Party of Two

Take two creative food lovers with opposite personalities, sprinkle in a long-simmering friendship, and add lots of laughter. The result: one special romance and a hot new restaurant.

THEY ARE, ALMOST LITERALLY, LIKE NIGHT and day. If she had her way, she says, she'd always be in bed by 8. He's the type of guy who's just getting started by then.

Before opening their restaurant together in the South End last fall, Christopher Myers and Joanne Chang often conducted their relationship as if they were on a 12-hour time difference. Chang, the daughter of Taiwanese immigrants, had her two Flour bakeries, the original on Washington Street and a new one at Fort Point Channel - neighborly sandwich and-scones kitchens that radiate the owner's rise-and-shine attitude. Her fiance, Newburyport native Myers, meanwhile, established his big personality as co-owner (with award-winning chef Michael Schlow) of three distinct fine-dining experiences - Via Matta, Great Bay, and the nationally esteemed Radius - each uniquely invigorated by the pull of the moon. Their schedules were so incompatible that for the first few years after Chang moved into Myers's Leather District loft, they communicated by the shower wall, leaving valentines and rendezvous plans for each other scribbled in the steamy glass.

In many ways, the things that make these two professional hosts tick are as divergent as their internal clocks. She's an avid marathoner and often bikes to work; he hates to exercise - resents every second of it. He's a music fanatic and thought long and hard about the soundtrack for their restaurant; she's oblivious to it. She plans, prepares, prioritizes. He wings it, makes another phone call, goes golfing.

"I'm a crammer," he admits, cheerfully. But if they are an odd couple, there has been no mistaking their baby, from the moment of arrival. Myers + Chang, the futuristic Asian diner at the corner of Washington and East Berkeley, is an adorable little thing born with his eyes and hands, her nose and heart.

The food is all Chang, a fresh, clean take on udon noodles, chow fun, pot-stickers, and other traditional Chinese, Thai, and Vietnamese dishes. The staff, well versed in her mantra of personable service, is appealingly hip yet nerdy - art schoolish, attentive, and engaging all at once. Design-wise, with its mirrored walls, stylish plastic bar seats, and culture-mashup mystique, the room gleams like something out of a William Gibson novel. Blue light from the new curbside Silver Line stop glances in through the windows at night, coincidentally enhancing the kind of LA-noir effect that Myers, once an aspiring actor, was aiming for.

His renowned aesthetic sense, in fact, is written all over the new restaurant. So is his bonhomie: "He who laughs at himself never runs out of material," someone has scrawled, fortune-cookie style, in wax on one mirrored wall.

If there is one thing besides food that has drawn these two people together, it certainly seems to be the laughter.

THEY MET, THE STORY GOES, OVER A JOKE. A dumb one, at that.

Chang, an honors graduate in applied mathematics at Harvard, is semi-legendary in her kitchens for her ability to recite Pi to the 15th decimal. After college she scrapped a promising career in management consulting to pursue her homebody passion for baking chocolate chip cookies. "There was always a tub of cookie dough in the fridge," recalls longtime friend Jenn Tombaugh, a former colleague and roommate.

Breaking in, Chang took a job as garde-manger at Biba, Lydia Shire's signature '90s restaurant on Boylston Street. Tombaugh, now a business executive in Connecticut, still marvels at her friend's determination: "To say, `I'm gonna go sit in the kitchen and cut vegetables for the first year, until I get the chance to bake' - that was a hard message to deliver to a family who came from Asia, who worked so hard to advance their children." But Chang's parents, who raised their son and daughter primarily in Dallas and Houston, were terrifically supportive. After Biba, their daughter moved on to the Bentonwood Bakery in Newton Centre. When that business was closing, her manager suggested they grab a drink at Rialto, where the manager knew the partners.

It's the kind of creation story couples tell and retell, with the details growing fuzzier and more cartoonish by the year. According to Chang, Rialto's manager at the time, a rather brash former classics major (and onetime Harvard doctoral candidate), introduced himself to the very slender young baker with a groaner of a riddle about pastry.

Why did the apple turn over? Because it saw the jelly roll.

Standing now, 13 years later, in the stainlesssteel kitchen of their open-layout condominium overlooking Chinatown, the two gently chide each other about that initial meeting.

