Oh I understand the impulse

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I'm not a great lover of pork, but I certainly understand the impulse to respond to complainers with the flip off.

Radical Chef David Chang and the Plight of the Asian Burrito -- New York Magazine David Chang has nothing against vegetarians. He just doesn’t like to cook for them.

That much is made clear on the menu of his East Village restaurant Momofuku Noodle Bar, which offers exactly one vegetarian dish—ginger-scallion noodles. OUR ONLY VEGETARIAN OPTION, it reads in boldface type, as if to say, “Hey, you can take it or leave it.” A further examination of the menu, with its exuberance of pig tails, pork necks, Berkshire bellies, and boutique bacon, might lead you to speculate as to whether Chang was kidnapped by a gang of vegan hippies at a young age and then force-fed wheatgrass and raw parsnips and this is his revenge.
...
“It was a lady who said she was a vegetarian,” he says, “and that she got something to go, and there was broth on the side, and she drank it.”

“I said, ‘We don’t have any vegetarian broths,’ and she said, ‘Well, you should, and anyway, somebody said it was,’ and I said, ‘Well, that must have been a miscommunication.’”

“You can’t do this to the vegetarians!” the lady bellowed, before threatening to sue Chang and put Momofuku Noodle Bar out of business.

“I got so pissed off,” says Chang.

So pissed off, in fact, that the very next day, in a public-relations gambit that would give Danny Meyer night sweats, Chang and his co-chef, Joaquin Baca, removed every vegetarian dish from the menu (back then there were still a few) except the ginger-scallion noodles.

“We added pork to just about everything else,” says Chang, giggling like a schoolgirl.

“We said, ‘Fuck it, let’s just cook what we want.’”

I'm going there next time I'm in NYC.

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2 Comments

I fully agree with him. When you are a regular you may ask for this or that. Otherwise, shove it, as my dear Tereza Heinz Kerry said.

My co-worker and I both had a good laugh at this story.
Thanks for the early morning laugh!

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This page contains a single entry by Seth A. published on January 24, 2007 3:09 AM.

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