Why David Chang Is ‘Steve Jobs with a Knife’

0:00Food at its very best is like nothing else. It's something you can express. It's a story. It can be delicious. And the absurd part of it is it's going to be in the toilet eight to ten hours later. No. Listen, for those that don't know anything about a Tibetan sand mandala, nobody would build a business where everything would disintegrate if it wasn't refrigerated. It's a terrible business idea, yet we do it all the time.

0:30hey there it's guy kawasaki this is the remarkable people podcast we have a special edition today in october 2025 i interviewed this guest at the masters of scale conference in san francisco California and the folks at Wait What who put on the conference paired me up with David Chang of all people to interview. Now if you're a foodie you already know who David Chang is but just in case you might not David Chang is the creator of the Momofuku restaurant. He's this great great character on this video that's not a character it's just being him called Ugly Delicious. He has written a really fun book called eat a peach which is his memoir and at the end of that memoir there's 33 tips for chefs that i recommend you read because it's really 33 tips for life so anyway this is david chang and i oh my god we let it all hang out on stage and i came up with a new name for David Chang.

1:41He is Steve Jobs with a knife because he has that kind of fanatical perfectionist attitude that none other than Steve Jobs had. So now before the interview with David Chang, I made a tribute to Jane Goodall. Jane Goodall was a friend of mine and she had just passed away and I just wanted to recognize her contribution. She is the most remarkable person that I have ever met. So that's what this is. This is a recording of an episode of a conference with me and David Chang, aka Steve Jobs with a knife. I'm so pleased to bring out onto the stage my friend and the host of Markable People, Guy Kawasaki.

2:38Hello.

2:42Hello, everybody. Thank you for staying to the last few sessions of the conference. I didn't know they put me in the second to the last slot. So about eight days ago, the world lost one of its most remarkable people. And I want to put a picture up there.

3:09So the last time I saw Jane, it was a couple miles from here at the Salesforce building. And it was her 90th birthday tour. and just so you know Jane Goodall she was 90 at that time at that birthday and she looked a little peaked or tired so I went up to her at the birthday party I said Jane you should chillax a little bit take it easy come to our house we have a extra guest house you can stay in our guest house we We won't ask you for autographs. We won't ask you for pictures. Just relax, Jane. You travel 300 days a year. She traveled 300 days a year. Now, when speakers travel, we get off the airplane.

4:00The limo picks you up. You go to the hotel. You relax. You wake up. You give a one-hour speech. You get back in the limo. You get back to the hotel. You go home. But when Jane Goodall travels from morning to midnight, She's meeting with schools and kids and not profits and all these things. Her travel is a hundred times more difficult than most speakers. And so I went up to her and I told her this. And this is what she told me. She said, Guy, I cannot rest because there is too much to do. And that was Jane Goodall. So listen, the day after she died, I was on my property and I have this UTV on this property and I'm driving around in our yard.

4:50And I look down and there's a frog on my leg. And my interpretation was that was Jane saying hello to me. So listen, you know, I know when someone passes like that, it's customary to give them a moment of silence. but I don't think that's appropriate for Jane. I think we should give her a moment of applause for all she did. Yeah. Yes. Standing ovation applause.

5:23Yeah.

5:31All right. All right. I think I'm going to begin every speech like a standing ovation at the start. So now I want to bring out another truly remarkable person, and his name is David Chang. So please join me. David Chang.

6:02Hi, guys.

6:07All right, we're doing this. Yeah, finally. So David, first question for you is, have you been able to get some good figs while you're in San Francisco? I'm not sure if everyone knows. It's been some years, but I haven't had any figs in San Francisco. And guys alluding to about 15 or years ago, I got in a lot of trouble. I didn't blame the late, great Tony Bourdain because he got me drunk out of talking much like this. And he said the topic was I call bullshit. And I called bullshit about, at the time, the Bay Area only cooking things like figs on a plate. He got pull quoted as first of my life, right?

6:51But I was basically saying that San Francisco, the Bay Area, has been at the forefront of sexuality, politics, technology, art, music. And I love Alice Waters. I love Chez Panisse, but it can't be the only thing that the Bay Area celebrates at the time. I could have used better words at the time, but I was trying to express that. But to this day, sometimes I might just get a fig on the plate at a restaurant here. David, I read your memoir, and I have come to the conclusion, and I say this with the highest degree of respect, because I believe you are in the sort of tradition of Steve Jobs. you are a mission-driven asshole.

