Foreword
Danny Bowien is a chef in conflict. Since moving to New York, he’s been cooking under the microscope of public interest and his story shows you just how intense that microscope can be.
But let’s be clear: The attention and the scrutiny are there because Danny makes really good fucking food. It sounds like a throwaway line, “Oh, you make really good food,” but no, it’s a remarkable skill. You have to acquire it, learn it, practice it. It’s not something that many people can do—with Danny, it’s innate. He simply knows how to make things taste really good.
I had tried his food in San Francisco before he came out to New York. And, to be honest, I remember being upset that this motherfucker was doing something I’ve wanted to do forever. Chinese food is far and away the number one thing I eat in my life, and I love the idea of updating it. If I weren’t doing Momofuku, this is what I’d be doing, I thought. But I got over my anger relatively quickly when I saw how well he was executing it. Danny is genuinely innovative in how he thinks about Chinese cooking. He uses his food to tell a story. In a weird way, unless you were Asian you might not have fully gotten the joke—but you still loved it. (Danny’s upbringing as an Asian kid with white parents has always fascinated me. He’s got some built-in Korean self-loathing, but without the overbearing tiger-parent upbringing to feed it.)
He uses his experience to make Chinese food in a way that nobody makes Chinese food. His cooking is this fantastic amalgamation of extremely thoughtful precision and totally carefree brushstrokes. When Mission Chinese NYC opened, it was a fucking phenomenon. It was raw. It was weird. It was dirty. But if New York loves one thing more than building people up, it’s tearing them down. This book is the story of a chef in our current era, about how easily you can get acclaim and fame when you have talent, which Danny has in abundance, and what happens when you fly too close to the sun.
This is a portrait of an artist that’s still in progress. It is as important to people who want to learn how to make delicious Chinese food as it is for people who want to understand what makes creative people tick.
