Best Food Writing 2011

by Holly Hughes

  The experience was a slap in the face. “I was waiting in the hall with the other people who were auditioning, and everybody had a gimmick,” he remembers. “Like ‘I’m a good ol’ country boy’ or whatever.” When he was asked what would “sell him as a person,” Bowien answered that his experience working his way up from dishwasher to chef would make him more accessible to viewers, and that he wanted to demystify cooking and show people it “wasn’t rocket science.” Although he was called back a couple of times, Bowien says the casting agents ultimately rejected him, telling him they needed him to “be more exciting.”

  And with that, Bowien gave up on the standard dream.

  “It’s like an indie band signing to a major label, then having to play the music people want them to play,” says Bowien. “I decided I didn’t want to do things by conventional means anymore.”

  Around this time, several other young chefs in San Francisco had left traditional employment situations to start pop-up restaurants. These consisted of taking over other people’s restaurants for a night or two each week, affording all the creative control and none of the risk. Myint, with whom Bowien had worked at another restaurant, was running a successful pop-up called Mission Street Food out of Lung Shan two nights a week, giving away part of his proceeds to charity. Bowien quit the two restaurants he was working for and signed on to help cook.

  Old Concept, New Concept

  Bowien is an affable charmer who used to front a rock band that once opened for the Flaming Lips. Myint is cerebral and at times awkwardly quiet. But the two men share a love for ridiculously grand projects with limited resources. At Mission Street Food, Bowien dreamed up a series of homage dinners. He, Myint, and another chef, Ian Muntzert, would re-create the food of famous chefs like Parisian star Iñaki Aizpitarte and Spanish molecular gastronomist Quique Dacosta, none of which they’d ever actually eaten. To figure out how to make it, they read chefs’ blogs and watched YouTube videos, at times making wild guesses as to what they were seeing. For an homage to Danish Noma chef René Redzepi, for instance, they reproduced a delicate cracker they thought was a tuile made of isomalt. They learned later that it was actually the coagulated skin from the surface of a fortified stock, removed and dehydrated. “We were like, ‘Oh, that’s what that chip was? That’s crazy!’” says Myint.

  This past summer, they decided Mission Street Food had run its course, and besides, Bowien was going to Korea to get married. So they closed. But one month later, they were at it again. Mission Chinese Food was born in the same spot, as a seven-day-a-week, lunch-and-dinner, will-deliver-anywhere-in-the-city Chinese restaurant.

  “We wanted to make really good Chinese food, and deliver it all over the city, because nothing like that existed,” says Bowien. In their off hours, they were regulars at several Chinese restaurants around town, enjoying foods like salt and pepper crab, fresh tofu, and scallion pancakes with chopped-up chicken, egg, and chile, so spicy you nearly passed out. Bowien admired these dishes to a point. “It’s sad, because you’ll go somewhere and it’s awesome,” he says. “But they hose it in MSG to the point where you feel you got kicked in the face.” Despite the fact that he’d never really cooked Chinese food, Bowien was confident he could do better.

  It was a ballsy assumption verging on disrespectful. Chinese cooking, comprising many distinct and refined regional cuisines (Cantonese, Sichuan, Hunan, and Xinjiang, just to name a handful), is a massively complex topic. You could spend your whole life trying to master just one style and never achieve greatness. “The Chinese kitchen tends not to favor the dilettante,” says food critic Jonathan Gold of the LA Weekly, who has written extensively about Chinese food.

  But Bowien’s experience with Chinese food was not the great Hong Kong live-seafood palaces, nor the Beijing restaurants that have been perfecting the art of Peking duck for 600 years. It was mostly the homogeneous, gringo-friendly American Chinese places serving food that can be traced to the Chinese who originally came over to work on the transcontinental railroads. In an effort to appeal to American tastes, these immigrants hit upon a winning combination of deep-fried meats, salty noodles, and sweet, starchy sauces, sometimes of dubious authenticity. (Chop suey, for instance, a mainstream hit at the turn of the 20th century, is widely suspected of being invented in America.) It’s a style that has persisted.

  “Chinese American food is locked where Italian food was, with the red and white checkered tablecloth and the Chianti bottle,” says Olivia Wu, a Chinese chef at Google’s Mountain View, California, location and a staff writer for the San Francisco Chronicle.

