After thinking about this blogpost for a minute I realized the blogpost actually literally argues for doing things the hard and stupid way. Not as a metaphor for integrity or quality.
Integrity isn't the point:
> It had nothing to do with integrity. I didn’t care about fooling the diners. What concerned me was the precedent we were setting.
The quality of the food isn't the point either:
> The dish was meant to be a difficult pickup that required constant coordination between the front and back of house.
The inefficiency is the point.
Doing it the long, hard and stupid way is the point.
This is a sermon against process improvements. Without seeming to realize that restaurants are a modern miracle of process improvements! How does this David think the kitchen gets fresh ingredients every morning? Where does David think fruit in the winter comes from? How did herbs and spices get so cheap? Because we decided for the past 200 years to relentlessly pursue efficiency. Because we decided not to do things the slow and stupid way any more. That's how!
> For example, one of my favorite Majordomo dishes is a whole boiled chicken. We present the bird to the table in a big pot, bring it back to the kitchen to carve it, and then return with a beautiful platter of rice topped with the sliced breasts and two different sauces spooned over the top. Once guests are finished with that, we bring out a soup made from the carcass. It’s so good.
The point is that the diner gets to see the chicken they will eat and understand the process.
The efficient way described in the blog is to instead use a stunt chicken which'll be paraded around the dining room instead of being cooked.
That's not a process improvement when the entire point of the dish is to show the diners what they will eat before they eat it and flex the restaurant's ability to coordinate.
Purposeful inefficiency is beautiful when it's about retro video game console programming or mechanical watches, because that's about spotlighting the process. Both of these are inefficient---modern computers are more powerful and quartz watch keep time better---but are fascinating because the difficulty of programming in assembly or an intricate series of tiny gears have inherent value to some people, far beyond the result of a video game or getting the current time.
It's a complicated finely tuned process to get a chicken from your table to the kitchen and back again. The chef wants employees that value the process itself, which is a fair ask when the process is the product.
"Once guests are finished with that, we bring out a soup made from the carcass."
Soup from the carcass is delicious, but there isn't time to do that during the meal. Even with a pressure cooker it's going to take at least an hour. (And if several tables order the same dish, you're gonna have a bunch of pressure cookers in your kitchen.)
So... the idea is sound, but I'm doubtful that they actually do it the way they claim. Which would make sense with the "hero chicken" story they admit to.
Hmmm, that like the "inefficiency" of advertisements with lots of empty space, and fancy stores with sparse interiors.
In other words, it's not actual inefficiency so much as a hard-to-recognize spending on buying another asset, namely the marketing/advertising effect of conveying "luxury" or "successfulness".
Sort of like peacock feathers: They're "inefficient" from the perspective of abstract aerodynamics, but from a holistic and practical perspective...
And yet, he says "... I didn’t care about fooling the diners."
I agree with you, that the diner seeing what they are about to eat is an important part of the experience. But Chang seems to be saying that even that is not the point! The results (including diner experience, and the honesty of that experience) don't matter. It is purely about instilling and maintaining a culture.
I don't really buy it, myself. Should they also forge all their knives from iron ore, the long slow way, before being allowed to use them in the kitchen? As other people commented, I think this is more about weaving a story and casting a glamour than anything else.
"The point is that the diner gets to see the chicken they will eat and understand the process."
What do you mean by "understand the process"? You only get that if you are in the kitchen with the cooks. Only open restaurants where you can see the cooks cooking help with that. Seeing a dead chicken ahead of time doesn't teach a guest anything. It is merely a flex, a story the restaurant sells to increase the price of a meal.
> "That was what made it great. If they wanted to sandbag it, they needed to figure out how they would make up for the lost energy elsewhere."
This seems to be the key quote. As a restaurant owner, as with any other type of team leader, his job is managing how the team's attention and energy is spent. Reading charitably, he doesn't want to formalize slack time into the system, because he thinks that slack will be eaten up by something else with the next process change, making the whole operation more brittle (also specifically in a restaurant setting, maximizing kitchen throughput is _not_ the same as maximizing efficient operation)
I could of course be reading too much into this, but from my own experience, it's the same difference between a sensible ad hoc meeting culture and being forced to use "efficiency" tools that inevitably make meetings less productive.
> I worried about the mindset of the server whose job it would be to parade a stunt chicken around the dining room. I was terrified of our culture stagnating.
