David Chang

The women in my life express love through food.

My grandmother was an amazing cook.

My mother is an amazing cook.

Mama.

Love was shown as, have you had enough to eat?

Till this day, when I talk to my mom, just the first thing she says is, what have you eaten?

Have you had enough to eat?

Well, as you saw in that clip, I grew up eating really well.

My mom cooked a lot of Korean things.

And growing up in Northern Virginia, it wasn't that cool.

In fact, I was like the butt of many jokes.

So when I started cooking professionally, those were the foods that I never wanted to touch because I was ashamed of it or I just didn't want to embrace it.

And that sort of encapsulates a lot of the foods that I think are truly delicious but may not be cool or is

looks good on a photograph sometimes.

Like a curry is a perfect example.

Bullet curry is so good, but isn't something that's gonna be on the cover of a magazine.

Absolutely, because we're not at a crossroads, but food is more popular than ever before.

And it sort of intersects so many different parts of culture throughout the world.

So in so many ways, you know, creating the show with Morgan Neville and Eddie Schmidt, we decided that food could be sort of a Trojan horse to talk about many of the great things in culture and many of the bad things in culture.

I mean, it goes all the way back to when they came to work on the railroads and how they were marginalized way back then in the 1890s or so.