Earlier this month at the big James Beard Awards hoop-de-doo in New York, the “Rising Star Chef” award went to a young man named Danny Bowien. He ascended the stage at Lincoln Center in a white tux offset by a pair of Air Jordan 11 Space Jams on his feet and a lime-green ponytail dangling from his variously dyed crown of hair. The crowd erupted in applause.
Bowien is beloved by the foodie-gensia for his two branches of Mission Chinese Food (www.missionchinesefood.com) in San Francisco and New York. He has been profiled in GQ and modeled for the Japanese clothing store Uniqlo. He has "Next Big Thing" written all over him — a chef celebrated for his creative take on Chinese restaurant cooking who's also a burgeoning style icon.
Bowien — a Korean-American young man from Oklahoma — has become the face for a new kind of post-punk Asian-inspired cooking in America. These chefs mine their own immigrant heritages and their jaunts to local Chinatowns and Koreatowns for inspiration. They explore Asian markets for new ingredients and Asian cookbooks for techniques and recipes. Then they kind of throw it all at the wall and see what sticks. In Atlanta, we can tip our chopsticks to Guy Wong at Miso Izakaya, Angus Brown at Octopus Bar and the team of Cody Taylor and Jiyeon Lee at Heirloom Market BBQ.
On previous trips to New York, I had never gone to Mission Chinese. Two issues kept me away: One, I had heard about the epic lines that formed outside the sliver of space in the Lower East Side, a line that could hold you captive for two hours or more with only a keg of gratis beer to keep you entertained. Two, Bowien’s food is famously over-the-top spicy in the style of the most ferocious Sichuan cooking. I knew I would have no willpower to resist, but I’d, um, suffer the consequences. On vacation in New York? No thanks…
But when I was in New York for the Beard awards, serendipity and good timing led me there for an unforgettable meal. I had ducked out of a luncheon the afternoon before the gala awards ceremony so I could walk around downtown Manhattan and take in the sights. My feet somehow led me to the front door of Mission Chinese at around 3 p.m. and — lo! — there was no line. Now was my chance.
A host led me past the grungy waiting area and takeout counter, through a dark corridor alongside the kitchen and into a small dining room that gave me the weirdest sense of déjà vu. It reminded me of the Peking — a dimly lit, funny smelling, vaguely creepy and altogether wonderful Chinese restaurant (also at the end of a long corridor) that my parents took me to when I was a kid. The waiters there wore formal black and white, the tea tasted bitter, the food arrived in footed silver dishes. It was there I had my first sparerib (tough, glossy red, sweet), egg drop soup (like an edible snow globe), water chestnut (strange, crispy) and dumpling (holy deity, this is what eating is all about).
I was so lost in this reverie that it took a moment to hear people shouting, “Kessler!” A group of colleagues were at a table. I sidled into an adjacent table as they were getting their first dishes delivered. As drool was practically dripping from my eyeballs, they offered me tastes of their smashed cucumber pickles and fried smelts with a ma la dipping vinegar — fiery with chile and numbing with Sichuan peppercorns. I passed back my salted mackerel fried rice with lap cheung sausage and my Xi’an herb and vegetable salad with turnip vinegar.
Before long, I had struck up a conversation with a New Yorker named Serena, who was on her first visit after despairing at the long lines on previous attempts. It didn’t take long for her to join the party, ordering dish after dish to pass among three tables. We all quickly traveled from that slightly awkward feeling you get when you share food with strangers (Serving spoons! More serving spoons!) to slurping up the dregs of the “mussels and brussels” — a happy combination of ingredients in an inspired sauce enriched with chicken fat and skin — right from the bowl.
Now I must tell you about my trip to the bathroom. No, this is not a T.M.I. comment about Sichuan seasonings. It’s about the really weird, mood-lit stalls at Mission Chinese that feature a framed portrait of Laura Palmer from “Twin Peaks” and an endless-loop soundtrack of that seminal television show’s theme, which is like an obsession that burrows into your unconscious mind.
And I got it. Mission Chinese Food is a kind of love poem to the Peking and the restaurants of its generation in communities everywhere. As much an art installation as a place to eat, it makes you remember your first reaction to a Chinese restaurant way back when — the otherness that scares and excites a young mind, those first tastes of food that become a part of you in spite of (or maybe because of) their very strangeness.
The flavors here — explosive at times but never over-the-top punishing to my tongue — bring you back to that discovery. Of egg drop soup. Of lo mein noodles. Of those fat dumpling as tender and slippery and different as anything you had ever eaten.
You do remember the feeling, don’t you?
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