New York, Part II
Nothing had changed.
It’s funny how perception can outpace reality. People around the country knew who I was and what Mission Chinese Food was, but they’d never tasted our food. I went on TV and made hand-pulled noodles with Martha Stewart. I had been to China twice in a year. Food writers were asking me for advice on cooking Chinese food.
But the reality was, I’d only been cooking Chinese food for a year, and we were still one small restaurant, in the same broken-down space, on the same shady block in San Francisco. I felt antsy, afraid of being a one-hit wonder. I wanted to test myself in New York again. Anthony knew this, and during one of my trips to the city, he told me to meet up with his friend Dennis. “I’ve known him for a long time. He’s looking for a space for you.”
Anthony explained that Dennis worked in finance and loved food and had his ear to the ground. I set up a meeting with him in Chinatown at East Corner Wonton, my favorite little now defunct noodle-soup shop. Soon this thirty-something Asian guy in a blue hoodie walked in. It was a Saturday morning and he had “late night” written all over him. But as hungover as he was, he was very excited to be up and meeting with me. We started walking toward the Lower East Side. Every now and then Dennis would press his face up to a window and say something like, “This place doesn’t look like it’s doing very well; we should talk to them.” It was a trip. This couldn’t really be how you opened a restaurant in New York, right?
Eventually he walked me over to a Thai restaurant on Orchard Street. My idea at that point was just to open a low-key takeout restaurant, something simple with minimal overhead, near a bar that could entertain our customers while they waited for food. This place looked perfect—a small counter in front, with a pass into the kitchen—and it was on a busy street full of bars. Tucked in the back, down a narrow corridor, was a small dining room in a covered patio. I would’ve been fine not having a dining room at all. But it was there, so we rolled with it.
Dennis set up a meeting with the owner. The whole thing was pretty sketchy and hard to follow. The gist of it was that we were speaking to a guy with a failing restaurant who was more than happy to offload the lease onto someone else. But it was cheap, and it was available. It felt right to me, so I called Anthony and he told me to go for it. He figured if I liked the space, it would be fine.
Anthony came out for a visit later, but we were already well into negotiations with the landlord by then. There were a number of shadowy side deals to be made, because the previous lessee had silent investors who had to be paid off. We really got shafted, to be honest. But we figured if we just did whatever it took to take over the lease, we’d be able to open the restaurant and everything would work out. We knew nothing. In San Francisco, we showed up at Lung Shan and cooked. I think back, and I’m terrified by how wet behind the ears we were. In my head, I was already arranging tables, designing the kitchen, imagining where customers would stand, thinking about the menu—I had no idea about building permits or codes, health inspections, fire inspections, community boards.
If we were smart, we would have had a contractor do a walk through of the space before signing the lease, and we would have checked the Building Department’s website to see what outstanding violations were attached to the building. We should have done a lot of things, but we didn’t. Dennis and Anthony and I walked through the building with our lawyer and she said, “You realize you’re taking the building as is, right? Anything you discover later, you’ll have to fix yourselves.” And we said, yeah, sure, cool. The previous owner must have been licking his chops when he saw us walk in the door. The building wasn’t up to code, and it was obvious just looking and listening to us—a wide-eyed chef from San Francisco and an investment banker—that we were clueless.
They had never pulled permits for any of the construction they had done in the building. The dining room had been constructed illegally, entirely out of plywood. The bathroom vented into the kitchen. The main exhaust tube from the kitchen was stapled rather than welded together, a fact that the fire inspector brought to our attention a week before we planned to open. Meanwhile, one of the restaurant’s previous owners, who was a trained architect acquainted with all the building’s problems, began texting and emailing to blackmail us for hush money. “I know that back structure is illegal—I built it. Unless you give me $5,000 by Monday, I’m going to report you.” We passed his texts on to our lawyer and went about trying to open. We started paying the rent in January, thinking we’d open within a month or two. Idiots.
I had finally acquired enough money to pay off my student loan, and I’d promised my wife that I’d open a bank account for the first time in ten years and get my credit back in line when we moved to New York. Instead, I put all the money into fixing the restaurant and sold off some of my ownership shares to fund the rest. We were bleeding cash. There was no room for failure now—for the first time since we started Mission Chinese Food, we had something to lose.
In San Francisco, Sue and Liang took care of everything related to the business of running the restaurant. They have a remarkable and uniquely Chinese approach to doing so. Everything is solvable, everything can be done yourself. In New York, we tried to mimic the Chineseness of San Francisco. We didn’t hire an accounting company until well after we’d opened. We had no HR department or business people—it was just me winging it.
It was so easy in San Francisco, why couldn’t we do it again in New York? We’ll buy a restaurant that’s not working, we’ll move in, reshuffle a few things, and then we’ll open. I’ll hire Chinese wok cooks who don’t have a lot of experience, and I’ll teach them our way to cook.