"From then on, I was smitten," Chang teases as she dices carrots for some Vietnamese spring rolls she wants to try.

"She claims I just sat down and blurted that out!" Myers protests in mock indignation. In truth, he swears, he made a gallant attempt at small talk, which just happened to include his cornball attempt at humor.

Not only a connoisseur of food and wine, Myers is also a raconteur who can expound at length about travel and books and politics. Corny, he is typically not. Despite wearing his urbanity as conspicuously as his rock-star chains and bracelets, however, he is quick to smile and to poke fun at anyone within earshot, especially himself. "You have a natural curiosity about life," says Chang, looking wholesome and casual in a gossamer fitted pullover and a new pair of jeans. "That's what I'm drawn to."

"I'm confused by the world," Myers deadpans. "I'm looking for answers."

His hair still wet from a late-morning start, spread-collar shirt untucked over his own stylish jeans, he perches on a stool at a corner of the counter, taking a bird's-eye view of his fiancee's handiwork. Chang is wetting rice paper wrappers at the prep counter, standing an arm's length not only from him but also the sink, the stove top, and her knives. It's easy to imagine they spend an awful lot of time in these very footprints when they're home together.

In fact, Myers says, during the yearlong run-up to the opening of Myers + Chang, she cooked nonstop, testing recipes. Now they eat at the restaurant practically every day. "I'm sure people in the building think we've moved out," he says.

In his two decades in the business, Myers - whether serving as maitre d', sommelier, overall conceptualist, or all of the above - has always left the cooking to others. "I'd say I can cook," he reports. "I just have no will to do it." He claims he hasn't been in a grocery store in years. When the couple throw a dinner party, he says, he makes one token dish, and he'll usually rely on Chang to help him finish it. When his large and scattered family reconvenes for holidays, his brother in New Hampshire usually does the hosting and cooking.

Chang, on the other hand, has a mind that seems to be constantly weighing ingredients. After sampling the spring rolls (maybe add something peppery, Myers suggests; both agree there are too many chopped peanuts in the sauce), she whips up a small batch of the homemade, oversized Oreo cookies that are a Flour favorite. With a proposal for her first baking cookbook due in a few weeks, she wants to see how easy they'd be to make at home. "Usually, we do this in a 60-quart mixer," she says.

Her own 4-quart KitchenAid mixer was one of the few things she brought with her when she moved in a few years ago from her apartment above the original Flour. What else? After a long pause, furrowing her brow, she brightens. "I brought my pillow," she says, turning to Myers with a smile. "Then you got rid of it."

The loft looks the same as it did when it was still Myers's bachelor pad. The largest wall is dominated by a huge orange tapestry, a flat-screen TV, and a tall pile of novels on a bookstand. He's the one with the real eye for design. It's not as if he had to stash his Day-Glo poster of Jimi Hendrix when she arrived, Myers says.

Yet "every single person thinks it's changed remarkably since you moved in," he says to Chang. "It used to be much colder, not as homey. That's some effect you've had on me."

SHE GOT THE GIG. AFTER ENDURING the apple turnover joke, Chang was hired in 1995 as the pastry chef at Rialto, where she stayed for two years. There was, however, nothing more to Myers's opening gambit, romantically speaking. For one thing, there were other girlfriends for him and boyfriends for her. Chang was dating a former Harvard classmate and future Bringing Down the House author, Ben Mezrich, while Myers went through a series of relationships.

"My history," he says, grasping for words, "is with . . . crazy people?"

Their camaraderie was so innocent that, when Rialto closed for two weeks for remodeling, the two proposed a vacation in China, thinking it might become a group venture for several managers. They ended up being the only two to make the trip. To save money, they shared rooms with twin beds. In hindsight, the couple admit, there was a certain chemistry between them that would remain unacknowledged for years. "I have a tragically bad memory," Myers says, "but I remember many days from that trip pretty accurately."

They never wanted to ruin the friendship, Chang says. After two years at Rialto, she skipped town for New York, to make cakes for the star pastry chef Francois Payard at his Upper East Side patisserie. Myers opened the impressive, then-very-un-Boston-like Radius to great fanfare, followed by Via Matta. She came back, settled at Mistral, and began planning her own venture.

