and since I'm here anyway
http://events.nytimes.com/2005/04/13/dining/reviews/13unde.html
Momofuku Noodle Bar
163 First Avenue (10th Street), East Village; (212) 475-7899.
RECOMMENDED DISHES Smoked chicken wings; rice cakes; steamed buns with pork; Momofuku ramen.
PRICE RANGE Small dishes, $4 to $15; large dishes, $9 to $14.
HOURS Lunch, 12 p.m. to 3 p.m. Monday through Thursday, to 4 p.m. Friday through Sunday. Dinner, 5 p.m. to 12 a.m. Monday through Thursday, 6 p.m. to 1 a.m. Friday and Saturday, 6 p.m. to 11 p.m. on Sunday.
Quote: Mr. Chang has replaced the dish with more summery offerings, like sweetly sauced Korean buckwheat noodles tossed with pickled pear ($10) and a rendition of chap chae ($9) with spring vegetables.
The non-noodle items, however, have been in top form since the beginning. Steamed Chinese bun dough folded around more of that braised heirloom pork, sauced lightly with hoisin sauce ($7), is itself worth the trip. I couldn't help ordering smoked chicken wings ($8) in a garlicky sweet sauce flecked with pickled chilies every time I went. Mr. Chang's excellent griddle-crisped Korean rice cakes ($8) are served in a chili sauce enriched with the sort of deeply caramelized onions his mentor Tom Colicchio would bill as "onion marmalade."
The market-driven dishes that most clearly reflect Mr. Chang's time at Craft were equally surefooted. Sautéed pea shoots ($7) were sprightly and direct. Asparagus ($8), cooked over a moderate flame in a small pan until tender and faintly charred, are given a second to rest while he builds a sauce - deglazing the pan with sherry vinegar, stirring in miso butter - before finishing the dish with a loosely poached egg.
It is not a new dish or a particularly novel one; neither is anything else on the menu. But through conscientious tweaks Mr. Chang has managed to brand each as his own.
And in the process, he's taken Momofuku from a neighborhoody near-ramen shop to a plywood-walled diamond in the rough. And the way he talks about it, it doesn't sound as if he has plans to stop polishing it anytime soon.
