David Chang Put Pork Buns on American Menus. This Week He’s Driving for CNN.

Sunday night David Chang was on CNN in a car, taking dinner tips from whoever sat in the passenger seat. The series is The Detour with David Chang. Six episodes, two a week. Christina Tosi, who started Milk Bar in his East Village pastry kitchen, rode with him to Benton’s, the Tennessee smokehouse that used to send ham and bacon to his restaurants. Cord Jefferson, who won an Oscar for American Fiction, took the Los Angeles to Las Vegas leg.

Today a Momofuku Goods truck starts four days in Boston with five new bottled sauces. One is Chili Crunch Sauce, a pourable version of the jar already in a lot of kitchens. The company says the grocery line is in more than 13,000 stores.

Chang opened a noodle counter on First Avenue in 2004. Twenty-two years later that counter is still there, and the group around it is smaller.

Chang is Korean American, raised in Vienna, Virginia, by parents who had left Korea as adults. The first Noodle Bar menu was ramen, and the stools sat empty until he added steamed Chinese buns with pork belly, hoisin, cucumber, and scallion after a meal at Oriental Garden, a Chinatown restaurant. Those buns left the East Village. Places that had never written pork belly on a menu started stuffing it into steamed bread.

Ssäm Bar opened in 2006 a few blocks away. It began as a wrap counter. It became the room that sold a whole roasted pork shoulder as bo ssäm, pulled into lettuce with rice, kimchi, and oysters. Korean restaurants already served bossam as boiled or steamed pork. Chang’s plate was a sugar-crusted shoulder you booked ahead, then a recipe in the 2009 Momofuku cookbook that home cooks copied.

Ko, a counter tasting room, opened in 2008 and held two Michelin stars until November 2023. In 2013 Bon Appétit ranked the Momofuku restaurants first among the twenty it called the most important in America. Korean kitchens in Flushing and Los Angeles were already cooking with gochujang and ssäm. What traveled through food magazines was a plywood room where those flavors sat next to country ham and a late-night raw bar.

Lucky Peach, the quarterly he started in 2011 with the food writers Peter Meehan and Chris Ying, ran until 2017. Netflix’s Ugly Delicious came the next year. A lot of people who never got a Ko reservation still know his voice.

Ssäm Bar closed in 2023 after two years at the Seaport. Ko closed that November. Seiōbo, the Sydney restaurant, ended in 2021. Toronto left the Shangri-La at the end of 2022.

New York still has two Noodle Bars, plus Bāng Bar, the flatbread counter at Columbus Circle. Kabawa and Bar Kabawa sit in the old Ko rooms on Extra Place. Las Vegas still has Momofuku at the Cosmopolitan. Los Angeles has Majordōmo, the Chinatown restaurant from 2018, and Super Peach, an all-day room that opened last October at Century City. Peach Palace sells the buns at JFK. Marguerite Zabar Mariscal started as an intern in 2011 and has run the company as CEO since 2019.

Ligaya Mishan, a New York Times restaurant critic, put Kabawa first on the paper’s 2026 list of the city’s hundred best restaurants. Paul Carmichael runs that kitchen. He cooked at Má Pêche, Momofuku’s old Midtown room, then spent a decade on Seiōbo’s Caribbean menu. Momofuku built the new room around him.

Fuku, the spicy fried-chicken sandwich that started off-menu at Noodle Bar, is opening street shops again. Coral Gables opened in March. West Palm Beach is due later this year.

MGM said last Thursday that Bāng Bar in the Cosmopolitan’s Block 16 food hall closes October 4. Momofuku and China Palace Group plan a replacement in 2027. They have not named it. A Momofuku is also listed for Saadiyat Grove, a new development on Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Island. Local coverage still has the Grove opening late this year. The restaurant has no date.

Sunday he is back on CNN. Dallas toward San Antonio with the comedian Cristela Alonzo, then Miami with Eric André.