When Flour opened in 2000 on Washington Street, that lower part of the South End was still mostly barren of restaurants or, for that matter, signs of neighborhood bustle of any kind. Though she says she had ongoing discussions with the Boston Redevelopment Authority about the pace of renewal, Chang factors more than a little luck into her great success there. She burned through her life savings and borrowed, as she says, "a buttload" from her parents to get the place off the ground. And one day, when the bakery had been up and running a little over a year, she sat down on the bench outside the front door with her friend Christopher. Knowing she was disappointed that the bakery hadn't won any awards in its first year, he'd brought a little gift, a set of bamboo bowls, and a note declaring her "Best of Boston." It was time, she suddenly knew, to ruin the friendship.

"I told him, `I, like, like you,' like we were in the third grade," she recalls with a smile. Myers, she remembers, was "blown away, befuddled."

"I was dense," he agrees. "And that's not a field I'm typically dense in."

Looking back, say their friends, the bond was always apparent, if not necessarily to the couple themselves. The fact that Chang waited until she'd established her own place before admitting it is significant, says one.

"I'd imagine he'd be intimidating, larger than life," says Amanda Lydon, who, with her husband, Gabriel Frasca, worked with Myers at Radius before taking over the Straight Wharf on Nantucket. They remain frequent double-dating partners with Myers and Chang.

At almost 12 years his junior - Myers just turned 50 - Chang may have felt a subconscious need to prove her own business savvy before taking him on as a partner, Lydon suggests. At work, he can be a tough taskmaster. "He's fun in a crowd," says Lydon, but he can also be a "nightmare" boss: "He keeps you up at night and makes you better."

The growing pains of Great Bay, the youngest of Myers's three restaurants with his partners Schlow and Esti Parsons, certainly gave him a nightmare or two. During the facade renovation of Kenmore Square's Hotel Commonwealth, guests at the grand new seafood restaurant had to step under scaffolding to get through the front door. "We opened to great fanfare, then had a bare bulb hanging in the door of a three-and-a-half-million-dollar restaurant," he says, still smarting from the experience.

By contrast, opening the low-key Myers + Chang has been a genuine joy. With a name that evokes a heart-shaped vow carved in tree bark, the restaurant is their own entrepreneurial love nest, with the added benefit of paying guests.

Chang, says Myers's close friend Parsons, completes him. "If there was ever a person I could imagine with Christopher, like, forever," she says, "it's Joanne. She's wonderful, calm and kind. And Christopher is wonderful and kind, but not particularly the calmest person." She laughs.

ON A RECENT MONDAY NIGHT, THE proprietors sit together at the first two seats, just inside the front door, having dinner. Chang is in her chef 's whites; Myers looks as though he's dressed for a date, in a blazer and a fine T-shirt emblazoned with a dragon, like the one on the front window. Spread before them, across place mats recycled from Chinese community newspapers, is a sprawling menu sampler - the chicken cashew, the sea bass, a side of the Brussels sprouts. Myers is leaving in the morning to accompany his 14-year-old godson, a golfing phenom, to a tournament in Florida. Chang has her notebook out, jotting some of their latest thoughts on the business - the upcoming patio season, how to accommodate large parties in the intimate space.

To Myers's amusement, his fiancee is still learning how to delegate the daily duties of the restaurant. She's a hands-on perfectionist who once came down from her old apartment on her day off to fix the dishwasher at Flour. When Chang opened her second bakery, she agonized about spending less time at the first, he says. "She felt like a bad mom."

She is, however, learning. Nearby, one of the waiters fumbles a ramekin of lemon creme, and it splotches across the floor. The couple look over their shoulders as the waiter wipes up the mess. Chang smiles, and Myers tells her she has a piece of food stuck in her teeth.

Ian, the floor manager, stops by to check on the food, engaging Myers in a discussion that ranges from a new band to HBO's John Adams miniseries. Chang pores over her notes as "Rock Around the Clock" bubbles over the sound system.

"I don't think we'll ever get sick of eating here," says Myers, taking a contented look around. For both of the names on the door, this is comfort food.