Everything backfired. The three Chinese cooks we hired didn’t work out. The oldest, Peter, lost it and quit, probably because he was being picked on by the two smaller, quieter Chinese guys, Jin and Chin. There was something exceptional about our working relationship with Sue and Liang in San Francisco. We had started from a very innocent place, and they made it possible for us to grow. Liang would bug us occasionally about buying the restaurant outright and taking over, but at the end of the day, he knew we were all in it together. I think that those cooks in New York knew who we were, that we had a big profile. They looked us up, and they used the fact that we were going to be busy and that we needed them for leverage.
I thought about Sue and Liang and the San Francisco team often. I was fortunate to have another shot at New York. But if we made fools of ourselves here, it would affect the way people viewed our restaurant in San Francisco. It could affect the way people would view San Francisco as a whole. The truth is that New York is the big time. Since leaving San Francisco, I’ve caught a lot of flack about abandoning the Bay Area. I know it seems that way, but I hope that San Franciscans can see our little restaurant succeeding in New York and be proud.
Chris: I can’t help but be reminded of a certain young kid, hoping to catch Emeril at Universal Studios. I asked the San Francisco crew separately about this, but tell me: You’re in New York most of the time now; is San Francisco really as good as it was when you were there?
Meanwhile with Jesse and Greg
Chris: How do you two feel Mission Chinese San Francisco changed when Danny left to open New York?
Jesse Koide, head chef of Mission Chinese San Francisco: Danny is such a presence. When he left for New York, the restaurant lost that. People kept talking about how they missed the way he’d come out into the dining room. It’s not in my nature to be so personable. I had to force myself to do it.
C: What changed about your job?
J: It took me a while to realize that I was actually running the place, and that I should be thinking about putting stuff on the menu. A younger chef would have jumped on that and maybe used it as their time to shine. Danny and Anthony would tell me all the time that I should feel free to change the menu. But to be honest, Chinese food isn’t what I think about when I’m trying to be creative. Eventually, I started adding things that I know how to do, which was also different from stuff that Danny would do intuitively. I would order different types of really nice fish and try to make crudos with Chinese and Japanese ingredients. We started ordering whole boxes of fish from Tsukiji market and doing sashimi specials. Stuff like that kept me more interested and occupied and happy than stressing out about trying to make a new noodle dish. Every time I did come up with something it just felt so contrived, like I was trying so hard to make it seem like Danny’s food or to make it seem like it was cohesive with the rest of the menu.
Greg Wong, general manager of Mission Chinese San Francisco: I think the food quality stayed the same after Danny left. The biggest thing that I missed was something so small. Every morning, Anthony, Danny, Grandma, and I would peel eggs in the dining room. Jesse would come out and everyone would sit around and talk. We had this little familial round table. That was a really nice time every morning. We talked about food, we talked about stupid stuff.
C: About six months after Danny left, the San Francisco Chronicle revisited Mission Chinese and questioned whether the restaurant was as good without Danny there. Did you feel like that was a fair question? That the restaurant was not as strong?
G: No, I would say that foodwise it’s just as strong. The front of house was too relaxed. And after that point I tried to step it up. One thing I always tried to do when Danny was out here was listen really intently to how he would describe dishes. Part of his charm was that every time he came up with a new dish he was super stoked about it and he would talk about it to every single customer. He’d go up to every table. It’s different not coming from him.
J: In my mind, the review didn’t really complain about the food as much as the service. And maybe that was Michael Bauer’s way of saying that things are different without Danny there.
C: Would you say the transition was difficult for you personally?
J: In the beginning, I was a little butt hurt about Danny moving to New York. He would say things like, “Well, the way we do it out there is better, so just do it that way.” I would be like, “Well, you and I developed this way here, and it was awesome six months ago, and now all of a sudden it’s worthless.” But that kind of wore off. I realized he had wrapped his mind around a bigger picture. I started to realize he actually wants to be a restaurateur. And because of his personality, he’ll become a great one. He doesn’t like to spend ten hours on the line. Sadly, I do, but I also want to learn how to operate and run a restaurant. I’m not that great at it, but I know I can be good at it.
G: I always saw Danny as a kid with ADD. I was told when I started that he might leave at any time. I was originally a cook, and Anthony said, “Make sure you’re writing things down, because if Danny leaves, we need this information.” Danny’s got this great sense of creativity, but sometimes with creativity you need outlets for it. That outlet ended up being Mission Chinese Food, but I don’t think that was the plan. I was excited for him to go to New York, because I assumed he was going to do something new.
C: Did you feel any bitterness?
J: I never really felt bitter or neglected, even though it would be easy to feel that way, and we would joke about it. I tried to put myself in his perspective. If I was to go open another place, I’d have to walk away from the first place and make the second as good or better, then go back and check in and hope that number one was still good. You can’t be in two places at once. I tried to put my feelings aside, because, sure, I’m in charge of San Francisco, but it’s not about me.
G: The only thing I’d be bitter about is that he’s hard to get in contact with. Sometimes I just want to be like, “Hey, jerk, respond to my questions. I know New York is keeping you super busy and it’s important and it’s good for all of us, but this is still your little original shop.”