7:35You truly are a mission-driven asshole. And I was reading your memoir. I said, man, that sounds like Steve Jobs with a knife. And I think one of the things that separated Steve from everybody is a term that I learned from Brene Brown yesterday, which is Steve was a plumber and a poet. And not many people can be a plumber and a poet. And I would say you are a plumber and a poet. Well, most people would say I'm a poor plumber at best, but I've never heard that comparison. I don't want to put myself in anything like that, but an asshole for sure, I believe. I think you should go to your LinkedIn profile and say, Steve Jobs with a knife.

8:21So, you know, I'm alluding to when I read your book, Well, for one thing, I will never own a restaurant after reading your book. So talk about the plumbing of a restaurant and then the poetry of what you're trying to do. Literally owning a restaurant, you better know the plumbing because more often than not, you are going to be cleaning up shit. That is not a joke. That happens quite often. And it sort of punctures any sort of beautiful idea, this romantic idea of opening a restaurant that might be romanticized on TV or the movies. And yes, the bear is very accurate, but not exactly perfect. But it's great.

8:55It's a great show. But when you're running a restaurant as a chef, sometimes you forget that you have to be a chef as well because you have the bureaucracy, the politics, and Lord knows managing people. That is not the easiest thing for anybody, let alone someone that started to cook so they didn't have to talk to people. And what is the hardest part there? Or everything's hard. Everything's hard. So everything that will go wrong can go wrong. It's just every day is like the worst day possible. And I joke, opening a restaurant and running a restaurant is like the great Catherine Bigelow movie, The Hurt Locker, except that you are not only diffusing the bomb, you are also creating the bombs as well.

9:35And that's sort of what it's like. Every day you're diffusing problem after problem after problem. And, you know, at the end of the day, when you look at the business, it's such an absurd thing that it truly is a passion project for most people. Okay, that's the plumbing part. What about the poetry? At the very best, cooking is not like any other discipline. It has to integrate food science. So you need to know microbiology, biochemistry. You need to understand proportions. You need to know history. You need to have a way to express yourself. And if you asked me when I was 22 cooking, I would have said, no, this is a craft.

10:12We're just plumbers. but more and more and actually talking about che panisse and figs on a plate like i've learned that actually was like so punk rock that was an ultimate form of expression and food at its very best is like nothing else it's something you can express it's a story it can be delicious and the absurd part of it is it's going to be in the toilet eight to ten hours later nope listen for those that don't know anything about a tibetan sand mandala nobody would build a business where like everything would disintegrate if it wasn't refrigerated it's a terrible business idea yet we do it all the time this is the masters of scale summit so i feel a moral obligation to ask one question about scaling so that they invite me back next year so as i'm reading your memoir I'm looking at all the whales you try to scale.

11:11So you try to scale by getting more butts in seats. Then you want to get butts in different cities in seats. Then you want to get butts eating different kinds of foods in seats. And then you want to get butts watching your TV shows. And then you want to start delivering food to butts. And then you want to sell butts consumer packaged goods. So let's talk about what you learned about scaling, trying all those things. Well, this is an interesting topic because I think it is the hot button subject in food, at least, is the idea of scalability. And food, unlike any other form of culture that you consume, it is not scalable.

11:57It really is not scalable. And I was just thinking about in 2013, 2014, I was friends with the former manager of U2, Paul McGinnis and he was having a conversation about this and he was like your business is dumb David and I was like no question about that that is a dumb business but one reason is you can't scale it you can't scale it like like music or downloads or what is now like streaming in general and I didn't know it at the time but he was showing me what later was that you two download that every iPhone got I think it was like iPhone 6 or something like that and I was like yeah that's definitely scaling.

12:33We can never do anything like that. And that is the bottleneck with people that are looking to invest because you take this great idea and there's terroir, there's story, there's purpose in a specific restaurant at a specific city. And there are cultural banks, like a great restaurant has a cultural bank to its neighborhood. Yes, you can scale that. Yes, you have fast food. I have tried to do that. After that conversation, I tried to do our first, what is now like the first ghost kitchen. We did it with Thrive and we did another one called Ando. So Maple and Ando. And I knew that we had to scale.

13:03Like we had to integrate technology at some point, but you know, like food and tech just don't go hand in hand. It doesn't because at the end of the day, everybody wants to eat at seven o 'clock, right? You cannot manufacture food fast enough. And it's still, no matter what you say, you need people cooking. It is a workman's like job and it's slow and it's plotting. And until somebody creates ways to make the throughput of food faster, but I don't know if that's going to be delicious. It's not going to ever really scale. So knowing that and knowing that food is not scalable, the irony here is the fact that food is not scalable is why it is becoming infinitely scalable.

