Why has David Chang been let off the hook for his former Ugly Delicious co-star's alleged abusive behavior?

The New Republic

Kate Telfeyan, a New York City chef, writes that the food media have been responsible for creating and enabling tyrannical celebrity chefs, such as former PBS Mind of a Chef host Danny Bowien, who was recently accused of being a “verbally abusive, deeply manipulative" and “tyrannical” boss amid allegations of racism at his restaurant Mission Chinese. Telfeyan also points to how Ugly Delicious host David Chang's star power and partnership with an alleged notorious abuser may have enabled abuse. Telfeyan says Chang "is a longtime friend and collaborator of food writer Peter Meehan, who recently resigned from his post as food editor of the Los Angeles Times after several colleagues came forward to describe an abusive newsroom culture that flourished under Meehan’s watch, both at the Times and, earlier, at Lucky Peach, the now-defunct food magazine that Meehan co-founded in 2011 with Chang and Chris Ying. Meehan’s resignation from the Times was the biggest story in the food world for much of this summer. He and Chang are close: They have worked on cookbooks together, and in 2018 Meehan featured extensively in several episodes of the first season of Ugly Delicious, Chang’s popular Netflix series. Chang obviously felt some pressure to say something about Meehan’s fall from grace. The result: a thin, say-nothing statement on his podcast, in which Chang shed some crocodile tears, affected a dash of emotional rawness, claimed to have fallen out with Meehan soon after the first edition of Lucky Peach came out in 2011 (how, then, is it possible they were so chummy on the 2018 season of Ugly Delicious?), then said he couldn’t comment further because of a binding NDA with Meehan. The food media’s response to this impossibly weak statement? Silence. The food writers one might have expected to criticize Chang or delve into the long-standing whispers of abuse in his own restaurants’ kitchens had nothing to say, which is perhaps not surprising when you consider that many of them have themselves benefited from Chang’s patronage, appearing on his podcast and in episodes of Ugly Delicious. Celebrity chefs and food writers need each other—to build their brands and 'do numbers,' whether online (for the writers) or at the point of sale (for restaurants). The food media is complicit in the creation of kitchen tyrants, building their profiles, massaging their egos, exploiting their personalities for clicks—and chefs, in turn, help elevate the careers of food writers with access and exposure. In this sense the food world represents the marriage of two uniquely flawed industries: restaurants and the media."