Women Everywhere in Food Empires But No Head Chefs

Over the past decade, David Chang has built Momofuku from a small ramen bar in Manhattan’s East Village to an eight-restaurant empire with roughly 500 staffers in the U.S., Canada and Australia. Here’s what else he’s done:

He’s earned two Michelin stars and four James Beard Awards. He’s accrued nearly 100,000 Twitter followers. He’s disrupted the French-Italian pastry monopoly by starting, with Christina Tosi, a chain of Milk Bar bakeries that tout haute junk food over croissants and cannolis. And he co-founded a quarterly food magazine called Lucky Peach, one of whose publications was titled “The Gender Issue.”