13:44Because what is being broadcast on social media now are really high-end restaurants or experiential dining that you cannot consume, but you can now broadcast. And that becomes cultural currency. So high-end dining restaurants, Let's just say the French Laundry here. It's harder to get in than ever before because there's a limited amount of these reservations and the demand is growing and growing and growing. So you have this barbell thing. You have super high-end and experiential dining. And weirdly, that's becoming scalable. And I don't know how to explain that, but they're able to expand, but they're also more importantly being able to charge higher prices, which they should be doing.

14:24And then you have things that are going to be cheaper and faster, not necessarily cheaper these days, but faster. because we're going to have food that you're going to be able to order on your app, and it'll be at your door pretty instantly. I do believe that. My concern is everything in between. But that is not scalable. And I'm mostly concerned about the things that are not scalable. But Dave, I want to point out to you that these people are all churning how to scale, not that something cannot scale. Listen, I've talked to so many people that are advanced in technology, and they all say, hey, you can do this, you can do that.

14:54But, well, you have to design an oven that's faster and all of these things. it will take time. It will happen. All of this is going to happen. It just can't happen at once. So I think this idea of broadcasting this fear of missing out on food is good and bad. But I think what we need to figure out, honestly, everyone in this room is like the restaurants that can't scale. My focus is like, how do you save those restaurants that are your neighborhood mom and pop, the diners? And I feel like we're losing the ability to actually judge the quality of what's good now, because everything's going to what is the best, this hyperbole in the media.

15:32This is the best 38 restaurants. This is the steakhouse you have to eat at. And I'm just telling you, I think everyone should go to these lists and go to these restaurants and eat at the restaurant next door to these restaurants. And honestly, choose five restaurants that you want to support. And it may not be the best restaurant you've ever had. I think we need to be comfortable with just eating good. you know like good's pretty goddamn amazing so i don't know if that answers your question and i know i'm going to talk to someone later like no i can definitely scale it

16:07and i've talked to a lot of very smart people much smarter than myself and i have no doubt that will happen but you know we should be worried about everyone else that are just sort of making a restaurant their livelihood right now all right so one of the stories that i found most endearing in your book was the story of Marge. So tell us the story of Marge, who started as an intern and eight years later was CEO of Momofuku. Marguerite Mariscal, she is our CEO. She started as an intern and then she had almost every position. And I remember telling our board when she was 25, I was like, she's going to be the CEO.

16:47And they all laughed at my face. Oh, she's too young. You're crazy. I was like, yes, I'm definitely crazy. But I think that she's going to be the right person. And I'm not betting on her now to be this fully formed sort of executive. I'm betting on who she's going to be. And there's a saying in hospitality that we can teach anybody how to cook. We can tell them techniques and so on and so forth, but we can't teach people like to give a shit. And she cared more than anybody else. And over the first few years, no matter where I was, she didn't have to be there, but she was there adding value at all times.

17:21And that was an easy ask for me to be like, okay, I know that she's going to be the best custodian of this brand and where we're going. And did she go to the Culinary Institute of America and all that? I mean, you say someplace it's better to get a college education than a culinary education, right? Yeah. I mean, cooking schools don't love me so much. It's not perfect for everybody. Some people certainly benefit from it, but you're talking about a 12 month program. So 24 month program, that might be like$250 ,000 in tuition. They're not going to make that back anytime soon in the workforce. Like when I started to cook, everyone calls me college boy because it was not like a cool thing to be as a cook at the time.

18:04And they're like, do our numbers, do our account. I was like, I was a religion major, guys. Like you do not, you do not want me to do anything number oriented. But what I learned was I learned how to critically think. I learned how to put disparate things together that may not be someone else's cup of tea. And I thought that learning how to think, learning how to communicate gave me a leg up in cooking. And like everyone else in college, for the most part, you work a job. And I think you should go to a really great state school and work at a restaurant before you want to become a cook. And before you work in a restaurant, you should wash dishes for six months.

18:42And if you love it, then just maybe the profession's for you. In my podcast, I once interviewed Mark Maron, and he wrote the book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a, you know. And he told me that you will truly know that you discovered what you love when it involves a shit sandwich, and you love the shit sandwich. And it seems to me the restaurant business and what you describe, there's a lot of shit sandwiches that you love, right? It's nonstop. It's honestly what people cook the best.

