Danny Bowien - The Mission Chinese Food Cookbook

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THE MISSION CHINESE FOOD COOKBOOK. Copyright 2015 by Danny Bowien and Chris Ying. Foreword copyright 2015 by Anthony Bourdain. Foreword copyright 2015 by David Chang. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST EDITION

ISBN 978-0-06-224341-6

EPub Edition November 2015 ISBN 9780062243430

15 16 17 18 19 OV/QGT 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Youngmi, my strength, and Mino, my inspiration

and

For Mom, Dad, and Jami

by Anthony Bourdain

There was a time when authenticity was a serious factor in assessing the meal you were about to haveor the one you had just had. Was this pasta sauced the way the nonnas would do it, back in Modena or Naples? Is this a real tacoor an Americans idea of a taco?

And cultural appropriation: this, too, was a factor.

Were those Chinese or Koreans preparing that sushi? Werent they historical antagonists? Should I feel queasy at the prospect of a white guy serving Thai food?

All such questions became instantly quaint with the emergence of Mission Chinese.

The mutant offspring of a taco cart, a charitable pop-up, a loose gathering of chefs, it ended up metastasizing from a two-nights-a-week experiment inside Lung Shan, an existing Chinese restaurant in San Franciscos Mission District, to the hottest, hardest-to-get-into, most influential restaurant in New York.

On any given night, Mission Chinese in its original iteration, a crummy, half-assed tenement building on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, would be clogged with pleasure-seekersmany of them chefsgreedily scarfing up everything on the menu. It was a hallowed ground, with crowds spilling out into the street, forming a line of the food-obsessed who would cheerfully wait for hours. Food writers would be stacked in holding, like planes circling over OHare in bad weather. At every table, drunk, happy people Instagrammed their food between bites. Meanwhile, Danny Bowien, improbable King of New York, improbable host, toastmaster general, and Korean American kid from Oklahoma City, popped in and out of the kitchen, dropping teapots of mai tais (as I remember dimly, anyway) and one plate after another of sizzling, searingly delicious food in front of his deliriously happy guests.

Oh, NO! Its too hot! said chef Eric Ripert, standing suddenly bolt upright, a look of genuine alarm on his face.

Hed just had his first bite of Mission Chineses notorious Chongqing Chicken Wingsa dish with a somewhat higher burn quotient than my Michelin-starred friend was used to.

He ran urgently to the bathroom, returning later with the news that the music from Twin Peaks was playing in there.

Eric went on to thoroughly enjoy his first Mission Chinese experience, the Salt-Cod Fried Rice being a particular highlight for him. He wouldnt return to the chicken wings that night, but the next morning my phone rang early.

It was Eric. In his French accent, still thick with sleep, he said, We have to go back for that chicken. Ive been thinking about it all night. I dont know why. I dont understand. But I think I need more.

Without knowing it, Ripert had, I believe, put his finger on one of the more important, revolutionary aspects of what Mission Chinese is doing.

Great restaurants teach us somethingnot just about food or hospitality, but about ourselves and our desiresthat we didnt know before.

When Mario Batalis Babbo opened in 1998, it taught us that, yes, we want, maybe even need, beef cheeks and calves brains and lambs tongues in our food.

Ten years later, Dave Changs Momofuku Ko taught us that, given the opportunity, wed rather enjoy fine dining at a counter, dispensing with the bullshit.

And now Mission Chinese has taught us that we are, in fact, capable of experiencing much more pain while eating than we might previously have thought possible. That we can enjoy food just as spicymaybe even spicierthan our fellow food enthusiasts in Chengdu and that, like them, we can sit there, sweating and pink-faced, mopping our necks, heads aflame, growing only more gloriously and deliriously happy. That we not only get what is going on in a scorching ma po tofu, but we now crave it. Have to have it.

Its like you live your whole life pretty damn sure that you dont like pain of any kind. It could be a trio of oiled-up supermodels waving that bullwhip or nipple clamp, but you aint having any of it. Then something happens. Life changes. You learn some very dark shit about yourself. And Mission Chinese shows it to you.

But its not just about the heat, or the fact that the food is so maddeningly, addictively flavorful. What makes Mission Chinese a game-changing enterprise (I know, its a hideously overused term, but stay with me) is not just the democratic everybody-waits-on-line, first-come-first-served ethic, or the fact that the menu reflects, to an unusual degree, what chefs in particular want to eat. Its not even the whole DIY, over-the-top, supercharged, pleasure-dome-in-a-shithole thing.

Its the fact that Danny Bowien, and a few others like himmostly first-generation immigrants from Asiaare changing, redefining, and defining forever what American cuisine really is.

America, after all, is a young country. We are still, after all these years, struggling to define in any meaningful way what it is to be American. We are, almost all of us, from somewhere else. Or our parents were. Or our grandparents. We dont have a national cuisine like the French. Or an imperial one like the Chinese. Our old school is mostly from the Southitself a reflection of African culinary traditions and ingredients, Native American foodways, French aspirations, Scots Irish appetites, and cooks who were, by and large, slaves.