  But whereas Italian American restaurant cooking evolved and diversified, Chinese American, with a few exceptions, largely has not. There are many theories for why this is: Shortly after Americans discovered they loved chop suey, the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed, banning Chinese immigration to this country for nearly 50 years, and the lack of new voices coming in allowed the whitewashed version to remain mostly unchallenged. Or an interesting observation explored in Jennifer 8. Lee’s book The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Many of the very characteristics that the Chinese enjoy most in their food, Americans find totally revolting. For instance, the Chinese like gelatinous textures, meats and fish with lots of bones you have to pick out, and black-colored ingredients such as black fungus. Americans, not so much.

  In any case, in many Chinese restaurants in America, there are actually two separate menus: the one given to white people, and the one offered to Chinese. When Bowien and Myint went out to eat, they would watch what the Chinese people around them were ordering and ask for those things. Many of those dishes served as the basis for the menu at Mission Chinese Food.

  Balls-out Flavor

  In the beginning, Bowien and Myint worked as a team, deconstructing their favorite restaurant Chinese food and applying their (mostly Western) kitchen experience to making what they considered better versions. Ma po tofu, a Sichuan dish usually consisting of tofu in a thickish sauce of ground pork, bean paste, chile oil, MSG, and cornstarch, became a two-day, slow-cooked Bolognese sauce of ground Kurabuto pork shoulder marinated in Shaoxing wine and black vinegar, seasoned with lots and lots of Sichuan peppercorns (our adapted version doesn’t take as long). Bowien got the idea from a wild boar ragout he made at Farina, and found that braising coaxed the flavor out without the need for MSG. The dish is hot and numbing, salty, savory, piquant: a blitz of spicy richness that’s strangely addictive, and can be intestinally unkind.

  Another dish, Explosive Chicken Wings, was inspired by a Chinatown Sichuan joint called Z & Y. Its battered and deep-fried wings are buried in a thick heap of dried Sichuan peppers you’re not supposed to eat. Mission Chinese Food’s version is delicate and crispy—better than Z & Y’s—thanks to a trick learned from a friend whose mother had worked at the original Buffalo chicken wings restaurant in Buffalo, New York: Bowien fries the meat once, then freezes it, then fries it again. The spice mix is not for amateurs.

  “I began to feel like I’d just sucked on a vibrator,” wrote SF Weekly food critic Jonathan Kauffman of the wings in an orgasmic review of Mission Chinese Food.

  Myint stopped cooking, in part to focus on opening a high-end restaurant, Commonwealth, next door. Bowien kept on experimenting. He gamely tackled naturally fermented cucumber and long bean pickles, homemade XO sauce—a traditional ocean-briny condiment of rehydrated dried shrimp and scallops—and dumplings made to order.

  A restless, frequently shifting menu means some duds, of course. The Chinito, a cylindrical Chinese doughnut wrapped in a big noodle and filled with duck and vegetables, was an instant hit with diners. But the doughnut, purchased in the mornings in Chinatown, became too stale and greasy to serve in good conscience by dinner. A steamed egg custard with chicken confit was bland. But more often, the criticism of Mission Chinese Food is that its offerings are too hot, the spices too overblown, and the meats too fatty—all of which Bowien can live with.

  “You can’t order lamb belly or pork be
lly and expect it not to be fatty,” he sighs. “And what do you expect when it says right there ‘Explosive’ on the menu?”

  Two of Bowien’s toughest customers turned out to be Lung Shan’s owners, Sue and Liang Zhou. First-generation Chinese and longtime restaurant owners, they couldn’t understand why Bowien and Myint ordered expensive meat, like Benton’s bacon, when much cheaper meat could be found. In addition to helping with the restaurant, the Zhous pay all of Mission Chinese Food’s supply invoices, and are technically the bosses of Myint and Bowien. A portion of the money made is donated to charity: the restaurant has raised $12,000 for the SF Food Bank since July. The Zhous share the rest of the profits with Bowien and Myint.

  “They’d be screaming at me in Chinese,” says Bowien, who only speaks English. Myint, whose Chinese-Burmese mother and grandmother taught him basic Cantonese, would assure the Zhous that they’d make it all back and more. “Trust us,” he would tell them. “You remember what we did with Mission Street Food? We’ll do it again.”

