Dinner Time Live with David Chang

All right, pre-service meeting.

We got two amazing guests, Tony Hale, Sam Richardson.

Been in many shows and movies,

but especially Veep, where they both starred together.

Very excited to have them.

They have spent a lot of time or lived in New York City.

I wanna do a East Coast diner-themed menu,

and I think it's gonna be fun and delicious.

I talked to them. They seem like real legit eaters.

Tony, uh, lived in New York.

Sam's a Detroit guy, but he's spent time in diners.

So I was gonna do a gravy fries or disco fries,

but now I'm gonna make chili cheese fries

as an ode to Coney Island and Detroit.

We're gonna do matzo ball soup, we're gonna do a patty melt, egg cream,

um, and this thing that I'm gonna call the moo shu Denver.

You gotta stay tuned to find out how crazy the story is gonna be.

-This one's amazing. -Let's have a good service.

- -Welcome to Dinner Time Live.

Joined with Tony and Sam. Really excited to have you guys.

Everyone here is a super big fan.

Chris Ying's gonna help me figure this whole hour out.

- Don't disappoint. - So excited.

We're doing a New York City, New Jersey, East Coast diner thing.

Theme. Both of you guys spent time...

-This is a lot fancier than a diner. -

Um, you know, a loose interpretation.

And, uh, I got some...

You are starting off on matzo ball soup.

I think, one of the best chicken soups you can possibly have.

-A little bit of dill flavor. - Ooh, yeah.

It's also in a very fancy, like, teacup.

It's also our only two fancy bowls we have.

I put my mouth on it already.

This is my second one

'cause I knocked the other one out so fast.

Um... And I just...

It's the only time I like dill in a dish.

It's the only time.

This, to me, is one of the dishes I fell in love with.

When I lived in New York City, I just ate matzo ball soup.

My first restaurant was a block away from 2nd Ave Deli.

I'd get it all the time.

Is dill a typical ingredient in matzo ball soup?

Uh, I don't know if it's typical,

but I find that those are the matzo ball flavors I like the most.

Everybody else is curious about what's going on in the wok.

-Is that bacon? -Yeah, I forgot how hot I had that pan.

I just did this show with Ryan Hansen on YouTube

where I cooked and talked at the same time.

-Brag. -Yeah.

I'm gonna drop a lot of names today.

Uh, but it was so hard. It was so hard to talk and cook at the same time.

-Thank you. Yeah, right? - Yeah.

To the point where I don't recommend it.

I don't know why you guys are doing this.

Guys, let's, uh...

-Let's just cut. -Let's just sit.

Um...

-I have... -Is that Spam?

No. We have Spam.

We have the holy trinity of breakfast meats.

Great. I'm from the South, man.

-That's fillet mignon to me. - Jimmy Dean breakfast sausage.

Any sage-flavored breakfast sausage will do. And Spam.

Great.

You have all the shapes too. You got a log, a square.

What is this dish called?

Well, it's a nice transition from, uh, matzo ball soup

to go into something totally insane that we're calling moo shu Denver.

- Mm-hmm. -Uh...

I don't even know how we got here.

I don't know why I even thought about a diner

'cause I never order a Denver omelet.

-Do you guys order that? - I don't know what that is.

I'm a big egg person.

-Let's get into it. -Yeah.

-I was born from an egg. -Oh, my God.

I grew into a full man.

I've known you for so long.

-You didn't see me when I was born. -Right.

But anytime there's, like, an egg sort of anything on a menu,

I'm looking at it.

I visit a lot of French restaurants so I'll do the omelet.

Do you know Jason Mantzoukas, I think, is allergic to eggs?

-Is he really? -He's famously allergic to eggs.

-I think... - Whoa.

- I know that. -Yeah.

This is a PSA for no one to serve Jason Mantzoukas eggs.

-I think that's how you say his name. -Mantzoukas. That's right.

Um, wait, so first of all, I wanna say,

I'm excited that there's a drawer for utensils at the bar.

I've never seen that before, and...

We're doing a bit of a renovation,

and I think this is a great idea for a bar in a kitchen.

- Yeah. - So thank you.

I think that's the favorite thing for everybody on this show.

It's really our way of saying, "Get your own damn fork."

- Yeah, clearly. -"We don't wanna do it for you."

Don't want your grubby hands all over.