C: In a lot of ways Mission Chinese Food was still growing into a restaurant when Danny left, so you guys have had to grow with it. Do you feel like the experience of running Mission Chinese is instructive to you going forward, maybe opening your own place?
J: Sure. Almost every Murphy’s-Law, worst-case scenario has happened since I’ve been here. Not very many restaurants do as much customer volume, whether it be delivery or eat-in. That kitchen is always putting out food.
C: Danny talks about how, after he left Farina, you guys didn’t talk for almost two years. He said there was no falling out, it just kind of happened. How do you remember it?
J: We ran that place with Paolo, and then got to the point where we were both just doing the menu ourselves. There were days when I would come to work at twelve thirty, even though we didn’t have to be there until one, but I could tell Danny had already been there for several hours. I’d go in the kitchen, and be like, “What’s going on?” And he’d say, “Oh, nothing, I already made the menu and prepped everything.” “What time did you get here?” “Oh, eight.” I don’t think he was even intentionally trying to prove that I wasn’t needed; he was just really going for it.
And then he wore himself out and had issues with the owners, like everybody else did, and he ended up just walking out one day during lunch. So then I picked up, trying to do the same thing and prove to myself that I could run this huge place. I went through the same process: wore myself out, got into a fight with the owner, showed up the next day at noon, grabbed all my shit, and bounced. It was the only job I’ve ever walked out on, and from there I pretty much walked straight to Mission Burger, where Danny was, and said, “Hey, I just quit.” I knew I didn’t have to say anything more. Just showing up and saying hi to him was going to tell him enough.
C: Until Farina, you had always been a senior cook to Danny. Did it ever feel unnatural at Mission Chinese Food for Danny to be chef and for you to be his sous?
J: It was a little uncomfortable, because I felt like if we had stayed friends for that year and a half or so, I probably would’ve ended up being a bigger part of Mission Street Food. Mission Street Food was like a soul search for him and Anthony. And I was still at Farina, just chipping away.
I mean, when he really wants something to be a certain way because he really believes in it, that’s when he can seem like a dick. But these things are easy to move on from. You just argue, and six hours later, you’re having a beer together. Not a big deal.
C: That’s interesting to me. If it were me, I’d say, “Screw you, long hair. I taught you everything you know.”
J: It’s not in me to remind people.
C: I would feel questionably happy for Danny if I had come up with him and then he was really successful. I feel like you guys are both purely happy for the success of the whole thing.
J and G: Yup.
I left San Francisco with someone running the kitchen who was more than capable as a chef: Jesse. By the time I headed for New York, he was already basically running the kitchen. Certainly you sacrifice some things when you go across the country to open a second restaurant. The energy in the room changes because I’m not there. But mostly the differences exist more in people’s minds than in reality. You can’t help people letting their feelings about the chef not being there affect their experience of the food. But when we went to New York, my San Francisco guys understood that this was something we should all be excited about. It’s a new sibling in the family. They understood and they supported me, and I needed them.
Chris: Early on, you guys talked about keeping the New York restaurant as far beneath the radar as possible. You were almost not going to call it Mission Chinese Food at all. You even asked me if you could call it Ying Chinese Food.
We didn’t want the expectations. We wanted people to find out about it gradually, but in New York City, before you get a liquor license, you need to go in front of the community board and explain why you deserve one. Food bloggers sit in on these meetings to get the scoop on the latest restaurant openings. So I figured if we had to let the cat out of the bag, it’d be best to have a proper newspaper announce it. I called the Times Dining Section to give them a heads-up, and that was it. People started showing up at the restaurant weeks before we were open.
Now, faced with an overly scrutinized, overhyped opening, I started freaking out. I didn’t have Anthony nearby to share the weight. He was in San Francisco, where his wife was having a baby. I hired a scruffy go-getter named Allen Yuen to be general manager, and I lucked out in finding an unbelievably talented woman named Angela Dimayuga to be chef de cuisine. But I was Allen’s boss, and he was looking to me for direction—so I did my best impression of someone who knows what he’s doing. I yelled at contractors when they showed up late, haggled over equipment, hired cooks, and made design decisions off the top of my head. We painted the walls teal because someone had called me and asked what color I wanted the walls, and when I looked down, the first color I saw was teal.
How (Not) to Design a Restaurant
Make what you will of this advice. As described in the next couple of chapters, the original location of Mission Chinese Food New York is closed, largely because of our naïveté (and the willingness of others to take advantage of that). As it turned out, the restaurant wasn’t built to stand up to the volume of business we did. We needed a restaurant specifically designed to meet our unique needs, in the way that everything on a submarine is made specifically for submarines. But for a while, it was the happiest place. It felt familiar to people. It had the feel of a clubhouse, or a bar your dad built for his buddies in the basement. It was honest, and even though it had its problems, I loved it.
Tiling:
We didn’t have any money, so we couldn’t do any major renovations or structural improvements. The aesthetic came to us on the fly. We had to fix the floor in the back, and the cheapest material available was black faux-marble tile. It looks sleek and fancy in a Miami coke-house sort of way, but it’s slippery as hell when it’s wet. A terrible choice, but it was cheap. If you ate at Mission Chinese, you knew to be careful when you were walking through the dining room.
