The fancy mall in the Time Warner Center known as the Shops at Columbus Circle has a lot to answer for. Its opening, in 2003, may have marked Manhattan’s capitulation to a retail landscape ruled by chains rather than independent, homegrown businesses.
For diners, the mall is best known for its eating-and-drinking zone named, with matchless pretentiousness, the Restaurant Collection. This brought us Per Se and Masa, which overnight made the city’s other high-end restaurants seem as affordable as Veselka. It was the start of a new class of restaurants where dinner would be priced like a luxury good, with entry-level meals that today cost $300 or more. Much more, in Masa’s case.
The purpose of this exclusivity was to signal to people with money to spend that they would be comfortable spending it in the Shops at Columbus Circle. For the same reason, businesses that were too far down-market were not welcome as tenants. This is why there’s a Whole Foods Market but not a Family Dollar.
Pork and other meats are cooked on a vertical rotisserie, shawarma-style, at David Chang’s Bang Bar.CreditJeenah Moon for The New York Times
Mr. Chang is a close observer of the ways society assigns high status to the food of some cultures and devalues the cooking of others. One of his greatest hits is a riff about New Yorkers who complain about $17 bowls of ramen while paying $30 for spaghetti. If he has a routine about vertical rotisseries I’ve never heard it, but surely he is alive to the associations they conjure, from Greek diners to taco trucks to the Halal Guys carts parked near Columbus Circle. If anybody grasps the cultural implications of bringing $6 street-meat sandwiches indoors where they can perfume the air breathed by consumers of Pink shirts and Floga furs, it is Mr. Chang.
Bang Bar might make more sense as a provocation than a business concern. It begins serving at 8:30 a.m. and closes when the food is gone, usually by 1 or 2 p.m. In the weeks after its opening, on Halloween, the lines were worthy of the Department of Motor Vehicles. Employees tried to appease the horde by handing out off-the-menu snacks, like rice porridge with fermented shiitakes, and asking whimsical survey questions. (“Do you keep peanut butter in the fridge?”)
After Mr. Chang opened a Momofuku Noodle Bar in the space next door, Bang Bar’s crowds grew somewhat more manageable, and when I showed up for breakfast at the end of December, there was no line at all. Maybe Deutsche Bank employees will keep Bang Bar’s early shift afloat, but right now its success seems to hinge on the lunch rush.
There are two rotisseries. After 11 a.m., one spit is buried deep inside a missile of dark chicken marinated with a yakitori-style glaze. The other is at the center of a red, dripping, gochujang-rubbed tower of pork. Ideally, whichever meat you choose will have built up a dark outer bark that can be lopped off with a few knife strokes and stacked on to a disc of griddled flatbread. The bread, thicker than a tortilla and less oily than a roti, will be rolled tight, like a cigarette, then bent in half, with both open ends at the top. This is called, in Bang Bar parlance, a U.
The chicken or pork can also be piled over a bowl of rice, but the bread is really very good. A close relative of the flatbread Mr. Chang’s crew originated at Majordomo in Los Angeles, it is perceptibly tangy and salted, without being salty.
A couple of condiments — including habanero salsa and the brick-red Ssam Sauce used, in various iterations, to italicize Noodle Bar’s pork buns and a hundred other creations in Mr. Chang’s Momofuku restaurant group — are kept out on a counter alongside the moist towelettes. But they’re hard to apply once a U has been rolled. What I did want was a spoonful or two of raw white onions, some chopped cucumber, maybe parsley or cilantro — the kind of simple salad that is almost always lobbed into a shawarma or a doner kebab. Both the chicken and pork are slightly sweet, and could use a lift.
The lunch menu also has two dips — a darkly fascinating, spicy eggplant spread, or whipped chickpeas whose sharp, pecorino-like flavor betrays the presence of Hozon, the fermented chickpea paste invented in a Momofuku laboratory. They are alluring enough, but the real reason to order them is the bread, puffier and softer than the one that wraps the U.
A smaller version of this, maybe five inches across, is folded in half like a taco to make a “mini,” which replaces the U at breakfast. It is no great shock that this bread works nicely with smoked salmon and scallion cream cheese blended with just enough soy sauce to make it arguably Asian. It is more flavorful than a bagel and better at holding everything together. But it is somewhat surprising how delicious a freshly griddled mini is with caper-scallion cream cheese, salted cucumber, tomato and fresh dill inside. The whole thing tastes alive in a way that a bagel with a schmear of veggie cream cheese never will.
I’ve saved the breakfast mini with mortadella for last, although it’s been the subject of the most rapt online attention. Building logs of mortadella layered with lardo and roasting them on spits is exactly the sort of thing the Momofuku group was put on this earth to do. I am glad this revolving meat torpedo exists. I respect Bang Bar’s cooks — this collaborative effort has no chef, Mr. Chang said in a phone interview — for realizing that the proper garnish for caramelized mortadella shavings is a slice of yellow American cheese and hot mustard. I appreciate the respect the sandwich pays to both fried baloney and Taylor Ham. And if I were in the habit of turning up at Columbus Circle with a hangover in the mornings, I would probably become a regular consumer of mortadella minis with Ssam Sauce. With a clear head and stomach, though, the saltiness can be a little too bracing.
At either meal, Bang Bar offers a cinnamon roll modeled on the kkwabaegi, the twisted Korean doughnut stick. It is baked rather than fried, making it a rare example of a Momofuku dish that contains less fat than its inspiration. It is a fine pastry to have with Bang Bar’s Vietnamese coffee, even after you learn that the cream cheese icing contains fermented chickpeas.
By the way, bang, or bbang or ppang, depending on how you like your Korean words transliterated, means bread. So this shawarma joint inside a mall is officially a bread bar, which makes sense given how pleasant the bread is. Still, I can’t help wondering how the people in charge of the Restaurant Collection felt about welcoming a place called Bang Bar.
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