"David Chang’s search for the perfect restaurant."

"I cook for my family. To put it another way: I am my family's cook, and so I cook almost every night. I cook three hundred days a year, and have cooked three hundred days a year for years. I cook for the three of us — for my wife, my daughter, and myself — and before there were three of us, I cooked for the two of us. I am a husband who cooks for his wife, which makes me a man who cooks for his woman and now his women, which in turns makes me a man who to some extent cooks like a woman: out of love and generosity, yes, but also out of service, out of duty. I cook because it's my job. I don't get many days off from cooking. I don't take many days off cooking, because I only like to eat at restaurants that serve food better than my own, or that serve Mexican food or sushi. Hell, I don't even take days off from cooking when I go out for days on the road, because before I leave I prepare my family food to be eaten in my absence. I cook so that there is no absence. I cook so that I am always there, even when I'm gone, even when I die, and my cooking translates in my daughter's memory as, simply, this: time."

The radical chef David Chang became an unlikely superstar making strange, cheap, and mesmerizing food at Momofuku Noodle Bar. But with his new project (Asian burritos!) off to a slow start, the willful iconoclast faces an unpalatable choice: stay culty and small or compromise and bring in the masses.

The Authors@Google program welcomed David Chang, chef and owner of Momofuku Noodle Bar, Ssam Bar, Ko, and Bakery & Milk Bar to Google's New York office to discuss his first book, "Momofuku".

Khao Man Gai, one of the most common street foods in Thailand, is, in short, a mutation, albeit controlled, of Hainanese chicken and rice. Overshadowed by the original dish and rarely included on the menus of most Thai restaurants in the West, Khao Man Gai (ข้าวมันไก่) is not widely known outside of Thailand.

I like to eat breakfast alone, and almost never before noon; anybody with a terminally jangled lifestyle needs at least one psychic anchor every twenty-four hours, and mine is breakfast. In Hong Kong, Dallas, or at home—and regardless of whether or not I have been to bed—breakfast is a personal ritual that can only be properly observed alone, and in a spirit of genuine excess. The food factor should always be massive: four Bloody Marys, two grapefruits, a pot of coffee, Rangoon crêpes, a half-pound of either sausage, bacon, or corned-beef hash with diced chilies, a Spanish omelette or eggs Benedict, a quart of milk, a chopped lemon for random seasoning, and something like a slice of key lime pie, two margaritas and six lines of the best cocaine for dessert…Right, and there should also be two or three newspapers, all mail and messages, a telephone, a notebook for planning the next twenty-four hours, and at least one source of good music…all of which should be dealt with outside, in the warmth of a hot sun, and preferably stone naked.