Seating:
Two of our staff members, Aubrey and Arley, built the banquettes out of plywood and lit them with fluorescent pink lights. Dennis recruited his dad to do some carpentry too. When I walked in and saw his sixty-five-year-old father slumped over saying, “I’m so tired,” I had to yell at Dennis about why he’d forced his old man to build our restaurant.
Accoutrements:
We hung up a Chinese dragon because we had one in San Francisco, and it was easier than figuring out something new.
The Bathrooms:
I really liked the bathrooms at Isa in Brooklyn, where everything about the restaurant was serious, and then you’d go to the bathroom and walk into this trippy space. We were just going to copy them exactly, but one night, while watching Twin Peaks at home, it dawned on me that if we were going to make going to the bathroom a weird, otherworldly experience, we might as well go all out. You’d step from the busy, noisy restaurant into a small, dim stall and be immersed in the haunting refrain from the Twin Peaks theme song. There were wood-paneled walls and a few sprigs of pine. A photo of Laura Palmer. And just like with Twin Peaks, if you said you didn’t like our bathrooms, it would be because you didn’t understand them.
The Menu Board:
My reference for the menu board at Mission Chinese was the menu at Landmark Diner, right near my apartment, but it could just as easily have been any of tens of thousands of cheesy backlit menus around the country. My wife took the pictures. I told her to put them on blue backgrounds, style them ridiculously (“Think cheeseburger next to a rose”), and overexpose them. She did a great job.
First thing every morning, I threw up from stress. I was losing my mind. I was ready to go, but the restaurant wasn’t. I’d show up at the site first thing in the morning and the contractors wouldn’t be there. I was training my cooks in my apartment because we couldn’t legally cook in the restaurant. None of this will be surprising to any other New York restaurateur, but I had no idea.
It all came to something of a head one night in Brooklyn. I went to a show my friend Peter Meehan was playing with his band. I was already a little drunk, and we made a beeline for the bar when we walked in the door. I ordered five shots of bourbon for myself, Youngmi, Angela, and two friends. Suddenly, Andrew Knowlton sidled up next to me. Since our China trip, I’d moved to New York and I’d called Andrew repeatedly, but couldn’t get him to call me back.
The truth is, I didn’t have a lot of friends in New York, not real ones, at least. Andrew and I had bonded during eight days in China together, on a trip that was pivotal for me. But now it seemed like we were just summer-camp friends. When we got back to New York, we didn’t hang out. I understand that that’s what it’s like to be a busy adult living in New York, but at the time I was existentially alone and grasping for some sort of buoy.
“Dude, what the hell, man? You never answer the phone.”
Not reading how drunk I was, or how paranoid, Andrew smiled, said, “What’s up?” and hugged me.
“Don’t hug me! I could be on the side of the road dead. If I call you two weeks in a row, do me a solid and text me back and say what’s up.”
I had almost unconsciously been drinking the shots in front of me. I started punching Andrew in the stomach, a little too aggressively, ranting about how he wasn’t a real friend. Real friends answer the goddamn phone. I was getting in his face, saying that nobody gives a crap about him or Bon Appétit. I was being an asshole, trying to get him riled up, and the less he reacted, the angrier I grew.
Chris: Well, in his defense, he told me that the bar was so loud that the most embarrassing part for him was that he kept having to say, “I’m sorry, what did you say?” And you’d respond, “I said you were a piece of shit!” “Oh.”
But I don’t exactly understand why you were so upset that this guy wasn’t calling you back. You’d only known him for a short time, after all. Were you worried that people who were being friendly to you weren’t really your friends?
Yes. At that point, I was drinking eight or nine Tsingtaos every night in the restaurant space—just pounding them, not enjoying them. I’d get drunk and hungry, go home, order a boatload of Chinese food, and tell my wife that it was for research and development. I’d pass out until it arrived, then wake up and eat. She’d go downstairs to the door and haul up an entire box of Chinese food with enough sets of chopsticks for five people. Youngmi was saying, “This has to end, Danny.”
Chris: Real quick, what would you order?
At the time, I had an idea to improve on moo shu pork, so I was ordering moo shu every night. I would try to order somewhat responsibly—fish with green chili pepper or whatever—but when you’re drunk, you get a little reckless. Plus, I knew from working in Chinese restaurants that ordering seafood gets dicey when it gets late. By eleven p.m., that calamari has been sitting in cornstarch for a long time, you know what I mean? So I stuck to the old standbys. Mongolian beef. For a while, I’d always order Singaporean rice noodles because they don’t overcook and get gummy. But, truth be told, it’s my least favorite noodle. I always got combination fried rice or fried rice with salted fish and diced chicken and Chinese sausage. The point is, I was not living well. I wanted to lose weight but in New York it was just too easy to eat. There are so many places to choose from, and everywhere is open late.
Chris: You didn’t want to lose weight because you were showing up in more magazines? Or because Uniqlo wanted you to model their clothes?