It doesn't read to me like he would have any problem with a process improvement as long as the real chicken were still used.
Some things are better, but some are bad shortcuts that cost quality. A burger from a place that cooks it after you order will always be better than a burger where they start cooking before you walk in the door. Back when I worked fast food I sometimes made my own burgers, when it was fresh off the grill it was one of the best burgers I ever had, but that is a lot more individual labor and so not sustainable in a fast food model. Back then burgers were assembled before you walked in the door, but these days they have all backed off to assemble the burger after you order of ingredients cooked before - it is higher quality and they have managed to optimize assembly enough that it is now sustainable.
Where the fast food industry wants to be is a robot that sees you push the button and starts cooking your burger then before you get to paying for it. Robots could do all that, but they are too expensive for the price they need to hit at least so far. (there are also some fraud issues they have to work out) They have to start cooking before you finish the order to meet their fast goals which is one of the reasons people go to fast food.
He says he doesn't care about the integrity but I think he's wrong and he's misidentified the lesson from this.
Because you are absolutely right, doing things that are inefficient and stupid for the sake of it is absolutely dumb.
> I worried about the mindset of the server whose job it would be to parade a stunt chicken around the dining room. I was terrified of our culture stagnating.
This is where it makes sense. He does care about integrity. If you foster a culture of faking little things like this it can eventually grow into a culture of faking the big things that actually do matter.
quality is entirely the point, nowhere does he suggest quality is compromised; his staff's alternate idea was not reducing quality. he's making a different point.
It’s very simple actually. “The dish” is defined as a chicken you see before it is then taken away and carved. You see your chicken. That’s the promise. If they parade around with a display chicken then it is simply dishonest. Does it matter? That is a different question entirely. The point is there is a promise involved in “the dish”. If they want to use a parade chicken then they need a different promise.
> The inefficiency is the point. Doing it the long, hard and stupid way is the point.
Yes. This is what passes for "fine dining" today.
Starbucks used to make a thing of this. The process of making drinks was deliberately made manual and complicated to give customers the impression they were getting their money's worth for overpriced coffee. That was part of the Starbucks mystique, when they had one.
> You’re really trying to teach someone to better themselves through their own personal integrity.
I am subbed to /r/KitchenConfidential sub (a place where chefs and kitchen staff hang around) and there is a constant trickle of anecdotes of Chang being one of the greatest a*holes they have ever worked for.
He doesn't teach. He screams, denigrates and have anger episodes that keep everyone in the kitchen in a constant state of fear.
Ironically I've heard Gordon Ramsey is actually a pretty swell guy despite the impression some of his shows give. You can see it when he's trying to genuinely empathize with the people on kitchen nightmares and actually help them, or when he goes to a place like remote India to try any chutney and he's being extremely respectful to the local culture. He gets passionate and angry but there's little condescension unless you're a professional chef who should know better and he's playing it up for the camera.
Is this actually substantiated by people who've worked with him? Or is it put out by his PR team? Because I've also heard this several times, but only through comments like this on the internet.
Commercial kitchens are incredibly high pressure workplaces and many famous chefs are also assholes. It doesn't excuse Chang, but there's definitely a certain personality type that's drawn to and can function in these environments.
This "high pressure workplace" has always struck me as crazy. I grant that it looks true from the anecdotes, but it also seems that the vast majority of the pressure is self created. Often times specifically created by that second point, that many famous chefs are assholes.
Worse, as most of their asshole behavior seems to stem from the fact that they are buckling under pressure. Pressure that they themselves are causing.
> It had nothing to do with integrity. I didn’t care about fooling the diners. What concerned me was the precedent we were setting. I worried about the mindset of the server whose job it would be to parade a stunt chicken around the dining room. I was terrified of our culture stagnating.
I'm sort of surprised that he didn't worry about integrity, since it's literally an example of lying to your customers about the food they're paying for. Fooling is a pretty light word for what others would call false advertising: you tell people you're making soup out of the carcass you just ate from, and then you just don't do that. I imagine that could also have an effect on the restaurant's culture as well. I understand that fine dining is partly theatrical, but don't charge me a premium for doing something you're not actually doing and then say "fooled ya!"
He said if you were going to fool the guest, you had to make up for that lost energy by doing something else (or presumably lower the price)
The guest is paying for an overall experience. There are plenty of experiences where a guest is happy to pay to be lied to, like a magic show or a strip club or the Olive Garden. As long as the totality of the experience is providing enough value.
