Gabriele Stabile
Restaurants: Nishi in New York City
David Chang’s New Push on Eighth Avenue
Nishi
232 Eighth Avenue, between 21st and 22nd Streets
New York City
tel 646.518.1919, nishi.momofuku.com
open for dinner Tuesday through Sunday, 5:30 p.m. to 11 p.m.
a meal for two is about $110 per person, before drinks
The exhaustion today comes from keeping on top of the global success Chang has experienced since those early Momofuku Noodle Bar days: multiple James Beard Awards; an occasional spot on the World’s 50 Best list; stunning, acclaimed restaurants in Toronto and Sydney, in addition to those in New York; multiple Milk Bar bakeries and allied mail-order business; the ground-breaking Lucky Peach magazine; a tech-centric food-delivery startup called Maple that’s hoping to create a new model by doing all the cooking in a commissary kitchen; a chain of fried-chicken sandwich shops. There’s more in the works.
The source of much of Chang’s stress is no doubt the same as it was at the beginning — unrelenting self-criticism. That’s what helped Noodle Bar evolve from a mediocre ramen-ya into one of the best noodle shops in the world. It’s how the original ssäms at Momofuku Ssäm Bar, which Chang called “Asian burritos” and the critics called ho-hum, gave way to the exciting late-night menu that stole all the attention. A similarly stressful continuous re-evaluation has helped all his enterprises succeed, even when they started out on rocky ground. Chang is always trying to improve everything — the flavor of the food at his restaurants, the quality of the journalism in his magazine, the level of his stress and exhaustion. Self-deprecation is his modus operandi. He has never made things easy for himself. In fact, ratcheting up the difficulty of even the simplest tasks is one of his hallmarks.
Nishi is a restaurant that seems Italian but actually serves Korean food in a space that was designed for another restaurant entirely. Nishi fits nicely into Chang’s what-the fuck-was-I-thinking approach. The name means “west,” which refers to the location in Chelsea, west of the East Village where Chang’s ascent began, and is no doubt also intended to resonate with the playful juxtaposition of Asian and European food. Like many of his other projects, it is genre-bending and very good. I have no doubt it too will continue to improve.
Only two months in, a signature dish had already emerged. And with good reason: it’s a pasta dish that exemplifies Chang’s approach, providing both an optical and a gustatory illusion. On the menu when you see the name, Ceci e Pepe, your eyes read Cacio e Pepe, “cheese and pepper,” the classic Roman noodle dish. Only if you look closely do you realize it actually says Ceci e Pepe. The bowl arrives holding what looks like ordinary Italian pasta with a pronounced aroma of cheese and just-ground black pepper. But that cheesy sauce contains no cheese. Instead, Chang ferments chickpeas with a koji culture, similar to how the Japanese turn soybeans and other grains into miso. The microbial process produces cheeselike flavors and umami compounds in abbondanza. This fermented chickpea paste, which Chang calls hozon (from the Japanese for “preserve,” now trademarked by Chang), forms the backbone of his nuanced sauce.
“Italian is the Trojan horse,” Chang tried to explain, as I tried to twirl the recalcitrant bucatini around my fork. I lost Chang’s point for a moment because I took a bite of my pasta and it was hard to pay attention to anything else. The noodles were cooked perfectly al dente; the sauce, earthy and sweet. The dish evoked cacio e pepe, but the flavor profile was different — cleaner, sweeter, beguiling.
What Chang was saying, no surprise, is that in order to make Nishi easier for diners to swallow, he has made his own task more difficult. He is putting his creative Korean cooking — the Korean-ness of which can psychologically turn some people off — inside the Trojan horse of Italian food — which everyone loves. “There is nothing Italian or Italo-Korean fusion about any of this,” he proclaims proudly. And as the wait for a table at Nishi suggests, people welcome this Trojan horse. Except, it should be noted, for Italians themselves. “It makes their fucking heads explode,” Chang said with a mischievous grin. “They get really angry here.”