  In It for the Long-ish Haul, Maybe

  Myint was right about it being a success, and, for now, there are no more scenes. Although the Zhous don’t eat the Americanized dishes they serve to their customers (kung pao chicken, hot and sour soup, etc.), they’ve spent their entire careers making them in the belief that that’s what people want. The fact that people apparently like Bowien’s food more than theirs doesn’t seem to bother them. “Some people like McDonald’s, some people like Burger King,” reasons Liang Zhou, with Myint translating. “Only it’s funny, because now Burger King and McDonald’s are under one roof.”

  And a small roof it is. The kitchen—two small, adjoining rooms, one housing the wok station and range, the other the salad prep, rice cooker, and deep-fryer—is crowded and hot. The Zhous hired two Chinese immigrants to help Bowien cook, and the cooks share the space with Bowien’s longtime cooking buddy Jesse Koide (who recently signed on), Bowien, and the cook dedicated to making Lung Shan’s infrequent orders. The smell of scallion is thick, and everybody has a nagging little cough from chile oil suspended in the air.

  One Thursday evening the dining room is full, and to-go orders are coming in at a steady clip. Lung Shan’s one cook is relaxed, as he gets about one order every 45 minutes or so. Meanwhile, Koide’s working the big wok station, dressed like a pirate in a striped tank top and tiger-print headband. He snaps at Bowien during an exchange over some beef and broccoli. “Just take it easy,” says Bowien, not unkindly. “Sorry, I got scattered there,” Koide says. “The wok stuff is so fast and easy to fuck up!” Most of his career has been spent sweating shallots, deglazing pans, slowly building sauces.

  There’s sweat collecting on the tip of his nose, but he doesn’t wipe it away or even seem to notice. Or perhaps he’s learned the hard way that if you work at Mission Chinese Food, you must never touch your face, because of chile hands.

  “I came to work here because I got burned out on the hierarchy,” he says. “The clocking in, and not getting paid for overtime, and not even getting a thank you.” At Mission Chinese he works long days, but it’s different. “You have to pull that personal ‘oomph’ out. It’s much more rewarding.” And if it’s dead at 5, you can just wander out, grab a doughnut, some coffee. Not have to answer to anyone.

  Bowien’s wife, Youngmi, and Myint’s wife, Karen, joke that they’re “restaurant widows.” Even on their husbands’ supposed days off, the men can usually be found at Lung Shan. There are just too many ideas for Mission Chinese Food. Like the Bruce Lee jumpsuits they ordered for the delivery drivers, who refuse to wear them (but Bowien and Myint are still holding out hope). The brand-new Chinese dragon arrived, and they had to mount that on the ceiling. They’re still trying to figure out what to do with the sous-vide set-up—maybe sell sous-vide-cooked meat that people can take home and turn into something? They’re toying with the idea of reviving the Grey Album, a dangerous cocktail they served at Mission Street Food of Boddingtons and Olde English malt, named after a Danger Mouse mash-up of Jay-Z’s Black Album and the Beatles’ White Album.

  That’s all near-term stuff. Future plans are hazier. Considering that he operates, as Myint approvingly says, “on his whims,” Bowien can’t predict where Mission Chinese Food will end up. Rolling out dumplings inside the plywood and plexiglass booth he and Myint built in the front of the restaurant, he says, somewhat unbelievably, that he hopes the owners of Lung Shan will continue the Mission Chinese Food menu even if he and his friends jump ship.

  “I’m just a stupid young guy, and my main objective is—not making money, but doing something that makes me happy,” says Bowien. He notes that Chinese food seems like a trend on the rise: He’s heard of two new Chinese restaurants slated to open in San Francisco with reputable chefs in charge. “We don’t want to be sucked into the bubble of a trend. No kimchee tacos, no bao buns. As long as we can keep it new, good, stay out ahead ....”

  He looks up matter-of-factly from the dumpling station and pats flour off his hands.

  “I give it at least six months.”

  Ma Po Tofu

  Ma po tofu, sometimes translated as “pockmarked-face lady’s tofu,” is a spicy tofu dish slathered with a rich, savory sauce of chiles, minced meat, and spices, almost like Chinese chili con carne, with the numbing power of Sichuan peppercorns. At Mission Chinese Food in San Francisco, they marinate a hunk of pork shoulder, grind it, stew it up in a fiery and fragrant blend of freshly ground spices, and mix in some tofu just before serving. Mission Chinese Food’s chef, Danny Bowien, advises serving leftover sauce over sautéed Chinese long beans or eggplant.