Now if you specifically chose the restaurant because of their honesty (for whatever that means), then it’s a different story
> He said if you were going to fool the guest, you had to make up for that lost energy by doing something else (or presumably lower the price)
I think in the context of the quote, that "something else" was meant to be some extra long, hard, stupid work. He didn't mean doing something to make it up to the customers. He's worried about the mindset of his team: he wants them not to take shortcuts, but only because doing that will make them worse at their jobs in an indefinable way.
Yeah that's what the article says, but you frame it argumentatively. He doesn't assert he doesn't care about integrity, reading it, its clear the communicated point is he cares about integrity because of how it affects culture, not just because the carcass you ate wasn't used to make soup: in that case, it'd be trivial to "solve" the problem by just not affirmatively claiming the soup was made from the exact same carcass.
When he said "it had nothing to do with integrity" I think he meant that it had nothing to do with personal integrity, i.e. he's not bothered by lying to customers. It's clear he cares about the morale and culture of his team, and I guess he's making some distinction I don't understand between integrity and feeling bad because you're the guy on staff parading around a decoy chicken all night. My point is that maybe they should also think about other kinds of integrity, if only not advertising a product you aren't really selling, but probably also not lying to your guests.
David Chang is a salesman and a businessman first. I get the point being made, but keep in mind that he is a brand, and part of that is the stories he tells.
He has slapped his name on so many subpar food goods that were a total disappointment that I actually have started avoiding things marketed under his brand name.
He might do things the hard way in his restaurants, but they certainly aren't ensuring tasty or high quality goods under his brand. I would rather he do things in a way that makes sense and provides the best tasting food.
More broadly, the point is that you should take advice only from people whose successes you want to emulate. The actual advice I get out of this article is:
Tell stories that paint the picture you want your customers to have about your product.
> Tell stories that paint the picture you want your customers to have about your product.
There’s one interpretation of the idea of business as not selling products but stories. Apple knows this and clearly exhibits it with every product demo. It’s all a story. One that I enjoy.
But low priced groceries also sell a story, about how a beleaguered mother can save a few dollars here in order to avoid bouncing a check or to buy herself one nice thing. Or a kid who wants something sweet and already blew their allowance on video games. A pattern they will repeat again every few months since it worked before.
Chang is definitely selling two stories and it sounds like they are a bit discordant when taken together.
> Apple knows this and clearly exhibits it with every product demo. It’s all a story. One that I enjoy.
That is true, but I've often seen that misconstrued (not by you in your comment) as somehow saying "Oh, Apple's success is just marketing! I can get feature XYZ for much lower elsewhere!"
Except that while Apple has generally great marketing, they also have generally great products. There is a ton of hard engineering and design work that goes into making a product that is easy to market in the first place. In fact, what the "it's just marketing" crowd tends to miss is that products are not just a collection of features, but are used to tell stories (or listen to stories) in users' own lives. They want to envision how a product will enrich their experiences, and Apple understands that's what they're selling.
In fact, if anything, I think the flop of the Vision Pro (may be quite premature to call it a flop, but I'll put my money on it being a flop) is directly due to the fact that Apple can't tell a story about it. By all accounts it has amazing, cutting edge technology. Except Apple can't tell a good story about what you're actually supposed to do with the thing that people believe and buy in to.
Michelin stars seem to have the dynamics of a loss leader. Particularly as it's become known that many of the restaurants are badly unprofitable—and moreso if you think the chefs should earn something commensurate to their presumable talent or passion (you don't have to think this). It seems to be more the case that every award or signal of quality is capable of (and actually being used) this way.
Some people, like Chang, may know it and treat it transactionally as such. $X for a star, which leads to Y amount of exposure. Others, may know it or not, but treat it like a goal in life either way. It's very possible of course that many of the former start as the latter people until they later [realize/sell out/give up].
I guess it makes sense. The world is more competitive. Information is freely available. You need to find some other moat. With information and access to everything, a moat that might have been quality or talent, is more easily captured by buying the signal (which to be clear can include buying and maintaining the quality). Then once you have the signal, well, it's up to you whether you still need or want the quality. When push comes to shove, it's probably the case that the signal is worth more than the quality.