No, I’m not that vain. The Asian people around me make sure of it. They like to tell you if you’ve gained weight. If I was looking chubby, Sue or Liang would say, “Oh, you got fat. That’s good; that means you’re making a lot of money.” Or when I’d say hi to Amanda, who works at the supermarket down the street from Lung Shan, she would always say, “Hey, you got fat.” Thanks.
This is the absolute truth: I did the Uniqlo campaign because it was good business. I’m not interested in seeing myself on the side of a bus. When I sit down with my phone or laptop, I Google “Mission Chinese Food” before I Google myself. Mission Chinese Food is the important thing, and I am not Mission Chinese Food.
Chris: But I think people see you dressed in bright clothes, or swim trunks, or in all white or all black, with your long bleached hair, and they assume you’re trying to be fashionable or avant-garde.
Anthony: Danny’s always had flair in terms of personal appearance. Actually, he used to dress crazier.
If anything, I’ve toned things down. I used to wear dress shoes and tank tops in the kitchen. I shared a ladybug sweater with my wife. The fact that people talk about my hair or my clothes now is ridiculous. I’m not trying to be Kanye West. I’m not wearing a ski mask with eyeholes cut out to work. I wear all white because it’s hot in New York in the summer. I wear swim trunks because you get a lot of water splashed on you in a kitchen.
Chris: Anthony, clearly, Danny has achieved a level of fame that we weren’t expecting. Do you feel like he’s changed as a person?
Anthony: Not to me. The only change is that sometimes he forgets what he’s told me. He talks to a lot of people.
I feel bad about that. Anthony will listen to me tell an entire story, and it will gradually dawn on me that maybe he’s already heard it. I’ll have been talking to him for thirty minutes, and then I ask, “Wait, did I already tell you this?” And he’ll just say, “Yeah, you did.”
I strive to be a humble person. When I was younger, I spent a lot of time and energy being negative, criticizing other restaurants. When I landed in New York, I was nervous as hell. People in San Francisco told me that New Yorkers hated San Francisco, that they’d resent the idea that Mission Chinese Food could show them anything new. I made a conscious decision to be quiet, to be nice. If you don’t come into a new city with an agenda to take over or undermine your peers, you’ll save yourself a lot of headaches.
And so, for every bit of negative energy that came my way—construction delays, extortion threats—I tried to put twice as much positivity back into the system. In the middle of construction and recipe testing, we’d take a few hours to deliver staff meal to our friends’ restaurants: heaps of savory, fatty salt-cod fried rice; enormous bowls of mapo tofu; crisp pork jowls with crunchy winter radishes; steamed rice studded with fragrant barley; and sometimes even my pesto. We figured we were cooking anyway, no harm in making a little extra to share. The amount of goodwill that came back to us was unreal. Paul Liebrandt came and made us staff meal at Mission Chinese, for crying out loud. Chefs are people pleasers, and they respect good hospitality more than anyone else.
David Chang happened to be around when I brought his team lunch at Momofuku Ssäm Bar. I’d met Dave a few times. I just wanted to duck in and out and get back to work, but when Dave saw that we’d brought food, he grabbed me and had his entire staff stop working. He stood in front of them and gave a speech about how not long ago restaurants in New York used to have one another’s backs. There was a sense of community that he said I was bringing back, and while it might not occur to his staff, the fact that we were bringing them lunch meant that we had spent time thinking about them. “This is an act of generosity that you need to remember and be thankful for. This is a dying thing, and it shouldn’t be. It’s a part of good cooking.”
The next time I saw Dave was the night before we opened. I worked up enough nerve to ask him for advice.
“Anything you want, just ask me,” he said. “What do you want to know?”
“What do I do?”
“What do you mean?”
I cleared my throat. “Well, we open tomorrow. What am I supposed to do, man?”
At first, he responded with positive vibes. “You’ve got this, man; you’re going to be fine.” But then he got on a roll. “Don’t undersell yourself. Don’t invest everything in your people, because they will screw you over. You don’t want to hear this now, and believe me I would never want to hear this either, but you can’t put all your eggs in one basket. You’ve got to value yourself; you’ve got to make sure that you look out for yourself.”
I think he sensed he was crushing my spirit. “Also, you have nothing to worry about.” At this point, Youngmi wobbled drunkenly over to us. “You have a beautiful wife, you’re happy. You’re doing it right.” I nodded. “I look back and can’t say that I did everything right. Don’t listen to me. You’re on the right path.”
I pushed his warnings to the back of my mind and focused on what he was saying at that moment. I was alive, I was married. Anything else would be a bonus.
All right, I could do this.
Pork Jowl and Radishes
SERVES 4 (OR 6 AS PART OF A LARGER MEAL)
We’d come to a point about six months in at Mission Chinese Food in San Francisco where everything on the menu was spicy. I didn’t want to get a reputation as just another Sichuan restaurant that brutalized customers with heat. This recipe was my olive branch to people with more sensitive tongues and tummies: an earthy umami plate of pork with just-cooked radishes. The fresh shiso and mint brighten things up.
