David Chang, the New York pork aficionado and fig-slamming celebrichef, was in town this week to celebrate the release of Lucky Peach his new food journal published by San Francisco's most adorable publishing house, McSweeney's. Chang, who was just recently zinged by food critic Alan Richman made an appearance at the Make-Out Room in the Mission while a flood of foodies and a litany of lit nerds queued up outside to pick up their copies of Lucky Peach's inaugural issue — which we never got our hands on.
The 200 copies set aside for the release party were gone within the first hour, as was much of the sponsored Black Star Beer and more or less all of the wiggle room in the bar. One frustrated couple exiting the at-capacity room clutching their prized ink-and-paper volumes of ramen recipes, was heard complaining, "that was miserable."
Still, we had a purpose: This editor, along with SFist's book nerd-in-residence, arrived with a fresh copy of the Gentleman's Quarterly July issue and the intention to get Chang's John Hancock on the very pages in which he was lampooned. Unfortunately, we kind of blew it.
We panicked slightly at the celebrity encounter (the subscription card we were using as a bookmark fell out, actually) and Chang didn't seem to be aware of the article anyway. When you're an award winning chef with a slew of highly sought after tables in New York City, you don't really need to concern yourself with a bunch of insecure San Francisco foodies trying to validate their local dining scene, we guess. Chang was a good sport about it though, he told us he mostly reads sports scores while he swooped the pen over a page with a Versace advertisement.
The next day Chang took to Twitter to extol Corey Lee's work at Benu in San Francisco. So maybe we can call this beef settled. Either way, we've got a GQ with David Chang's handwritten note about designer handbags that we'll gladly sell you.