19:18Okay. This question, David, trust me, I'm trying to be deeper than it might seem, but I want to know what is the ideal number of Michelin stars to get at a restaurant? Obviously, everybody wants three, right? No, no, no, no, no. We had the longest reign for two stars in New York City history. And for a while, I wanted really three stars, but just, and I'm a highly competitive person and I wanted it. And then at some point, like halfway along the way in 15 years, I was like, I'm good with two. Because when you get three, you can only go down. They can only take it away. Right. And two, I know what we can.

20:01And you know what? That's when I knew like I was getting older and the things I cared about when I was younger, I don't care about at all anymore. And listen, I love when my peer group gets awarded with the highest praise and the highest honors, but I truly don't care at all about Michelin stars for myself anymore, but I want it for my team. It just doesn't mean anything to me anymore. So if you get one star, you're so thrilled you got your star. You get two stars, it keeps you hungry. You get three stars, you always got to be worried about. It can only go downhill. Yeah. Truly. And two stars, just for those in the business, when someone's awarded two stars, that's the restaurant you want to eat at.

20:43Because you need to make the decision, is this person going to try to go get three? And historically speaking, the restaurants that went from two to three, those are the moments that are just like amazing albums and like rock and roll. You want to go there. So you got a lot of great restaurants, a lot of two-star, three-star restaurants here. But if there's a new two-star restaurant in San Francisco or one that goes to two or Oakland area, you should definitely check those out. But also, who gives a shit about the mission guide? You can go to any restaurant and it'll be fucking good. So the cover of your book shows Oddjob pushing the peach up the hill, right?

21:22And you're 48 years old now, right? I want to know, has the Sisyphus boulder changed for you? What's the boulder now? Yeah, I don't know. I think about that all the time. For those that don't know the Greek myth of Sisyphus, right? He's eternally punished to roll this boulder up the hill only to have it rolled back down on him when he reaches the top of the hill. I actually view it as an inspirational story. You're Asian. I do because you have a choice. You can have a choice to be like, I've been presented this really crappy situation which we're all presented all the time. And you can bitch and moan about it.

22:01Or you can actually say, this is not going to affect how I'm going to think about this. I'm going to roll this boulder up the hill better than anyone's ever rolled it. And that's the mindset that I have. And I got to be honest, now that I'm a father of two, I'm 48. It's like, maybe I don't want to roll this boulder that much more anymore. That's just where I'm at. Yeah. I'm not as angry as I used to be. And I would rather be a dad than be me. So having Hugo, your first child, was the turning point. For sure. Yeah. I mean, she was born in 2019. his first birthday, which is a big deal in Korean culture.

22:36We celebrate March 1st in 2020, and then the world ended. And that was tough for so many people, particularly restaurant business. And I think it was spending time with my son, because I was on the road probably 175 days a year. We had restaurants in Canada, Australia, a bunch of places. We'd open up like nine restaurants in 24 months. Talk about not scalable. That was not a scalable pace. And then I just was like, you know what, I don't want to do this anymore like this. So thankfully, we started to grow our CPG business and I spend less time on the restaurant. And you're scaling. And all of a sudden we're scaling.

23:12And the funny thing is no offense to certain parts of America, but I don't want to fucking go there.

23:20I don't want to open up a restaurant there. And one of my investors told me, you are the worst businessman I've ever met in my life, because I cannot tinker. If a restaurant's supposed to be the same, I will definitely screw it and it'll be different. Right. And I just have to, I can't do the same thing. It drives me crazy. But now we can have control. I'm a control freak. So we can work on a product. The only problem with consumer product goods and retail and grocery stores, it moves at a snail's pace. And I'm an addict to a lot of things, but I'm an addict to action. And that's been hard for me is while we're scaling this consumer product goods business, it moves so goddamn slow.

23:59So if there's anybody in the world who can answer this, it is you. So what is the impact of the, shall I say, war on immigrants that's going on right now? What's the impact is that going to have on the restaurant business? I always think about like Singapore. I don't know what they're doing right now, but they put a ban on immigrants. And I remember my friends at our restaurants in Singapore. We don't have any employees. No one's working. And I remember 2016, couldn't find a lot of laborers or cooks or dishwashers. And here's a problem. I think a lot of restauranteur chefs want to speak out, but they don't want to become a target for the people that work there.