Raw or nearly raw vegetables and herbs aren’t something you typically come across in Chinese cooking. The Chinese people I know don’t like to eat undercooked vegetables. (Chris’s mom says she was totally baffled when she first moved to the States from Taiwan and saw her schoolmates eating salad.) It’s too bad. In Chinese cooking—and Western cooking, for that matter—root vegetables are often tragically overcooked, braised to mush. When done properly, though, they can be tender but still hold on to their crunchiness, and they are the perfect complement to rich meats—like, say, pork jowl.
Jowls are likewise underappreciated, and frequently misunderstood. They’re very fatty, so one’s instinct is to cook them low and slow until all that fat has melted away. But we don’t shoot for fall-apart tenderness—in Chinese cooking, it’s all about textural variety. In New York, where we have proper ovens, we roast the jowls until just tender. In San Francisco, we put the jowls in cold oil, then bring them up to 350°F, turn off the heat, and let them slowly cool. It’s the wrongest of wrong ways to confit something, where the idea is to gently cook in warm oil, but it works for jowls.
Because I love you, I’m also including an alternative to jowls, which can sometimes be tricky to find. In fact, this just might even be a better option: Hong Kong-style crisp pork belly.
Note: If you’re using jowls, they need to be seasoned and refrigerated overnight before cooking, and then chilled thoroughly before finishing the dish.
2 pounds pork jowls, or 1½ pounds Hong Kong–Style Crisp Pork Belly (recipe follows)
About 2 tablespoons kosher salt
6 to 8 cups rendered pork fat or vegetable or peanut oil, plus a little more for stir-frying
1 pound small radishes with greens (or substitute small peeled turnips)
1 tablespoon minced garlic
1 tablespoon fermented black beans
1 tablespoon soy sauce
½ teaspoon Mushroom Powder
1 teaspoon cornstarch slurry
Leaves from 1 sprig fresh mint, coarsely chopped
2 shiso leaves, coarsely chopped
1½ tablespoons Fried Garlic
Steamed rice, for serving
1. If you’re using Hong Kong–style pork belly, skip ahead to step 5. If you’re using pork jowls, slice the jowls across the grain into 1-inch-wide strips. (Think very thick, short strips of bacon.) Season the strips liberally with salt, set them on a wire rack over a baking sheet, and refrigerate, uncovered, overnight.
2. In a deep pot, immerse the pork jowl strips in enough fat or oil to cover by about an inch, set the pot over high heat, and bring the fat to 350°F. The jowls will begin to brown as the oil comes to temperature. Once the oil hits 350°F, cook for 5 to 7 minutes more, or until the meat has browned and about half the fat has rendered from the meat.
3. Using tongs or a slotted spoon, transfer the pork to a baking dish or baking pan. Carefully ladle just enough of the hot fat over the pork to cover it. Lay a sheet of parchment paper on the surface of the fat, cover the dish tightly with aluminum foil, and allow the meat and fat to cool completely.
4. Remove the pork from the fat, wrap it tightly in plastic, and refrigerate it for at least a couple of hours or as long as overnight; it’ll be much easier to slice once chilled. (You can reserve the fat for another confit. Strain out the solids and store it in the fridge for up to 2 months.)
5. Bring a large saucepan of very salty water to a boil. Meanwhile, slice the pork (jowls or belly) into rough ½-inch cubes. Set aside.
6. Wash the radishes, including the greens, by swishing them around in a bowl of cold water. Depending on the size and type of radishes you’re using, halve or quarter them, doing the best you can to leave the greens attached. (With turnips, you may want to remove the greens and discard any tough stems, reserving the tender greens.) Blanch the radishes and greens in the salty water until they’re slightly softened but still crunchy, about 30 seconds. Drain in a colander and run under cold water.
7. Get a wok or skillet very hot over high heat and coat with a thin film of pork fat or oil. When the fat’s shimmering, add the pork and stir-fry to warm it through and get a little color, about 3 minutes. Transfer to a plate.
8. Add the garlic to the wok and stir-fry until softened and fragrant. Add the fermented black beans and give them a quick stir, then add the radishes and return the pork to the wok. Stir-fry the ingredients briskly, then add the soy sauce and mushroom powder and give everything another quick toss. Add ⅓ cup water, then add the slurry, stir, and allow the liquid to come to a simmer and thicken into a glaze—it will happen quickly. Toss to coat the ingredients, adjust the seasoning with salt, and then scoop everything onto a serving platter.
9. Rain down the chopped mint and shiso over everything. If you used pork belly, put the whole or crumbled pork crackling on top. Finish with a sprinkling of fried garlic. Serve with rice.
Hong Kong–Style Crisp Pork Belly
MAKES ABOUT 3 POUNDS (CAN BE SCALED UP)
This is a very straightforward recipe I adapted from Marco Pierre White, after watching his videos online. When you really nail the recipe, you get an awesome crunchy rind and perfectly cooked meat.
