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In four years, Chang had gone from a noodle cook to an international name brand whose dazzling ascent made him the role model for countless other impatient young chefs who hoped, like him, to open their own places without long years of apprenticeship in someone else’s kitchen. His fame allowed him to begin steadily growing his empire outside the East Village—opening Má Pêche in midtown Manhattan in 2010, Seio-bo in Sydney one year later, and the Toronto trio the year after that. (For some reason, this pretension-hating chef is drawn to restaurant names that couldn’t be more hoity-toity—they come complete with diacritical marks.) At the same time, he and pastry chef Tosi began expanding Momofuku’s chain of hugely successful stand-alone Milk Bar dessert shops, which have inspired a cult around her insanely rich Crack Pie and Proustian soft-serve ice cream that tastes like cereal milk.

“His genius isn’t so much in the cooking as in understanding the Zeitgeist in the way that nobody else did,” explains Ruth Reichl, who, as then-editor of Gourmet, was one of Chang’s early champions. “At that point, most restaurateurs were thinking it was the reader of The New York Times they had to woo. But they aren’t the people who are spending money today. It’s the 20- to 30-year-olds who spend all their disposable income on food and are extremely knowledgeable about it. As his work got more sophisticated, he trusted his audience to follow him. He’s one of them.”

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– http://www.vogue.com/magazine/article/david-chang-the-anxiety-of-influence/#1