Don't forget he filed a trademark for chili crunch sauce (which has been used in several Asian cuisines for literally centuries) and sued to stop smaller restaurants and businesses from selling it, and only backed down when there was public outcry.
trademark refers to the name a product is sold as, not what the product is, and also has a local jurisdiction. What they do in Asia has nothing to do with trademarks in the US, and since not very much of Asia has spoken English for literally hundreds of years, I doubt they were calling it chili crunch sauce.
I'm not defending Chang nor trademarks, just pointing out how they work legally and the flaws in the argument you're making.
Remember, people called windows "windows", but they didn't sell products called Windows till Microsoft started and trademarked it.
He's really trying to build an empire based on his name and recognition from a few good restaurants he founded. I think he wants to scale it as much as he can right now and sell it. He has commented before that a restaurant based around the chef's personality isn't really a business you can sell one day. But products based around the celebrity chef are. But yeah, most things he's putting his name on are so super over priced they are clearly selling to people with no price sensitivity. I'm sure his margins are fantastic and he'll get a big payday if he sells at just the right time.
I don't really understand any of this this thread, there's a lot of conflicting ideas. David Chang owns a frozen food empire that's super over priced and super low quality that's successful enough that he'll make a lot of money if he sells at the right time?
I've been wondering about this for YEARS now: WTF happened to Milk Bar in NYC? Based on the taste and quality, it seems like the most egregious case of "selling out" I've ever seen. It seems like an overnight change to me
David Chang and Christina Tosi worked together, and I remember seeing a bunch of their marketing on Netflix
In 2015 the location in East Village was still GREAT. Interesting deserts, seemingly made by hand, with high quality ingredients
Then I go back a few years later, and it's this CHAIN and the food is inedible. I take one bite, can't eat it, and throw it away
It just tastes like sugary processed food now, like Twinkies or Chips Ahoy or something
I also saw Milk Bar products in Whole Foods, bought it, took one bite, and threw it away, and never bought it again
It's just weird to me that a chef would let the quality sink so low, so fast. Usually the "founders" care about quality, and are mission-focused
I always thought that process took decades, and changes in ownership. (Actually I am re-reading Pollan's account of the "big organic" Cascadian Farms brand now -- another very interesting case of counterculture going mainstream / industrial, but the change was more gradual I think)
They opened a Milk Bar near Harvard and it was total garbage.
They were so lazy that they didn't even make anything in Boston. It was all shipped over from NY. Stale and tasteless cubes of nothing wrapped in plastic.
Neither Christina Tosi nor David Chang have any integrity. They just peddle whatever garbage they can to people while building their own brand.
A year or two ago that Milk Bar location finally died out and was replaced by Joe's Pizza. Another NY chain. But one that is the opposite of Tosi/Chang in every way. Authentic. Careful. Customer-focused. Great NY-style pizza made on the spot with the same ingredients. Joe's is just as good in NY as it is in Boston.
Good riddance to Tosi and Chang. I now actively avoid anything associated with them.
I just remember the Saltie owner posting photos of the pavement outside their next door neighbor Milk Bar, being salty about the scores of serving cups and other detritus their customers would leave without the store taking responsibility for cleaning them up
As others have alluded too. At this point SC is high on its own supply. Create a food empire, hang out with rich or famous chefs. Create millions of aspiring chumps who'd take his words as gospel.
Milk bar always seemed like an example of using raw marketing power to convince people something is good. I saw Tosi on Chefs table and it was crazy how generic what she was doing was versus the other chefs on the show. Juxtaposing her with others on the show it felt like a bunch of artists who wouldn't compromise their vision versus a capitalist who was optimizing everything around money.
I wasn't saying that this is a particularly insightful message. I was saying that the message I took from this story wasn't about doing things the hard way. Its a meta lesson about messaging and showmanship.
he’s also reportedly a jerk to his staff and yells at them. and sues mom and pop shops for using his trademark of a really generic term... something like spicy chili oil or very similar.
"a failure to enforce a trademark by monitoring the mark for misuses will result in a weakening of the mark and loss of distinctiveness, which can lead to a loss of the trademark"
David Chang is the guy who sent cease and desist letters to other manufacturers selling chili crunch, a condiment that existed long before he was born. Maybe that is the "long, hard, stupid way"
My understanding is that another company owned the Chili Crunch trademark and took enforcement action against David Chang's company when it started selling products under that name. As part of the settlement, Chang's company ended up purchasing the trademark. As one of the obligations of owning a trademark is to enforce its use in the marketplace, Chang's lawyers did just that. But after blowback in the press, Chang arranged for the other brands to also use the trademark.
