David Chang Filled Empty Stools With Pork Buns, Then Kept Driving

On a stretch of Interstate 15 toward Las Vegas, David Chang’s CNN crew wanted him at an Indian spot beside a windshield shop in Hesperia, California. He also spotted a Mexican cantina that looked good. He ate at both. The Detour with David Chang, which premiered on 20 September 2026, is built for that habit: six road-trip episodes, friends in the passenger seat, dinner tips from people who live there instead of from a ranked list.

The argument is older than the series. It started on First Avenue.

In August 2004 he opened Momofuku Noodle Bar in the East Village. The name plays on “lucky peach” in Japanese and nods to Momofuku Ando, the inventor of instant ramen. Early nights were thin. The stools filled after he added steamed Chinese pork buns with hoisin, cucumber, and scallion, an idea borrowed from a meal at Oriental Garden in Chinatown. Ssäm Bar followed in 2006. Its sugar-crusted pork shoulder, booked ahead and pulled into lettuce with kimchi and oysters, became a New York ritual. Momofuku Ko opened in 2008 as a counter tasting room and held two Michelin stars from 2009 until it closed in November 2023. Christina Tosi built Milk Bar out of the pastry corner of that world; the cereal-milk soft serve traveled farther than most of the tasting menus. The company stretched to Toronto, Sydney, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles. Several of those rooms have since closed. The First Avenue noodle bar is still open.

Chang was born in Arlington, Virginia, on 5 August 1977 and raised in Vienna, Virginia. His mother, Woo Chung Hi, was born in Kaesong; his father, Joseph Chang, in Pyongyang. They arrived in the United States as adults in the 1960s. He grew up with golf and Georgetown Prep, then majored in religious studies at Trinity College in Hartford, class of 1999. He taught English in Japan, bused tables, tried finance desks in New York, then enrolled at the French Culinary Institute. In Eat a Peach, the 2020 memoir, he writes that when he started Momofuku he killed the version of himself that did not want to stick his neck out.

James Beard recognition and a place on the TIME 100 in 2010 followed the rooms. With Peter Meehan he launched Lucky Peach magazine in 2011; it ran through 2017. The louder shift for people who never got a Ko reservation was television. Ugly Delicious, the 2018 Netflix series he created and starred in, treated pizza in Tokyo and Viet-Cajun cooking in Houston as fights over who gets to claim a cuisine. Breakfast, Lunch & Dinner and the Dave Chang Show podcast kept him on the road in audio and on camera. On authenticity he has been blunt. “Nothing we cooked was authentic,” he writes in the memoir. “It was neither here nor there, which made it ours.” To ABC he called authenticity a dangerous word when it means keeping a cuisine pure. What he wants instead is fresher and closer: cook with what is good around you, and make something new.

The bookable map is uneven. New York still carries Noodle Bar plus Kabawa and Bar Kabawa in the old Ko spaces on Extra Place, where Paul Carmichael runs a Caribbean-leaning kitchen that landed high on the New York Times’s 2026 list of the city’s best restaurants. Los Angeles has Majordōmo in Chinatown and Super Peach, an all-day room at Century City. Las Vegas still has Momofuku at the Cosmopolitan; Bāng Bar, the flatbread counter in the hotel’s food hall, closed on 4 October 2026, with a replacement concept planned for 2027. A Momofuku for Saadiyat Grove in Abu Dhabi remains listed and unopened as of November 2026. Peach Palace sells the buns at JFK. Marguerite Zabar Mariscal, who started as an intern in 2011, has been CEO since 2019.

Book New York, Los Angeles, or the Strip and you are walking into a company that still opens and closes rooms. The Detour is the current advice on screen: ask a local, put the phone away, pull over twice if both kitchens look good.