Late in Larissa MacFarquhar’s profile of David Chang, the Momofuku man makes a confession: “I’m slowly realizing that I’m a highly complex individual,” he says. It’s not an insight likely to surprise readers of the piece, which will appear in The New Yorker this week. Chang comes across as brilliant, inspired, and high-strung to the point of actually giving himself shingles, a diagnosis made by a doctor after the chef literally incapacitated himself with worry and anxiety. But if you want to get a sense of how intense Chang really is, just read the passage where he reads the riot act to a group of hapless Noodle Bar cooks, who had committed offenses ranging from using tongs on the family-meal chicken (a Chang bête noire) to cutting up the fish cakes for the ramen carelessly.

The New Yorker has a truly mind-boggling story in this week’s issue, a story so bizarre we could hardly believe it, even though we're familiar with the subject. Bobby Egan, the owner of an unremarkable Hackensack meatery named Cubby’s, has become an unofficial liaison with the North Korean government. We expected the piece to be pretty lighthearted, the tale of an unwitting dupe doing PR for Kim Jong Il as if he were the Mayor of West New York. The truth is far weirder, and more chilling: In fact, Egan presents himself as an adviser to the North Koreans on high matters of state.

This week’s New Yorker offers a touching portrait of a restaurant mogul in pain – in this case, food-court mogul Dennis Riese, the owner of Hawaiian Tropic Zone. Riese knows that people consider the Zone little better than an upscale Hooters, or worse, a strip club. But nothing could be further from the truth, he says: For one thing, there are “no nipples.” You can’t very well have a strip club without nipples, can you? Of course, even nipples wouldn’t necessarily make the Zone woman-unfriendly. “Women like sexy. Talk about empowerment and feminism! There’s nowhere offering women sexy in the way they would like it to be — classy sexy!” The short piece is probably a ten on what ESPN’s Bill Simmons likes to call the Unintentional Comedy Scale, but we feel a twinge of sympathy for the Zone, having actually been forced to eat at the regular Hooters, which, “talent” aside, has pretty awful food.

In The Zone [NYer]

Related: Hawaiian Tropic Zone's Tina Marino Probably Won't Be Sharing Her Life With You
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