What Does Pim Have Against David Chang?

I was at home last Monday night when an email arrived from a friend of mine. The subject line said, “Check this out." I opened it up and enclosed was a copy of a Tweet from the blogger Pim Techamuanvivit which said; “Someone should give f*ucking David Chang a f*ucking thesaurus so he could be more offensive in more f*ckingly offensive terms" I wasn’t all that surprised: I had experienced my own unpleasant incident with Pim, one in which she took what I thought were extraordinary steps to hurt OA, so I was already of the opinion that under the bubble and squeak persona that she puts on for her blog, the reality is she’s a manipulative, sneaky and disingenuous person. But it also happens that Pim and Chang had history which went back to a Food and Wine event at Aspen a few years back. As Chang tells the story, it was the first time they met. Pim approached the table he was working at, introduced herself and immediately launched into a tirade about the “misogynistic rap music" that David played at Momofuku Noodle Bar. As to be expected, Chang wasn’t interested in putting up with her bullshit and he responded by staring daggers back at her while telling her to go chill out.

To my knowledge, that was the last interaction Chang had with Pim until around a month ago when Pim’s boyfriend, David Kinch, the chef/owner of Manresa in Los Gatos, California was a guest chef at an event at David Chang’s restaurant Ssam Bar. One would think that given the occasion of her boyfriend receiving a special honor, and given his business relationship with Chang, Pim would use the opportunity to bury the hatchet. But not only wasn’t she interested in putting things behind her, it appears that she took the opportunity to go out of her way to create a problem for Chang.

Here is what I was told. According to three different people who work at the restaurant, when Pim first arrived at Ssam Bar the day before the dinner, she went down to the restaurant’s basement kitchen to drop some things off. While down there she noticed photos of various chefs taped to one of the walls, one of which was a photo of her friend Daniel Patterson the chef/owner of the restaurant Coi in San Francisco (a super-talented chef in my opinion.) I asked Chang about the photos and here is what he told me: “Since we don’t take reservations, when we know a chef is coming to town we put his photo on the wall so the staff can recognize him." (a photo of the wall is at the top of this article.) Now that sounds harmless enough. But Pim purportedly got out her cell phone and called Daniel and told him that Chang had his photo on something that she called “The Wall of Shame" and that he was making fun of him behind his back.

Upon hearing this news, Patterson called Chang who at the time was at the Chambers Hotel going over plans for a new restaurant he is opening there. Upset at what he had heard, Patterson asked Chang if he didn’t like him or if he ever did anything wrong to him. You can imagine how awkward it was for him, especially at first because he didn’t even know what Patterson was talking about. But when he got to the bottom of it, he ended up having to go through multiple phone calls with both Patterson and David Kinch in order to try to get the whole thing straightened out.

Now first of all, Pim was at Ssam Bar as a guest, and when you are a guest in someone else’s home, or place of business, especially in an instance when you are merely a guest of the honored guest, you should try to be on good behavior. But I guess Pim doesn’t abide by those rules, and from appearances it looks like she was happy to use Davd Kinch’s celebrity to gain access to a place she wouldn’t ordinarily have access to in order to settle her own scores. And while the story invokes both laughter and astonishment, it also made me cringe at the thought of what Mrs. P would do to me if I intruded into her business the way Pim intruded into David Kinch’s, or vice-versa.

A few things come to mind when I hear stories like this one. First, if Pim doesn’t like David Chang, she should have enough integrity to not attend an event at his restaurant. And if you do decide to attend an event for a business reason, the right thing to do is to be on good behavior. The second is, to take advantage of a situation where your boyfriend is being honored and to use the special access you gain through him to make trouble for the person hosting the event is at best stupid, and at worst pretty low behavior. Finally, what on earth does Pim have against David Chang? Does playing so-called misogynistic rap music in your restaurant really rise to treating someone that way? Certainly not. Maybe what’s really going on is that Pim is jealous of David Chang’s success. After all, besides the fact that there seems to be a story about Chang in some magazine or newspaper on a daily basis, both he and Pim have books out for the holiday season. And while predictions are that the Momofuku Cookbook will be vying with Ad Hoc at Home for the honor of top food book of the season, word on the street is that Pim seems to have laid a rotten egg with hers.

10/19/2009 | Comments (17) | David Chang, Pim Techamuanvivit , Daniel Patterson , David Kinch, Momofuku Cookbook