You can’t help but think of Chang’s approach at Nishi as a form of gastronomic Postmodernism in the original literary-criticism sense of the word, a notion reinforced by the indecipherable footnotes on the menu. Footnotes! Most asterisks on menus lead you to notifications of the use of frozen ingredients, warnings about the consumption of raw eggs, and indications of spiciness or appropriateness for particular diets. But Chang’s messages are more David Foster Wallace than litigation-avoidance. (Chang confirmed that the allusion to the late author’s work is a quiet homage to the 20th anniversary of Foster Wallace’s breakthrough novel Infinite Jest.) To the Romaine and Walnut Bagna Cauda appetizer a footnote adds, “Bagna Cauda x Caesar x Ho Chi Minh.” When the dish arrives, that footnote makes some sense. Leaves of crisp romaine lettuce are smeared with a sort of garlic confit made with fermented Asian fish sauce and dusted with ground toasted walnuts. The effect is part Caesar salad, part XO sauce, and all delicious. I can see why someone from bagna cauda’s Piedmontese birthplace might get mad. But like just about everything on the menu, to those of us without a maternal attachment to Italian culinary traditions, however much such traditions are ironically employed, the salad tastes both familiar and delicious.
Other, less familiar-sounding appetizers also intrigue. Shaved Winter Vegetable — the footnote adds “Mul Neng Nyun (-) Noodle and Beef (+) Momofuku Pickles” — arrives as a pile of ribbons of preserved radish in a refreshing white broth that tastes of umami, beef, kimchi, horseradish, and other flavorful things I couldn’t identify. Somewhat embarrassingly, my dining companion and I both pick up our bowls to drink the broth, lick our lips, and say in unison, “Aaah.” Here again you sort of understand the footnote after you’ve had the dish. Mul neng nyun is the delicious, milky-white beef bone broth that’s the Korean panacea equivalent of chicken soup for Jews. Chang leaves out the traditional noodles and the beef, as the minus sign in the footnote suggests. In their place he adds the preserved radish, an allusion to pickle plates that are famous at other Momofuku restaurants. We’re playing the self-reference game again. And it’s fun. Later Nishi’s executive chef, Josh Pinsky, tells me no one likes this dish but Chang has told him he is never going to take it off the menu. We love it. Perhaps the equation in the footnote should be amended to say “(=) critic bait.”
The menu’s pasta section is titled “Myun,” Korean for “noodles.” They are all quite different from each other and definitely all worth trying. Spicy Beef Sichuan arrives looking remarkably like pappardelle al ragù, save for the crisp fried shallots sprinkled on top. “That’s not Italian, either,” Chang said, pointing to the bowl of red-sauced noodles before us. “There’s no tomato.” I picked up my menu to read the footnote: “Ma Po Tofu x Ssäm’s Spicy Rice Cakes x Chili Fan Mee x Bolognese.” Hmm. The redness of the sauce derives from the same things that color the Sichuan specialty Ma Po Tofu, which is rich with red chiles and numbing Sichuan peppercorns, flavors that Chang also employs in his signature spicy ddeok (Korean rice cake and pork dish) at Momofuku Ssäm Bar. The wide pappardelle recall chewy hand-pulled Asian noodles, while the long braise of meat and aromatics suggest a traditional Bolognese sauce. As in a good postmodern novel, the footnotes help if you know the references, but you can enjoy the story even if you don’t.
Chicken & Dumplings arrives in a casserole with a ladle. Its gravylike consistency lies between a soup and a stew. The “dumplings” are made from hand-pulled noodles torn into bite-size pieces. Smoked shiitake add layers of flavor. The overall effect is of a Chinese-flavored chicken potpie; the starchy dumplings are like pieces of crust that have fallen into the filling. We try not to finish it all, knowing how much more food we have to come, but we cannot resist.
Each time I have eaten at Nishi I’ve felt the sense of exhilaration and satisfaction that remind me of my first meals at Ssäm Bar. Unless you ask, you have little to no idea what you are eating or how it is made, although thanks to Chang’s phenomenal success serious foodies throw words like koji and hozon around like salt and pepper — but you know something exciting and important is happening.
