Eat a Peach

by David Chang

By the time we started writing the Momofuku cookbook, other restaurants were already copying our recipes. I was shocked, both by the fact that people were taking our cooking seriously and also that anyone would choose imitation as a strategy—a surefire path to mediocrity. I knew that doing a cookbook would accelerate the process, so I took the opportunity to mess with any potential copycats. In Momofuku, there’s a recipe for the aforementioned roasted rice cakes, tossed in what is essentially gochujang (fermented chili sauce)—only we don’t call it gochujang. In the book, it has the absolutely awful and ridiculous name “red dragon sauce.” I knew that lazy people would copy the recipe without bothering to check whether “red dragon sauce” was a real thing. To this day, I’ll see it show up on menus from time to time. It always makes me laugh.