1 (4-pound) piece skin-on pork belly
3 tablespoons kosher salt, plus more as needed
1 tablespoon sugar
Olive oil
1. Rub the fleshy side of the pork belly with the salt and sugar. Lay it skin side up on a wire rack set over a baking sheet and refrigerate, uncovered, overnight.
2. The next day, remove the belly from the fridge and let it rest at room temperature for 1 hour before cooking. Meanwhile, preheat the oven to 360°F.
3. Rub the skin side of the belly lightly with olive oil and salt it lightly. Pour about ½ cup water into a roasting pan and set a rack in the pan—if the water touches the rack, pour off enough so that there is about ¼ inch of space between the water and the rack. Set the belly skin side up on the rack and slide the pan into the oven. Roast the belly for 1½ to 2 hours, peeking as little as possible, until the skin has bubbled and puffed and turned a glorious golden brown. If at any point the water evaporates, replenish it. (Alternatively, you can undercook the pork belly to medium doneness, about 1 hour, and then deep-fry the whole thing. The skin will only be about one third of the way to crisp and bubbling when it comes out of the oven, but will finish in the oil. This is how we do it at the restaurant, but it’s probably too much extra work for home cooking.)
4. Pull the belly out of the oven and allow it to rest for at least 20 minutes before slicing. Seeing as how the skin should have gone crunchy and the flesh beneath it should be tender—like, say, a loaf of bread—a bread knife works well for portioning. If you’re planning to use the belly in the stir-fry with radishes, remove the skin in one piece before slicing the meat, then break up the crisp skin over the meat and vegetables, or just place the whole damn thing on top. If you’re not serving the pork until the next day, you’ll have to bust out the deep fryer. A 5-minute turn in 350°F oil will restore the texture of the crackling. It will feel slightly soft straight out of the oil, but not to worry—it will crisp up as it cools.
The first or second day after we opened, Jin and Chin, the Chinese cooks, sent their cousin in to talk to me. He told me that they no longer wanted to do prep work. They were tired, and they were here to cook, not slice vegetables. They wanted everything prepped and handed to them. They’d dump it into a wok, push it around, and then dump it out onto a plate. I was paying them well—nearly as much as Angela pulled in as the chef—but they thought they had me over a barrel. They kept saying, “This is your business. We don’t want to leave, but if we have to work so hard, we will. This is your business. This is your business.” We were wildly busy from day one, fighting just to keep pace. Still, I’d be damned if I was going to be held hostage. They’d already driven out our other Chinese cook. I told them if they didn’t want to pull their weight, and if their families really didn’t need their income, they could walk. And they did.
We were a few hours away from dinner service. I looked at my remaining three cooks and said, “Tonight, you’re going to have to work the woks.” They’d worked at places like Daniel and Blue Hill, and none of them had ever touched a wok. They looked at me with big doe eyes. I looked back at them and said, “I’ll show you. I’ll be with you, but you’re going to have to learn fast.” All night we alternated back and forth. I would cook, they would watch. I’d move to the other station and watch one of them, while showing the other something else. And in this way, we got through one service, and then the next. And then we were off to the races.
The New York Times gave us a glowing, impressionistic review that compared us to Led Zeppelin, and in their year-end roundup they named us the restaurant of the year. The James Beard Foundation nominated me as the best chef under thirty—the Rising Star Chef of the Year—and then again the next year. The second time, I won the award. Anthony and I flew to Copenhagen to present the Mission Chinese story at René Redzepi’s MAD Symposium. And the restaurant kept getting busier. Every night we thought we’d fed as many people as we possibly could, and then the next day it seemed as if we fed a hundred more.
Articles about us cropped up everywhere, almost always with cultural references to the sixties and seventies. People saw us as beatniks, blues rockers. They talked about eating at the restaurant as a hallucinatory experience, about how we were taking hold of an ancient cuisine and redefining it. They talked about the heat and the numbing, and about feeling breathless but helpless to stop themselves from eating more. I guess there was something profane and free-loving about what we were doing, but if I had to describe our restaurant, I would say that we were just flying by the seat of our pants.
With a kitchen we’d designed ourselves, and without the physical and cultural limitations of the Lung Shan space, the food got better—better than in San Francisco, better than I could have hoped. I could cook freely and improve dishes where we’d taken shortcuts before. We added little squares of crispy tripe to the Chongqing-style chicken wings. We replaced the braised beef cheek in our broccoli beef with smoked brisket. I was as happy with the mapo tofu as I’d been that first night at Mission Street Food, so we decided to put it on the menu twice: once by itself, and once mixed with thick bone marrow broth in the meatiest, spiciest bowl of ramen you’ve ever had.
Angela and I developed an ideal working relationship. From day one, she got it. She thrived in our narrow New York City kitchen, which, with the flames of three woks firing at once, was like working inside a furnace. I’d taken her to San Francisco to show her what that restaurant was about—a cramped, run-down place held together by sheer force of will and a shared sense of purpose—and she brought the same energy to New York. I didn’t have to worry about leaving her to run the restaurant when I went back to check on San Francisco.
