Chef David Chang on His Kids Not Eating Anything He Cooks, Learning to Gamble & New Show the Detour

Our next guest is a legendary chef and a great lover of food. You can join him on a cross-country hunt for hidden gems on The Detour with David Chang. It premieres September 20th on CNN. Please welcome David Chang. Very good to see you. How are you? I'm doing excellent, Jimmy. You have two boys. Yes. Gal has four girls. That's crazy. Are you going to have two more boys? We've got to talk to Grace, my wife, about that. Maybe. We'll see. You got Hugo and Gus, who call me Uncle Jimmy. And by the way, I like that they do that. They love Uncle Jimmy. They do. They don't love me as much as they love you. They are the cutest little boys. They really are. Do they eat your food? Like, do you cook for them? Do you cook good things for them? That's where it gets a problem, where they don't love me as much, Jimmy, because they don't really love my cooking. My kids don't either. He's driving me crazy. They don't want to eat. They just don't want to eat anything. They just won't even taste anything. I made a lasagna the other night. They're like, yeah, no, no thanks. I'm in the same boat. Yeah. What do you give them? What are you OK with giving them? Anything that they'll eat at this point. Really, yeah. Yeah, really. I'm in dire straits here, because I feel like I'm on a food reality competition show, because they will literally give me, one of them gives me a score out of 1 out of 10. And Gus, the youngest, goes like, I'm a gladiator. And he goes like this. And the hardest part is, no matter what I do, they're just constantly punking me, because it's to the point where it's a bowl of cereal, but no milk. How do I know that? How can I read your mind? Or a bowl of pasta. All kids love pasta. Right. Buttered pasta. No butter. So it's just boiled noodles. Just boiled noodles. It's psychotic. And that must drive, it drives me nuts. It must drive you especially. By the way, this would be a great show, where you have the two meanest little judges in the world, and you have to cook something and present it to them, and then they give you either a pfft or a this. It's every day. Every single day. Yeah, that's tough. Were you like that when you were a kid, or did you eat what you were given? I mean, I ate pretty much everything that my parents gave me, because out of fear, for the most part. Yeah, right. Fear. There was no, even the idea that, there was one thing we wouldn't eat, liver, when my mother would make it. It smelled terrible. We would not eat it. We would be angry, and I don't know why. She would make it like once every three months, just to torture us. Well, I actually didn't mind liver so much. It was like okra and vegetables. It's one of those, I think my kids don't eat vegetables so much, because I actually don't eat vegetables all the time. Oh, all right. Well, that kind of makes sense, I guess. Now, I watch your show, and it's a lot of fun. I watched the Vegas episode. And in the Vegas episode, you mentioned your dad. You talked about your dad, who I know a little bit about from knowing you, and from your book, and everything. But your dad did something that just struck me as very David Chang-y. Which is, he taught you to gamble, but he set out to teach you how to gamble. Yeah, I mean, most people that I know, they play catch, or they have these father-son relationships that are relatively normal. I never had that. My dad never wanted me to cook. He wanted me to be a professional golfer, and when that didn't happen, I got a call. I was in college, and he's like, son, I'm sending a car, and we're going to meet in Atlantic City. I was like, I don't even know what's going on. And sure enough, it was the most bonding I ever had with my father, where he taught me every game of chance in a casino. You went around from table to table, game to game? Two or three days, if I recall, learning how to gamble. And that was the most bonding I've ever had with my dad, and it was pretty awesome, to be honest. Really. And you stuck with it, and you stuck with it. Apple didn't fall too far from the tree, as Jimmy knows. I do like to gamble. Will you pass that along to Hugo and Gus? I promise you I will do the same. You will, you will. Will your wife, Grace, be in favor of that? I hope she doesn't see this show. So you went to Vegas with Cor Jefferson, very talented writer, Oscar winner, in fact. You guys went around to a bunch of Vegas spots. I don't know if you know this, but when you got to Chinatown, that's where I grew up. That is my neighborhood. I grew up right there in Chinatown. It wasn't Chinatown at the time. It is now, but that was where I grew up. Yeah, I played Little League, where you were eating Korean-Chinese fusion. No, yeah, Chinese food in Korea, it's a different thing, and you eat this thing called jajangmyeon, and it's delicious. A lot of people don't know about it, but I introduced it to Cord, and it's cool. Different in the same way that Chinese food in the United States is different from Chinese food in China, or is it just a completely different thing? It's a completely different thing, and that's one of the great things about the show. Sometimes I'm teaching somebody something that I know quite a lot about like that, and oftentimes I'm learning from just regular people on the street, like where to eat, what to do. You said something interesting, I think, to the waiter in the show. You said, all food is fusion. It is. Which is interesting. I never really thought about that. Everything that you think that is authentic was, at one point, somebody said, that's crazy. You cannot put tomato sauce on pasta. That's insane, and then it becomes normalized. It's really a great way to think about it. The other thing that I thought was really interesting is you went to Steve Aoki's house, and you said, I've never been to a house in Las Vegas. It's true, it's true. I mean, I have a restaurant in Las Vegas, and I go to Vegas all the time, and it dawned on me, I was like, wait a second here. This is a strange thing, to be actually in a house, because most people go to Vegas, they just stay in a casino, or they go off the Strip, but not really off the Strip, and that was a weird thing. Yeah, there are houses, and there are families. Some of them have pets. There's like two million people that live in Las Vegas. Yeah, even more than that, yeah. Yeah, well, I'm glad you discovered a house. That's exciting. You, who was like, of your guests, I know each time you have a guest, you have a celebrity guest that travels with you. Who was the most eager to eat weird things? Eric Andre, great comedian, very funny man. When we got to the state of Florida, where we did a road trip. That's where he is from. He is from, and he is so famous in the state of Florida, it is crazy. Is that right? Oh my God. Really? Yeah, he's like John Lennon, or Paul McCartney, or something to them. Really? And he was not afraid to eat anything and everything. What did he eat? Anything? Everyone assumes a chef eats everything, but I don't. You don't? Yeah, maybe I know where my kids get it from, right? But like, we went to a bar, like this dive bar in Key West, and there were frog legs. He's like, yeah. I was like, no. You won't eat a frog leg? I mean, I'll eat it. I'll try a bite of everything, but it's not like what I want. If there's buffalo wings and frog legs, I'm going with buffalo wings. You'll go with the buffalo wings? Yeah, but, you know. All right, well, you know what? I hope Hugo and Gus don't see this. Well, it's great to see you. The show is called DD Tour with David Chang. It premieres on CNN on September 20th, and you can watch it the next day on the CNN app. David Chang, everybody. We'll be back in a minute.