David Chang’s new memoir skirts the trauma he inflicted on employees
Hannah Selinger, a former beverage director at Momofuku, admits she’s “not the intended audience” for Eat a Peach, a new memoir by David Chang, the chef behind the celebrated New York restaurant group. In her review of the book for Eater, she wonders why Chang isn’t being held accountable for his violent behavior that she witnessed as an employee in the late 2000s: punching walls, breaking desks, and frequent screaming and threats. Ultimately, she writes, it’s because Chang has edited his misdeeds into a “redemptive” tale—a “relentlessly self-flagellating apology performed in public.” But that doesn’t take away the trauma that he inflicted on other people—herself included. The “norms” he initiated in his kitchen, she adds, still thrive in other restaurants, with a generation of young chefs inheriting his “intricately documented rage.”