> As one of the obligations of owning a trademark is to enforce its use in the marketplace, Chang's lawyers did just that.
There is no such obligation. Yes, if you don't enforce a trademark you can lose it, but it isn't like you will be subject to fines or something if you don't. This is a ridiculously generic trademark that never should've been granted, and if Chang (or his lawyers) were good, decent people they would've just let it be. The trademark would've lapsed, and everything would've been fine.
I’m generally in favor of “cheap and cheerful” - that is, friendly efficiency. Doing elaborately inefficient things to justify higher prices is a turnoff.
Unfortunately, from a restaurant’s point of view, they may care about customer satisfaction, but their incentives are to get more money per visit. A lot of things restaurants do make more sense from that perspective.
For example, large portions can be seen as a way to justify moderately higher prices while keeping customers feeling like they got good value for their money. Elaborate, unnecessary service is a way to justify really high prices.
And nowadays they care less about perception, so they just add extra changes.
Ignoring the explicit text which everyone seems to be overly concerned with... I'm not really worried about that. The article makes you think for a second...
The thing I like about this article is that you should be concerned with these things. You should make active decisions about quality, culture, integrity, the way you produce things, etc. You should not skip to "the long, hard, stupid way" or the shortcut in your proprietary process without consideration. Even the thought that there could be more value in an inefficient process is worth considering if you haven't before.
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Integrity isn't the point:
> It had nothing to do with integrity. I didn’t care about fooling the diners. What concerned me was the precedent we were setting.
The quality of the food isn't the point either:
> The dish was meant to be a difficult pickup that required constant coordination between the front and back of house.
The inefficiency is the point.
Doing it the long, hard and stupid way is the point.
This is a sermon against process improvements. Without seeming to realize that restaurants are a modern miracle of process improvements! How does this David think the kitchen gets fresh ingredients every morning? Where does David think fruit in the winter comes from? How did herbs and spices get so cheap? Because we decided for the past 200 years to relentlessly pursue efficiency. Because we decided not to do things the slow and stupid way any more. That's how!
The point is that the diner gets to see the chicken they will eat and understand the process.
The efficient way described in the blog is to instead use a stunt chicken which'll be paraded around the dining room instead of being cooked.
That's not a process improvement when the entire point of the dish is to show the diners what they will eat before they eat it and flex the restaurant's ability to coordinate.
Purposeful inefficiency is beautiful when it's about retro video game console programming or mechanical watches, because that's about spotlighting the process. Both of these are inefficient---modern computers are more powerful and quartz watch keep time better---but are fascinating because the difficulty of programming in assembly or an intricate series of tiny gears have inherent value to some people, far beyond the result of a video game or getting the current time.
It's a complicated finely tuned process to get a chicken from your table to the kitchen and back again. The chef wants employees that value the process itself, which is a fair ask when the process is the product.
Soup from the carcass is delicious, but there isn't time to do that during the meal. Even with a pressure cooker it's going to take at least an hour. (And if several tables order the same dish, you're gonna have a bunch of pressure cookers in your kitchen.)
So... the idea is sound, but I'm doubtful that they actually do it the way they claim. Which would make sense with the "hero chicken" story they admit to.
In other words, it's not actual inefficiency so much as a hard-to-recognize spending on buying another asset, namely the marketing/advertising effect of conveying "luxury" or "successfulness".
Sort of like peacock feathers: They're "inefficient" from the perspective of abstract aerodynamics, but from a holistic and practical perspective...
I agree with you, that the diner seeing what they are about to eat is an important part of the experience. But Chang seems to be saying that even that is not the point! The results (including diner experience, and the honesty of that experience) don't matter. It is purely about instilling and maintaining a culture.
I don't really buy it, myself. Should they also forge all their knives from iron ore, the long slow way, before being allowed to use them in the kitchen? As other people commented, I think this is more about weaving a story and casting a glamour than anything else.
What do you mean by "understand the process"? You only get that if you are in the kitchen with the cooks. Only open restaurants where you can see the cooks cooking help with that. Seeing a dead chicken ahead of time doesn't teach a guest anything. It is merely a flex, a story the restaurant sells to increase the price of a meal.
