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"FacebookPinterest\n\nWe were somewhere\u00A0around\u00A0mapo, on the edge of the catfish, when the peppercorns began to take hold. I remember saying something like, &amp;quot;Maybe I should slow down...,&amp;quot; pushing a plate of Mongolian long beans into the cluttered center of the overburdened table. And suddenly the numb rush was upon me, a long, white, buzzy tunnel. At the end of it, I could still see the women across the table talking, but I could no longer quite make out the words. On the sound system, the Stones&amp;#39; &amp;quot;Shattered&amp;quot;\u00A0sounded like it was being played through\u00A0  the blades of a helicopter. I reached for the cool-looking pinkish drink on the table and took a deep gulp, only to remember it was a michelada made of Bud Light spiked with smoked-clam juice, chile oil, and a rim of more crushed chiles and Sichuan peppercorns. I felt like a Looney Tunes character trying to quench the fire of a jalape\u00F1o with a nice draught of Tabasco. Peeling myself off the ceiling, I came down face-to-face with a leering bright-yellow forty-foot dragon. On the wall, a cavalry of luridly painted Red Chinese generals on horseback regarded me with bemused,\u00A0  pitying expressions.\u00A0\n\nIt&amp;#39;s fair to say that the only place in the universe I could have been was Mission Chinese Food, which opened on New York&amp;#39;s Lower East Side in May, a fully realized version of the wildly popular San Francisco pop-up restaurant. It is a place that serves as a piece of performance art on the theme of the Food Moment\u2014communal, theatrical, multiculturally adventurous\u2014and feels in every way an Event. And it is a place, inside the kitchen and out, wholly animated by chef-owner Danny Bowien&amp;#39;s intuitive, idiosyncratic culinary insights, not the least of which is that the dominant building blocks of Sichuan cuisine\u2014Sichuan peppercorn, with the numbing property known as\u00A0ma, and red chile, with fiery heat known as\u00A0la, the yin and yang of a venerable centuries-old cuisine\u2014are essentially drugs. They leave you coughing like a bong hit; buzzing like a line of coke; blasted skyward like a volleyball, and then spiked down into the dust, a speedball of spice.\u00A0\n\nThus: a break. With runny nose and streaming eyes, I headed down a short flight of steps to the bathroom. I threw open the door and saw wood paneling, a painted totem pole, a pine branch, and, over the toilet, a framed yearbook photo of a smiling teenage girl. I had just enough time to think, &amp;quot;Is that Laura Palm\u2014&amp;quot; when the door clicked shut behind me and the outside noise fell away, replaced with the unmistakable strains of the theme song to\u00A0Twin Peaks. I had apparently stumbled through a wormhole and into a shrine to David Lynch&amp;#39;s 1990 TV show. It was quiet and cool in there, and I thought I might like to stay a while, but already I could hear distant knocking. Back at the table, my companions were blissfully chatting on, apparently not having noticed I was gone. No point mentioning Laura, I thought. The poor bastards will see her soon enough.\u00A0\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\nWelcome to the\u00A0Restaurant as Acid Test, a one-way ticket to Toontown. Bowien himself is not un-Bugs-Bunny-like: slight of frame, graceful in motion, slyly mischievous, floppy on top. His long hair, dyed the color of orange sherbet, and clear-framed glasses are on their way to becoming as iconic on the New York dining scene as Mario Batali&amp;#39;s clogs or Jean-Georges Vongerichten&amp;#39;s Prada pants. When the 30-year-old chef speaks, it&amp;#39;s in quick, low-volume bursts\u2014shy but passionate, halfway onto the next thing. He seems perpetually amused by the place he&amp;#39;s found himself, and, in turn, it&amp;#39;s easy to be amused by his quirky, alien presence. When he appeared on\u00A0The Martha Stewart Show, demonstrating how to make hand-pulled noodles, it was like watching representatives of two very distant planets.\u00A0\n\nAt the restaurant one Tuesday morning, he was wearing a black cable-knit cotton sweater, the skinniest of black jeans, and pointy patent leather shoes without socks. A recent Uniqlo ad depicting him in a puffy yellow jacket notwithstanding, Bowien tends to the monochromatic: all white in summer, all black the rest of the time. &amp;quot;I saw him wear a color once,&amp;quot; chef de cuisine Zach Swemle says, sounding unsure of whether he had, in fact, imagined the whole thing. &amp;quot;I think it was a green scarf.&amp;quot;\u00A0\n\nIt being an hour between 10 a.m. and midnight and a day ending in\u00A0y, Bowien has to pick his way through people\u00A0patiently waiting on the sidewalk for their chance to descend the steps of the onetime Thai restaurant, make their way past a curtain and a keg of free beer for those still stuck outside, down a cluttered corridor, past the order windows that look onto the narrow kitchen, and into the dining room, where the dragon awaits. From the day that Mission Chinese opened, as pre-hyped a restaurant as New York has ever seen, the crowd around a beleaguered ash tree outside its sunken entrance has been an all-but-permanent fixture.