This book suffers from some of the same things I have noticed before with high end cooking.

The book is in 3 parts each detailing 1 of his 3 restaurants:

Noodle bar; a low brow eatery with highly flavoured food. Simple and tasty. I really loved that part.

ssäm bar; middle brow restaurant. Had some good things, but for the rest, no

Ko; high brow restaurant in with the dictates of culinary fashion. Boring, no fun, no flavour.

If I were to live in New York I'd go out of my way to eat at Noodle bar. But the other two? Don't think so.

The problem for me with high end cooking is that what food gains in refinement it loses in taste and they all offer more or less the same food.

I have eaten at starred restaurants and I have yet to have a reaaly good meal there.

I came to Momofuku as a relatively beginning cook (despite my middle age) and an intermediate foodie, and suspected that the recipes from David Chang’s acclaimed group of NYC restaurants would be over my head. I was right -- as they will be for all but the most adventurous and experienced cooks. But recipes aren’t the only aspect to this book -- it’s also a memoir of Chang’s path from happy noodle-eater/unhappy office-worker through cooking school and apprenticeships to award-winning chef and restaurateur.

In fact, straightforward recipes are fairly rare in this book. Rather, they’re tutorials -- each step is a paragraph about process and technique, and I’m already a better cook (and restaurant patron) just for having read them. The book itself is trademark Clarkson-Potter (think Barefoot Contessa and Martha Stewart books) -- smooth, heavy pages filled with full-color photographs of food, the restaurants, diners and staff -- many of which evoke a sense of motion and hectic energy. That energy is reinforced by Chang’s conversational text, including profanity (which feels seamless and characterizing) and absolute gems of instruction. For example, for a pan-roasted rib eye (a do-able recipe), Chang advises to “Season the steak liberally with salt -- like you’d salt a sidewalk in New York in the winter,” and, after cooking, to “Let the steak rest. Just leave it the hell alone”; about removing the fat from pigskin in the process of making pork rinds (not a do-able recipe): “Scrape gently but with determination.”

Recommended for uber-motivated -- and armchair -- cooks. ( )