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This seems to be the key quote. As a restaurant owner, as with any other type of team leader, his job is managing how the team's attention and energy is spent. Reading charitably, he doesn't want to formalize slack time into the system, because he thinks that slack will be eaten up by something else with the next process change, making the whole operation more brittle (also specifically in a restaurant setting, maximizing kitchen throughput is _not_ the same as maximizing efficient operation)
I could of course be reading too much into this, but from my own experience, it's the same difference between a sensible ad hoc meeting culture and being forced to use "efficiency" tools that inevitably make meetings less productive.
> I worried about the mindset of the server whose job it would be to parade a stunt chicken around the dining room. I was terrified of our culture stagnating.
It doesn't read to me like he would have any problem with a process improvement as long as the real chicken were still used.
Where the fast food industry wants to be is a robot that sees you push the button and starts cooking your burger then before you get to paying for it. Robots could do all that, but they are too expensive for the price they need to hit at least so far. (there are also some fraud issues they have to work out) They have to start cooking before you finish the order to meet their fast goals which is one of the reasons people go to fast food.
Because you are absolutely right, doing things that are inefficient and stupid for the sake of it is absolutely dumb.
> I worried about the mindset of the server whose job it would be to parade a stunt chicken around the dining room. I was terrified of our culture stagnating.
This is where it makes sense. He does care about integrity. If you foster a culture of faking little things like this it can eventually grow into a culture of faking the big things that actually do matter.
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quality is entirely the point, nowhere does he suggest quality is compromised; his staff's alternate idea was not reducing quality. he's making a different point.
Yes. This is what passes for "fine dining" today.
Starbucks used to make a thing of this. The process of making drinks was deliberately made manual and complicated to give customers the impression they were getting their money's worth for overpriced coffee. That was part of the Starbucks mystique, when they had one.
I am subbed to /r/KitchenConfidential sub (a place where chefs and kitchen staff hang around) and there is a constant trickle of anecdotes of Chang being one of the greatest a*holes they have ever worked for.
He doesn't teach. He screams, denigrates and have anger episodes that keep everyone in the kitchen in a constant state of fear.
For example - https://www.reddit.com/r/KitchenConfidential/comments/1c3l66...*
Worse, as most of their asshole behavior seems to stem from the fact that they are buckling under pressure. Pressure that they themselves are causing.
I'm sort of surprised that he didn't worry about integrity, since it's literally an example of lying to your customers about the food they're paying for. Fooling is a pretty light word for what others would call false advertising: you tell people you're making soup out of the carcass you just ate from, and then you just don't do that. I imagine that could also have an effect on the restaurant's culture as well. I understand that fine dining is partly theatrical, but don't charge me a premium for doing something you're not actually doing and then say "fooled ya!"
The guest is paying for an overall experience. There are plenty of experiences where a guest is happy to pay to be lied to, like a magic show or a strip club or the Olive Garden. As long as the totality of the experience is providing enough value.
Now if you specifically chose the restaurant because of their honesty (for whatever that means), then it’s a different story
I think in the context of the quote, that "something else" was meant to be some extra long, hard, stupid work. He didn't mean doing something to make it up to the customers. He's worried about the mindset of his team: he wants them not to take shortcuts, but only because doing that will make them worse at their jobs in an indefinable way.
He has slapped his name on so many subpar food goods that were a total disappointment that I actually have started avoiding things marketed under his brand name.
He might do things the hard way in his restaurants, but they certainly aren't ensuring tasty or high quality goods under his brand. I would rather he do things in a way that makes sense and provides the best tasting food.
More broadly, the point is that you should take advice only from people whose successes you want to emulate. The actual advice I get out of this article is:
Tell stories that paint the picture you want your customers to have about your product.
There’s one interpretation of the idea of business as not selling products but stories. Apple knows this and clearly exhibits it with every product demo. It’s all a story. One that I enjoy.
But low priced groceries also sell a story, about how a beleaguered mother can save a few dollars here in order to avoid bouncing a check or to buy herself one nice thing. Or a kid who wants something sweet and already blew their allowance on video games. A pattern they will repeat again every few months since it worked before.
Chang is definitely selling two stories and it sounds like they are a bit discordant when taken together.
That is true, but I've often seen that misconstrued (not by you in your comment) as somehow saying "Oh, Apple's success is just marketing! I can get feature XYZ for much lower elsewhere!"
Except that while Apple has generally great marketing, they also have generally great products. There is a ton of hard engineering and design work that goes into making a product that is easy to market in the first place. In fact, what the "it's just marketing" crowd tends to miss is that products are not just a collection of features, but are used to tell stories (or listen to stories) in users' own lives. They want to envision how a product will enrich their experiences, and Apple understands that's what they're selling.