\u00A0\n\nThe night before had been as packed as ever, including, in no particular order: tourists, hipsters, hipsters with their tourist parents, couples on dates, people photographing every plate that emerged from the kitchen, a table of boisterous Wall Streeters from Bowien&amp;#39;s home state of Oklahoma, the San Francisco-based folk-rock band Vetiver, and chef Magnus Nilsson, of the acclaimed Swedish restaurant F\u00E4viken. At one point a large, serious-faced man in a suit and an earpiece swept through, giving the dining room a security inspection. Soon after entered David Chang, of Momofuku fame, dining with\u2014yes, of course\u2014Dr. Jim Yong Kim, president of the World Bank. Whether they discussed pork buns, fiscal policy, or the H\u00FCsker D\u00FC pounding over the speakers, it was hard to say.\u00A0\n\nNow the kitchen is back at it, working under conditions that would make a claustrophobe squirm. In a corridor perhaps five feet across, two blazing-hot woks put forth sizzling portions of intensely smoky thrice-cooked Benton&amp;#39;s bacon; spiced chicken hearts in bright red Sichuan-peppercorn oil; innocent-looking fried rice, slicked with the funky hit of salt cod. Gnarled, sticky knobs of pigs&amp;#39; tails, braised in root beer and then battered like McNuggets, bubble happily in a deep fryer. Bowien hurries through, checking on how things are. He stops for a gentle, encouraging word to a new chef working the expediter&amp;#39;s position who is confused about the final touches on a particular dish. He does the same with a Hispanic dishwasher charged with prepping bright green pea leaves, taking the knife and demonstrating the proper cut.\u00A0\n\nAnother chef is tucked into a tight corner, plating the pickled and cold dishes\u2014pig&amp;#39;s-ear terrine, creamy--centered tea-smoked eggs, frighteningly addictive peanuts soaked in vinegar and dusted with garlic and anise\u2014that are as vital to a Mission Chinese meal as the menu&amp;#39;s more pyrotechnic punches. Still, gut-wrenching spiciness is the restaurant&amp;#39;s most obvious calling card: The place routinely provokes gastrointestinal conversations of a candidness not usually heard outside of South Asian backpacker hostels. That the crowd is nevertheless so diverse speaks to another of Bowien&amp;#39;s crucial insights: Americans love Chinese food. Not only the bounty of exciting ethnic Chinese\u00A0cuisines we&amp;#39;ve been blessed with in recent years, but Chinese Food, capital C, capital F\u2014the gloopy, greasy stuff, ordered off a wall of backlit photos or a Torah-length takeout menu, delivered in a white wad--cardboard box with a wire handle. That stuff is as important to what is cooked at Mission Chinese as any other, more refined, source of inspiration. Bowien knows Americans love Chinese Food, in part because he loves Chinese Food. And if he has a particular genius, it&amp;#39;s his natural, even naive conviction that what he loves, you will love, too. Developing the menu for the restaurant was in part a months-long excuse to order $100 worth of Chinese delivery a night. &amp;quot;My wife was finally like, &amp;#39;Enough. No more\u00A0research,&amp;#39; &amp;quot; he says.\u00A0\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nBowien comes by\u00A0his unusual approach to things honestly. He grew up in Oklahoma City, the adopted Korean child of white, churchgoing parents. (Though he could now find out who his birth parents were, he says he hasn&amp;#39;t tried.) Bowien was popular, played the drums in various alternative bands, but was also aware of being different. &amp;quot;I was the one little Korean kid with long hair, growing up,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;Kids can be brutal.&amp;quot; He got his first kitchen job at age 13, as a dishwasher in a Vietnamese restaurant, but also worked as a technician in an ophthalmologist&amp;#39;s office. For a while, the two careers seemed equally plausible. Then, at 18, he went to visit friends who had relocated to San Francisco. &amp;quot;They were like, &amp;#39;Hey, you should come out here. There&amp;#39;s a lot of good food out here.&amp;#39; Because they knew I liked cooking,&amp;quot; he says. Immediately upon landing, he went and tried Korean food for the first time. &amp;quot;I ate as much as I could eat all over San Francisco for five days, then I came back and told my dad I was moving.&amp;quot;\n\nAfter a spell in culinary school, he headed to New York. It did not go well. Living on a bare mattress in Williamsburg, subsisting on potatoes and eggs, he would bike every day to a fancy West Village Japanese-French restaurant and straight into the teeth of fine dining&amp;#39;s most hierarchical, militaristic traditions. He was hazed mercilessly. &amp;quot;They were, like, throwing shit at me, yelling at me, telling me, &amp;#39;Go hang yourself from the bridge on the fucking way home.&amp;#39; &amp;quot; Why did he think they targeted him? &amp;quot;Because I wasn&amp;#39;t good, I guess. I wanted to be good, and I wasn&amp;#39;t,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;But I also looked at those guys and thought, &amp;#39;None of you guys have girlfriends! You&amp;#39;re all miserable!