A streak of pluckiness, or at least a commitment to persist, as well as a capacity to think deeply and grow out of the shallows — these traits peek through David Chang’s glimpse into his personal tribulations and his sober take on the plight of his industry.
We’re still a conservative steak-and-potatoes country, and that bums me out. There’s less risk-taking. That’s OK if you want to be a craftsman, but there’s fewer people that want to do that, too.
What would the alternative to a steak-and-potatoes country look like? Every country has its staples.
That’s a great question. I guess for me it’s: How do we find openness? So much of my life is because of the hell I experienced as a kid. [Chang is a son of Korean immigrants. He grew up with three siblings in suburban Arlington County, Virginia.] A lot of it was like, as silly as it seems, Oh, Chang, you eat dog, or you eat poo, or your house smells. All of these things. What bothers me about steak and potatoes — and I love steak, I love potatoes, I love them together — is when people don’t want to try anything else. That myopic viewpoint scares me. If I learn to appreciate something, then it better allows me to understand someone else’s culture.
(David Marchese, “David Chang Isn’t Sure the Restaurant Industry Will Survive Covid-19,” NYTimes, 3-27-20)
(c) 2020 JMN
EthicalDative 
Compassionate Conservative
A column in The Times by Bret Stephens got POTUS’s attention recently. There is conjecture that it may have contributed to the “cure-worse-than-the-disease” propaganda that trumpets against efficient pandemic control.
My mom puts the groceries away and we sit down to talk on her patio, keeping our chairs far apart. She didn’t think much of my last column, in which I argued that we need to balance the public-health risks of pandemic against the risks of a global depression.
“I don’t remember your degree being in medicine or epidemiology,” she observes.
Stephens is a thoughtful, informed, and sensitive voice for conservatism. I sense that he is offsetting here what may have been his inadvertent contribution to fostering indifference to the virus’s potential toll on the more vulnerable segments of the population.
So I sit on my mom’s patio and listen. Not out of filial deference or compassion, but because deep down I know there’s usually more wisdom in my mother’s instincts and perceptions than there are in my clever (or not-so-clever) concatenations of facts, concepts and hypotheticals. And while I can’t hug her, I can at least try to honor her by paying close attention — as we should all of our elderly loved ones, now so vulnerable, never more precious [my bolding].
Stephens’s mother is a Jewish refugee born in Milan who fled Nazi control of northern Italy.
(Bret Stephens, “In This Emergency, Mom Knows Best,” NYTimes, 3-27-20)
(c) 2020 JMN