has to offer.