Artist Profile: Tracy Chang on Food, Community, and Pugs

James Beard-nominated chef Tracy Chang’s love of food started in her grandmother’s Japanese restaurant, right here in Cambridge.

“I have super fond memories of sitting at the bar of the restaurant, whether it was a sushi bar or the ‘bar’ bar, and drinking Shirley Temples,” Chang said in an interview with The Crimson.

Despite her family’s involvement in the food business, Chang was actually directed away from the food industry, recalling that her parents considered the restaurant a place for “smoking and gambling and drinking.”

Chang was on the pre-med track at Boston College, where she studied finance. In spite of her family’s directives, Chang found herself constantly drawn back to food, spending much of her free time cooking for friends, tailoring different dishes to their personal tastes and dietary restrictions.

Due to the poor state of the economy during her senior year of college and her growing dispassion for banking, Chang began to pursue her culinary interests by working at o ya — a fine dining restaurant in Boston. From there, interested in gaining a more formal culinary foundation, Chang went to Paris for a one-month intensive course in patisserie at Le Cordon Bleu.

While Chang did not have a foundation in pastry, she understood the field to be an important learning experience.

“Pastry chefs are perfectionists,” she said.

After Paris, Chang won a scholarship to apprentice with Chef Martín Berasategui in his three-Michelin-star restaurant, Restaurante Martín Berasategui near San Sebastian. When asked about her time in Spain, Chang reminisced on the grueling but highly educational experience.

“I started on fish, which they told me later was the hardest station or the most rigorous,” she said.

While Chang ultimately had to return to Boston to care for her sick father, she would go on to create a pop-up restaurant, Guchi’s Midnight Ramen, with some former co-workers from o ya. At the time, ramen was neither common in Boston, yet Chang found that people were excited to try the new dishes. She observed that it was this excitement that fueled her to found her restaurant, Pagu.

“I wanted to keep testing these ideas and these recipes,” she said.

The concept of Pagu embodies Chang’s experiences in previous kitchens and her viewpoint on what food means to her. Named after the Japanese word for “pug,” the restaurant sits at the intersection of Spanish and Japanese cuisine — a clear reflection of her experiences at o ya and Restaurante Martín Berasategui. Dishes range from traditional tapas such as croquetas and jamón ibérico to typical izakaya dishes such as katsu and roasted black cod.

One element of Chang’s food that she takes pride in is its freshness.

“You might go to another tapas restaurant or Japanese izakaya, and they might not make their aioli or their hot sauce or their baos from scratch, but all that stuff we make in house,” she said.

However, Chang was most emphatic about the personal meaning behind this food.

“I like to make dishes that have specific meaning to me,” she said.

Chang focuses on food as a source of nourishment and empowerment for one’s emotions and community, in addition to one’s body. This belief is perhaps best exemplified by Chang’s forays outside of the formal kitchen, such as hosting events and collaborations with other chefs.

She also has helped run fundraiser dinners, such as one for Boston’s Chinatown Neighborhood Center to illuminate the difficulties that Chinatowns are facing across the country. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Chang created “Off Their Plate,” an organization that provided hot meals to healthcare workers across Boston.

“Restaurants can be a place, a platform, for us to help a lot of other people in the community,” she said.

Chang also teaches, having presented at food conferences, radio stations, and even Harvard’s Science and Cooking course. These experiences directly inspired Chang to create a program at Pagu that offers courses on how to make sushi and hand-pulled noodles.

Ultimately, Chang’s outlook on food and cooking could be summed up by the word “Pagu” itself, which she revealed means “pug” in Japanese; Chang even has her own pug — Pearl.

“I wanted a name that would stick, and I wanted a name that would be forever sparkly and exciting and playful. I realized that my pugs that I’ve had my whole life would just look at me and kind of wiggle their heads and their tails. And they were and have been my muses,” she said.

Ultimately, while Chang's path to food was not linear, she has managed to embrace her life experiences in her cooking and spread hope for the community through it.

—Staff writer Noelle J. Chung can be reached at noelle.chung@thecrimson.com.