Hans Vogels
Hans Vogels had a hell of a week at the pass. The chef de cuisine at Momofuku’s ground-floor Noodle Bar in Toronto found his restaurant transformed by a festival-long takeover by AT&T and DirectTV into the unofficial fulcrum of celebrity tumult: stars of every magnitude descended upon the dining room to savour David Chang’s famous ramen, while barnacles of agents, managers, publicists and press thronged every precious cubic inch of available space. The orderly, streamlined kitchen was reimagined as culinary pandemonium. “We — or maybe just I — underestimated how crazy it was going to be,” Vogels confesses toward the end of the madness. “It was wild.”
Vogels was worried, going into the festival, that its high-profile attendees wouldn’t take to the Noodle Bar menu. Call it a matter of preconceptions: “We know this is a big event for L.A. people,” he says. “A lot of those types we figured are all on these carrot-only diets, or that they don’t eat at all — or certainly wouldn’t want to eat what Noodle Bar specializes in. We make unapologetically heavy food here. We’re a restaurant that makes pork and ramen and fried chicken. So we thought the week would be horrible.” They even devised additions to the bill of fare with these assumptions in mind. “We made a salad,” he laughs. “Noodle Bar never makes salads. It’s against our mandate to make anything healthy.”
But what Vogels found, to his surprise, was that the celebs went wild for the good stuff — and virtually no one at all questioned or complained. “We had nobody asking how many calories was in this or that, nobody demanding wild substitutions. They ate a lot pork buns. They ate a lot of ramen. They ate a lot of fried chicken. It didn’t matter what our perceptions were. We thought they’re from Hollywood, so they’re gonna want this or that. Well, we found out that’s just not true.”
Which taught Vogels an important lesson. “Delicious food is gonna win every time no matter what,” he concludes. “George Clooney wants good-tasting food. He doesn’t want fancy food. He’s not sending anything back because it’s not served on a silver platter. He just wants something delicious.” (Clooney did indeed enjoy the Noodle Bar menu, reportedly.) “One thing I’ve realized over the last couple of days is that these famous people in the restaurant are just people that are hungry. And people that are hungry want to eat good food — it doesn’t matter who they are.”