I don't like that angle, but okay.

That's the immediate angle I saw.

But the moo shu Denver,

Dave started messing with this menu, figuring out what he wanted to do,

the first thing you said to me...

How did we get here?

You said, "We're gonna do a patty melt, do classics, matzo ball soup,

then we're gonna show them how to eat breakfast correctly,"

which to Dave means wrapping things up in something else.

-This is his favorite way to eat. - Correct.

I don't know why, but moo shu pork, if you're not familiar,

it's like a Mandarin pancake with cabbage and pork

and wood ear mushrooms and hoisin sauce, and I don't just do that.

I add, like, noodles and rice and everything.

I basically make a little burrito out of it.

I don't know why or how,

but Denver omelet led to wrapping everything into a pancake.

Do you use Spam often?

-Like, is it a...? -Yeah. I mean, I love Spam.

There was a while where I was embarrassed about my love of Spam.

No shame. No shame.

But I really think Korea would not be around

if we did not have Spam.

But, um, I think it's just a delicious meat.

- What is it? - I was gonna say.

-I mean, it's corned beef, right? - No.

Okay, well, then, that's one strike for me.

I don't know. Is it ham? Is it ham?

Put some respect on its name. You can't say it's corned beef.

- It's not an elegant name. -It's an entire pig put into a can.

Stick a pig into a machine, and out pops this little...

-One pig per can. -Exactly. One pig per can.

Like a big Acme machine that goes in a factory.

-That's dark. -I knew that. I was joking.

I'm doing a rendition of a Denver omelet,

and I've never ordered a Denver omelet.

All I know is there's bell peppers in it. Some green stuff.

- Ham. -Ham.

- Cheese. -Mushrooms.

-Basically everything. Cheese. - Yeah, yeah.

So he started messing with this

and saying, we're gonna wrap this up

'cause if you eat at McDonald's, you get a Big Breakfast,

you wrap the pancake around the sausage. Everybody does that.

Of course, of course.

But he wanted to put the whole kitchen sink in a pot

with eggs and hash browns and everything, and then wrap it up,

then started calling it moo shu Denver.

Thinking that was gonna be a horrible joke,

but we found out that there is a connection.

This is crazy.

This is a discovery today. We're a part of a big discovery.

Legitimately so.

So David started asking:

"Why is it called the Denver omelet?"

How did Denver, of all cities, get its own omelet, right?

-You ever wonder? -I really do, every day.

-Weird. You've asked me that. -Yeah, and he didn't have the answer.

-Of all the cities in America, why Denver? -Yeah.

Poor Denver's like, "Hey."

Nothing against Denver. I love Denver. Mile High City. It's great.

But they don't deserve their own omelet.

Not on the top of the list of omelet-deserving towns.

But we started looking into this, and it turns out the Denver omelet

is actually a direct descendant of egg foo young.

- You know what egg foo young is? - I do.

-It's roast beef, right? Corned beef? -

Oh, Sam.

Sam, I don't want this to happen again.

What, am I wrong this time too?

We're gonna say you're right.

- You can be right this time. - You nailed it.

But egg foo young was this fluffy omelet

that Chinese laborers working on the railroads,

during the silver rush of the late 1800s or whatever, would make this omelet.

And they didn't wrap it in a pancake like Dave,

but they ate it as this sandwich.

So this thing that he worked his way all the way to 150 years later

that we were very proud of and thought, "Dave has created a brand-new thing,"

as usual...

But you guys are the first people to ever get, I think, a moo shu Denver.

-I'm very excited. - Honored.

So can you break it down, um, like a normal cooking show?

- -Um...

-Very strange we're not... - Taking so long on the process.

We're not going by protocol here.

Um, what is...? What is in that?

'Cause I'd like to make it too, maybe.

When we made this, I thought it was gonna be horrible.

When we tasted it, it was like, "We're definitely serving this." Um...

So I make a batter that's really almost like a crepe batter,

but most crepe batters don't have baking powder or baking soda,

the leavening agents that give a lot of cakes, uh, the rise.

So I basically just did flour, a little baking powder,

a little baking soda, milk, and a couple eggs.

And on this show, we don't take any measurements.

So I have no idea how much I put in, but...

uh...

this is basically what I'm making.

-I made some already. - Yeah, yeah, yeah.