  What to buy: Chinese black vinegar is a robustly flavored rice vinegar that can be found at most Asian markets. Make sure it is not labeled “sweetened black vinegar.”

  Fermented black beans, known as douchi in Chinese, are soybeans that have been salted and fermented, turning them black, soft, and dry. These savory, salty, and somewhat sweet and bitter beans are used as a flavoring agent throughout Chinese cooking. Fermented black beans can be found in the dry goods section of most Asian markets.

  If you can’t find soft tofu, substitute firm, but do not use silken tofu, as its soft texture will disintegrate into the sauce. Beech mushrooms, also called clamshell or hon-shimeji, originate from Southeast Asia and are popular in Japan. These small, white or brown capped fungi are sweet and nutty and keep their shape nicely when cooked, lending themselves well to stews, soups, and sauces. They can be found at many Asian grocers, though sliced button or baby bella mushrooms can be substituted if needed.

  Special equipment: You’ll need a meat grinder for this recipe. We used the special attachments for a KitchenAid stand mixer.

  You’ll also need a spice or coffee grinder. We used this Krups coffee grinder with good results.

  Game plan: Since this recipe makes 12 cups of meat sauce and you only need 3 cups for the ma po tofu, freeze the leftovers for a simple weeknight meal.

  For the marinade:

  1 (4-pound) boneless pork shoulder, untrimmed and cut into 1-inch cubes

  1 cup Shaoxing wine

  ½ cup Chinese black vinegar, plus more as needed

  For the sauce:

  2 ounces dried arbol chiles

  ¼ star anise pods

  2 tablespoons Sichuan peppercorns

  ⅔ cup packed dark brown sugar, plus more as needed

  ⅓ cup kosher salt

  2 cups water

  1 bay leaf

  1 cardamom pod

  ¼ cup plus 1 tablespoon distilled white vinegar, plus more as needed

  ¼ cup minced fresh garlic (about 1/2 medium head)

  ¼ cup peeled and minced fresh ginger (about 1 [3-to 4-inch] piece)

  3 tablespoons tomato paste

  2 tablespoons fermented black beans, finely chopped

  2 tablespoons soy sauce, plus more as needed

  4 ounces beech mushrooms, stems trimmed

  Chile oil, as needed

  To ser
ve:

  2 (1-pound) packages soft tofu, drained and cut into 1-inch cubes

  2 tablespoons coarsely chopped fresh cilantro

  2 scallions, thinly sliced (white and light green parts only)

  Steamed white rice

  For the marinade:

  1. Place all ingredients in a large bowl and stir to evenly coat the pork. Cover and refrigerate for at least 2 hours and up to 4 hours.

  For the sauce:

  1. Heat the oven to 400°F and arrange a rack in the middle. Place the chiles in a single layer on a baking sheet and toast until slightly darkened and fragrant, about 3 to 5 minutes. Let cool completely. Using a spice grinder or clean coffee grinder, grind the chiles into a fine powder. Transfer to a medium bowl. Grind the star anise pods along with the Sichuan peppercorns into a fine powder and add to the chiles; set aside.

  2. When the pork is ready, set a colander over a large bowl and transfer the pork and marinade mixture to the colander. Set the marinade aside. Using a meat grinder fitted with a coarse (¼-inch) dye, grind the pork into a large Dutch oven or a heavy-bottomed pot with a tightfitting lid.

  3. Add the ground spice mixture, reserved marinade, brown sugar, salt, water, bay leaf, and cardamom pod to the ground pork and stir to combine. Bring to a simmer over medium-high heat, then reduce the heat to medium and simmer, stirring occasionally, until the meat is no longer pink, about 15 minutes. Reduce the heat to low, cover, and simmer until the flavors have melded, about 2 hours, stirring every half hour. Meanwhile, place the vinegar, garlic, ginger, tomato paste, fermented black beans, and soy sauce in a medium bowl and stir to combine; set aside.

  4. When the pork is ready, remove from heat, add the reserved black bean mixture and the mushrooms, and stir to combine. Taste and season with chile oil, additional soy sauce, brown sugar, and black or white vinegar as needed to balance the flavors. (At this point, you can cool the sauce completely, then transfer it to a container with a tight-fitting lid and freeze it for up to 1 month.)