Danny Bowien - Mission Vegan

The Mission Chinese Food Cookbook

BY KIM HASTREITER

Ill never forget the night I first met Danny Bowien. The year was 2011 and I was in San Francisco with my crazy bestie Joey Arias to perform with my other brilliant friend Thomas Lauderdales band Pink Martini. For fun, Thomas had invited Joey to sing and me to play the triangle and cymbals as guest performers with the band for a few nights at the Symphony Hall there. None of us were from San Francisco, but I had some great friends there who knew everything and everybody from the underground up and steered us to the best newest, most genius stuff to do and see while we were in town. As usual, I became the tour guide bossing my posse around about what we should do, buy, eat, and see. Casing out the alternative city culture as soon as I arrived, I immediately discovered that at that moment in time, San Francisco seemed to be nurturing a whole fresh youth cultural movement that was centered around FOOD.

As a self-described cultural anthropologist, seeing this new generation latching onto food as culture in this town where the queen motherlegend of New American Cuisinethe visionary Alice Watershad opened Chez Panisse in 1971 made sense to me. Waters had changed everything with Chez Panisse. Her powerful philosophy of serving only ethically and locally sourced food cooked simply was new and began a seismic change in American cuisine, eventually putting the United States on the global culinary map. News of her then-radical ideas spread, turning San Francisco in the seventies into a culinary mecca for food makers and lovers everywhere. And now, forty years later, new generations seemed to be picking up the baton and continuing to shake things up once again.

As soon as I arrived in town, the very first thing I was emphatically instructed to do with my big motley crew was to head down to Mission Street and wait in line for a table at an innocuous, generic-looking, old, beaten-up Chinese restaurant there called Lung Shan, where some young punk-y kids had supposedly taken over the kitchen guerilla-style a few nights a week and were serving a super radical and creative menu (alongside the OG Chinese takeout fare). All my Frisco friends were talking about this. The buzz was BIG. The lines were LONG. The food was RAD. The idea was NEW. The prices were DEMOCRATIC. The ingredients were ETHICAL. And the chef/cofounder (Danny Bowien) was COLORFUL, COOL, and TALENTED. Oh, and he was supposed to be really really NICE, too.

The wait was quite a while, so our whole Pink Martini crew happily joined the party taking place on the sidewalk with the other hungry festive local culture vultures outside waiting to get in. When we finally got our table, I discovered Danny was a fan of Paper (the magazine I used to make back then). He took the time to give us a giant warm welcome in the middle of his chaotic and overwhelming night. The place was pumping, Danny was racing around like an athlete, and I loved him immediately. We ordered everything on the menu. And with every dish delivery, he checked in with us like an eager puppy to see how we liked it all. Of course, his kung pao pastrami was the star of the night for everybody. It kind of summed up Mission Chinese Foods rebel attitude to me and how this new generation of subversive kids were pushing boundaries with their new medium. They were turning it all upside down, experimenting with OG cultural dishes while respecting the provenance, ethics, and heritage of San Franciscos early eat-local mavericks like Ms. Waters.

Now, I am not a part of the culinary world or a food critic. I am a culture person. Ive spent my whole life and career chasing creative subcultural movementsand the subversive energy of dinner that night eleven years ago really struck a chord with me. After stuffing ourselves to the gills, I left Mission Chinese that night with the strong feeling in my gut that something new culturally was going on with these new creatives coming up in this town. Danny was the kind of rebel kid that years before (if hed been in my generation) wouldve channeled that energy into making art, starting a band in his garage, or shooting Super 8 movies underground. As I sniffed around San Francisco that trip, I began to notice more and more very cool young folks who were making culture around foodgrowing it, cooking it, butchering it, reinventing it, fusing it, and most important, building communities around it. I was so inspired by this new young San Francisco food scene that I decided then and there that I needed to create a special food issue of Paper. Danny Bowien was the one who excited me the most that trip, so I crammed in a few more visits before I left town and by the time I returned home, Id made a new friend. As I pulled my food issue together six months later, I got word that Danny had rented a little basement spot on Orchard Street to open a Mission in NYC. I was ecstatic! So of course he became part of my issue, front and center.

From the moment my issue came out and Danny moved to NYC, I watched his journey become a saga. As years passed, Mission opened and closed on Orchard Street, reopened in Chinatown, opened in Bushwick, closed in Chinatown. He hustled his ass off, as we New Yorkers tend to do. But all throughout his journey, the one consistent thing that Danny brought to my city was a sense of community. And throughout it all, I saw clearly that my friend Danny was happiest when he was feeding this community.

Mission Chinese became my canteen. I met so many people and made so many friends there over the years. Danny introduced me to his posse of young friends there, and of course Id drag my family of OGs to Mission often so he met my old friends there. Our friends then met each other and young and older generations of like-minded creative New Yorkers got all mixed up. So much love in that place. Friends got married. Friends got divorced. Friends got famous, friends had babies, friends fell in love, friends went into rehab, friends even died. There are so many stories. Like the time Danny cooked for twenty-five of us at Mission after the huge womens march before the catastrophe of Donald Trumps presidency began. Or the first birthday party at Mission Chinese of Danny and Youngmis beautiful son, Mino, who was dressed in traditional Korean gowns. I remember the day well, especially the huge platters of food they served from neighborhood places like Katzs Deli and Russ & Daughters. Danny loved those kinds of legendary old-school New York spots. He was always excited to turn me on to somewhere he loved. Like the time he took me to eat my first burger at Peter Luger (with no reservation and no wait) or schlepped with me for the first time to Barney Greengrass for matzoh brei or to some insane sushi place on the Upper East Side or to his favorite old-school Ballatos for spaghetti and meatballs on Houston Street. And everywhere he went hed bring bags of his mapo tofu or hotter than hell chicken wings as a treat for the staff at whatever restaurant he was eating at. Of course, Danny was beloved and treated so well everywhere. I remember Danny hosting a Pink Martini practice once during Mission Chinese off hours for a gaggle of my friends who were immigrants from all over the world. It was at the beginning of the Trump years and so I invited lots of my immigrant friends to perform the song America from West Side Story