Chang knows it too.
The food at Nishi wasn’t supposed to be like this. Just a couple of months before opening, this Chelsea location was going to be another outpost of his Fuku fried-chicken sandwich shop. As the Chelsea opening approached, Chang got an itch to do something else. “I haven’t really cooked in five years,” he confessed. He wanted to get back in the kitchen.
The build-out for the original fried chicken concept in the space has resulted in physical limits to what and how much the kitchen can produce and to the amount of comfort the dining room affords. One of only two main courses on the menu, a superb leg of lamb (broken down from the whole animal, cured, rubbed, tied, and marinated for a total of ten days, before being roasted and thinly sliced) has been removed because it is too taxing on the space and the staff. I loved the rich, tender, flavorful meat—it tasted like an Asian pastrami—served on a bed of chile-flavored white beans.
I hope while the weather is still cool the lamb will be replaced by a new experiment the kitchen sent out one night, a casserole of Korean braised beef short ribs that reminded me of potted flanken, a Jewish dish my mother used to make. As we dove into the succulent, soy-sauce-flavored beef — my mother would have simply used salt — Chang noted that the young cooks in his kitchen, even those who have worked in some very highly regarded restaurants, had never seen a dish cooked in this way. “In what way?” I asked. It seemed so homey and familiar. “Braised, cooked all together in a pot, for a long time,” he said incredulously.
Chang went on to explain how in his other restaurants, too, he has seen that young cooks, even those with fine résumés and passion for food, have never really seen home-style or old-fashioned cooking. Elsewhere they have compiled parts of dishes, prepared elements to be heated sous vide, or assembled components on a plate. The notion of combining ingredients and slow-cooking them for several hours is foreign to millennial line cooks, whose parents certainly didn’t do it either. This only adds to Chang’s anxiety, in this case about the future of food.
Nishi’s dining room, like the kitchen, is more casual than Chang would like: the signature straight lines, the shared tables, the uncomfortable square stools, and the white oak veneer would better suit a fast-food restaurant than a ristorante. Early reviews have been negative largely because of the uncomfortable environment and the challenges the fast-food setup has created for providing service in line with the sophisticated food. But the total effect is pure Chang. And the fact that you can’t place the décor — it’s not Italian, French, or even Korean — makes it a neutral canvas for the unexpected food.
A short beverage list has a few excellent cocktails and a small selection of ciders, beers, and wines. The half-liter carafe of house red or white seems a throwback to a time when cooks knew how to braise beef.
The two desserts are a pistachio Bundt cake and a panna cotta with plum vinegar. The former is, surprisingly, a classic American Bundt cake, and the latter is reminiscent of an Asian almond pudding, with a drizzle of tart vinegar. Neither seems particularly suited to the meal that comes before, though it’s hard to imagine what would. Neither Italians nor Koreans usually eat a rich, sweet dessert. A piece of fruit perhaps?
At Nishi, Chang has opted to go the no-tipping route; service is included in the menu prices, which range from $10 to $38 per item. He doesn’t know whether that will work. “It’s really hard at this price point to bring in enough money to pay everyone,” he told me, suggesting that higher-priced restaurants could charge enough to cover a fair wage. Coupled with the 8th Avenue rent, Chang confides, “I don’t know if we will ever make money here. Certainly not before we open for lunch.”
If one of the most famous chefs in the world, serving such complex and satisfying food in a hot, mid-priced restaurant, has serious doubts about the financial viability of his enterprise, what does our dining future hold? This uncertainty, coupled with Chang’s anxiety that his young cooks have never braised a piece of meat, leaves me feeling unsettled. I am generally optimistic about food, especially in America, where I see so much young talent in kitchens, on farms, in butcher shops, and elsewhere. But in our current political and economic climate, will their enthusiasm and studiousness be enough to overcome the business realities of running a restaurant that can nourish a delicious future for everyone? At least under Chang’s watch, we know that things will evolve and get better. ●