In fact, if anything, I think the flop of the Vision Pro (may be quite premature to call it a flop, but I'll put my money on it being a flop) is directly due to the fact that Apple can't tell a story about it. By all accounts it has amazing, cutting edge technology. Except Apple can't tell a good story about what you're actually supposed to do with the thing that people believe and buy in to.
Some people, like Chang, may know it and treat it transactionally as such. $X for a star, which leads to Y amount of exposure. Others, may know it or not, but treat it like a goal in life either way. It's very possible of course that many of the former start as the latter people until they later [realize/sell out/give up].
I guess it makes sense. The world is more competitive. Information is freely available. You need to find some other moat. With information and access to everything, a moat that might have been quality or talent, is more easily captured by buying the signal (which to be clear can include buying and maintaining the quality). Then once you have the signal, well, it's up to you whether you still need or want the quality. When push comes to shove, it's probably the case that the signal is worth more than the quality.
I'm not defending Chang nor trademarks, just pointing out how they work legally and the flaws in the argument you're making.
Remember, people called windows "windows", but they didn't sell products called Windows till Microsoft started and trademarked it.
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David Chang and Christina Tosi worked together, and I remember seeing a bunch of their marketing on Netflix
https://rseventures.com/milk-bars-christina-tosi-went-momofu...
In 2015 the location in East Village was still GREAT. Interesting deserts, seemingly made by hand, with high quality ingredients
Then I go back a few years later, and it's this CHAIN and the food is inedible. I take one bite, can't eat it, and throw it away
It just tastes like sugary processed food now, like Twinkies or Chips Ahoy or something
I also saw Milk Bar products in Whole Foods, bought it, took one bite, and threw it away, and never bought it again
It's just weird to me that a chef would let the quality sink so low, so fast. Usually the "founders" care about quality, and are mission-focused
I always thought that process took decades, and changes in ownership. (Actually I am re-reading Pollan's account of the "big organic" Cascadian Farms brand now -- another very interesting case of counterculture going mainstream / industrial, but the change was more gradual I think)
They were so lazy that they didn't even make anything in Boston. It was all shipped over from NY. Stale and tasteless cubes of nothing wrapped in plastic.
Neither Christina Tosi nor David Chang have any integrity. They just peddle whatever garbage they can to people while building their own brand.
A year or two ago that Milk Bar location finally died out and was replaced by Joe's Pizza. Another NY chain. But one that is the opposite of Tosi/Chang in every way. Authentic. Careful. Customer-focused. Great NY-style pizza made on the spot with the same ingredients. Joe's is just as good in NY as it is in Boston.
Good riddance to Tosi and Chang. I now actively avoid anything associated with them.
Edit SC -> DC (David Chang)
Isn't that just called advertising? This is so blatantly obvious, it doesn't sound like much of an advice.
I wasn't saying that this is a particularly insightful message. I was saying that the message I took from this story wasn't about doing things the hard way. Its a meta lesson about messaging and showmanship.
https://www.justia.com/intellectual-property/trademarks/enfo...
"a failure to enforce a trademark by monitoring the mark for misuses will result in a weakening of the mark and loss of distinctiveness, which can lead to a loss of the trademark"
Here's a summary from NBC News:
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/david-chang-momof...
There is no such obligation. Yes, if you don't enforce a trademark you can lose it, but it isn't like you will be subject to fines or something if you don't. This is a ridiculously generic trademark that never should've been granted, and if Chang (or his lawyers) were good, decent people they would've just let it be. The trademark would've lapsed, and everything would've been fine.
Unfortunately, from a restaurant’s point of view, they may care about customer satisfaction, but their incentives are to get more money per visit. A lot of things restaurants do make more sense from that perspective.
For example, large portions can be seen as a way to justify moderately higher prices while keeping customers feeling like they got good value for their money. Elaborate, unnecessary service is a way to justify really high prices.
And nowadays they care less about perception, so they just add extra changes.
The thing I like about this article is that you should be concerned with these things. You should make active decisions about quality, culture, integrity, the way you produce things, etc. You should not skip to "the long, hard, stupid way" or the shortcut in your proprietary process without consideration. Even the thought that there could be more value in an inefficient process is worth considering if you haven't before.
-- Granny Weatherwax
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-- Lao Tzu