It was the best I’ve ever felt. I’d come back to New York, where I’d fallen on my face at the beginning of my career, and succeeded. I came intent on learning from mistakes—not just my mistakes, but those of other chefs. I wanted to examine how they’d failed me, how I’d failed them, and build something new. I treated my staff like friends, paid everyone well, hung out with them after work. I emphasized camaraderie above everything—I didn’t want a divide between the front and back of the house, or between the staff and me. We had nightly reports on sales, what had gone right and wrong, what VIPs had come in. In the kitchen, everything was about efficiency and consistency. We portioned out our mise en place ahead of time, used an intercom system so our expediter could be heard over the roar of the woks and the music, turned every available space into storage, did anything to keep up with the demands of the dining room. I would take the ideas we developed in New York and return to San Francisco to share them. And in the middle of it all, Youngmi got pregnant with our son, Mino.
Chris: A year or so in, the restaurants were bustling—probably still getting busier—and it didn’t seem like you were faltering at all. The Internet was buzzing about you opening in Brooklyn, Oklahoma City, Paris. And in private, you were definitely beating the drum for opening more places.
We desperately needed a commissary—somewhere we could do our prep work and stage our delivery orders. There just wasn’t the space to make more food in the restaurant. Same in San Francisco—the place runs off one oven with a broken temperature regulator. I had begun daydreaming about multiple production hubs, improving the existing restaurants, adding new ones, trying out new concepts. I did a pop-up restaurant in Oklahoma. I flew to Paris to scout locations.
Friends and other chefs would ask how I expected to open in another country when I already had two restaurants separated by the width of a continent. They warned me that I needed to shore things up at home before looking abroad—the volume and pace we were working at were increasingly untenable. But that’s what I was trying to address. I figured more restaurants meant less pressure on the existing locations, and more money to work with. There are plenty of restaurateurs with restaurants in multiple countries; they don’t have to be in one place all the time. If you install capable people in your restaurants, you can trust them to run things when you’re gone. Paris was a ways out, but I definitely had my sights set on big things.
Chris: Nothing ever seems that far off with Mission Chinese.
Mapo Ramen
SERVES 4
Since our mapo tofu recipe is easily made in large batches, here’s another way to use it. Combined with thick, gelatinous, super-fatty bone marrow broth, it makes for a bonkers bowl of ramen: ideal for a cold night, but total suicide in the summer. I wouldn’t exactly recommend making this recipe from scratch—it requires a fridge well stocked with various homemade condiments from the rest of this book. But if you’ve got it, flaunt it.
1 tablespoon oil from Smoked Garlic Confit, or substitute vegetable or peanut oil
¼ cup Ginger-Scallion Sauce
10 to 12 Smoked Garlic Confit cloves
¼ cup shiro (white) miso
6 cups Bone Marrow Broth (recipe follows)
Kosher salt
1 pound fresh ramen noodles
About 4 cups Mapo Tofu, warmed
Chili Oil, for drizzling
Sichuan peppercorn oil, for drizzling
¼ cup Fried Garlic
1 sheet nori, quartered and toasted
1. Bring a pot of water to a boil. Meanwhile, heat a wok or large saucepan over high heat. Add the oil, ginger-scallion sauce, garlic confit, and miso and cook for about a minute, stirring continuously with a wok ladle or spatula and smashing the garlic against the sides of the pan. Add the broth to the wok along with 6 cups water and bring to a simmer. Season to taste with salt.
2. Drop the ramen noodles into the boiling water and cook for about a minute, until just tender. Drain the noodles thoroughly and divide them among four large bowls.
3. Pour the hot broth over the noodles. Top each bowl with about a cup of mapo tofu. Nest a soft-cooked egg into each bowl. Garnish with the chili oil, Sichuan peppercorn oil, fried garlic, and toasted nori. Serve piping hot.
Bone Marrow Broth
MAKES ABOUT 8 CUPS
This isn’t like other stocks where you want to simmer everything gently. Boiling is necessary to emulsify the fat into the broth.
3 or 4 (3-inch-long) marrow bones (about 2 pounds)
1 (4-inch) square dashi kombu, wiped with a damp cloth
A 3-inch piece daikon, peeled
1. In a large stockpot, combine all of the ingredients with 1 gallon of water and bring them to a boil over high heat. Skim any gray scum that rises to the surface in the first few minutes, then reduce the heat to medium-high and keep the stock at a boil (or at least a strong simmer) for 3 hours. Don’t let the liquid reduce by more than half—if it gets lower than that, add a little fresh water.
2. After 3 hours, remove the pot from the heat and allow the broth to cool to room temperature. Strain through a fine-mesh strainer, discarding the daikon and kombu and reserving the bones and loose marrow. Using a butter knife, scrape any marrow that hasn’t already fallen out of the bones and combine it with the marrow you strained from the broth in a blender.
3. Blend the marrow with a ladle of stock into a very fine puree, then pour it back into the broth. Strain the broth once more through a fine-mesh strainer, cover, and store in the refrigerator for up to a week.