&amp;#39; &amp;quot;\n\nBowien eventually landed in the kitchen of a Ligurian restaurant in San Francisco, under the tutelage of chef Paolo Laboa. And that is how, in April 2008, he wound up beneath the vaulted ceiling of the pink-marbled Salone del Maggior Consiglio at the Palazzo Ducale, in Genoa, Italy, onetime home of the doges. Chefs from across Italy and around the world had gathered there to compete in the final rounds of the Pesto World Championship. They were lined up behind tables stretching the length of the\u00A0Salone, fifty to a side. Somewhere among them was Bowien, jet-lagged, confused, the\u00A0  only Asian face in the place, with a borrowed mortar and pestle, wondering exactly\u00A0what the hell he was supposed to do.\n\nWhether by design or because someone had dropped out, Laboa hadn&amp;#39;t informed Bowien until the last -minute that he&amp;#39;d be competing, too. Now Danny stood there, -staring at the prescribed ingredients\u2014basil, olive oil, sea salt, garlic, Pecorino, and pine nuts. He had made pesto in the restaurant, but only in five-gallon batches using a food processor, never with a mortar and pestle. All around him, chefs were sweating centuries of traditional training on how to do pesto the correct way. Bowien&amp;#39;s mind instead went to what he dislikes about most pestos\u2014how they separate into broken pools of oil surrounding herbal sludge, how the heat generated by a smashing pestle or whirring blade gives the basil a blasted, acrid taste. What, he thought, if I treat this more like a Spanish aioli\u2014or, better yet, a vinaigrette? So he put the pine nuts, salt, and garlic in the mortar and started gently adding the oil and basil, using the pestle more like a whisk than a club. The result was shimmering, bright green, and fresh-tasting. Just before the judging, he tightened up the emulsion by folding in the cheese.\n\nHe won the damned thing.\u00A0\n\n&amp;quot;I just did it differently,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;If I had known I was going to do it, I probably would have been bugging my chef the whole time, &amp;#39;Tell me how to do this\u00A0right.&amp;#39; Instead there was nobody standing there telling me what to do.&amp;quot; To Bowien, it was both what made it the hardest thing he&amp;#39;d ever done and the thing that made it possible, the thing that set him free.\u00A0\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\nIn the few\u00A0months he&amp;#39;s been back in New York, Bowien has embraced the city&amp;#39;s classic culinary institutions, particularly those of the Lower East Side, with the nostalgic fervor of an old Jewish man. He has marched his staff up Orchard Street to Katz&amp;#39;s Deli for pastrami and down Houston for smoked fish at Russ &amp;amp; Daughters. Mission Chinese&amp;#39;s most famous and, truth be told, gimmicky dish, sweet and spicy kung pao pastrami, functions as a demented hat tip to the neighborhood\u2014though it did nothing to impress the Orthodox owner of the ancient corsets shop across the street from the restaurant, who was displeased to learn that nothing was kosher.\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nToday, Bowien is intent on introducing ecutive chef Angela Dimayuga to the lunchtime burger at Peter Luger Steak House. &amp;quot;It&amp;#39;s like my favorite meal in New York,&amp;quot; he says, with a genuinely gleeful grin. He and I, along with Swemle, jump in a cab to meet her at the restaurant, just across the Williamsburg Bridge. The famously crusty waitstaff greets Bowien warmly. In the intense, punishing period of getting Mission Chinese off the ground, Bowien would often escape here with his chefs for a much needed break. Like a quarterback with his offensive line, he makes a point of taking care of his staff, even reserving part of his budget for the purpose. &amp;quot;I need to keep them happy,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;They&amp;#39;re the ones who are going to make me look good.&amp;quot;\u00A0\n\nBowien often talks like he&amp;#39;s in a twelve-step program for the entire panoply of chefly vices he experienced in New York\u2014and recognized in himself: machismo, competitiveness, vanity, striving. &amp;quot;Over the years of cooking, I&amp;#39;ve gone through all these stages of being an asshole, wanting to be the best, abusing my responsibility,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;I kind of just wanted to come out the other end as the nice guy, you know? I don&amp;#39;t need to be the best anymore. I just want to cook what I want to cook.&amp;quot;\n\nWithin fifteen minutes at Luger we&amp;#39;re facing down a worn wood table laden with thick slices of sizzling bacon, plates of onions and tomatoes, a gravy boat filled with steak sauce, and four perfect burgers, made from the gamy scraps of prime porterhouses. While the rest of us are still fussing with condiments, Bowien has already inhaled his. &amp;quot;Oh man, that&amp;#39;s cool,&amp;quot; he says, peering at his iPhone. He passes it around; David Chang, who has taken an older-brotherly interest in Bowien&amp;#39;s career, has tweeted about his meal the night before: &amp;quot;Food @missionstfood by @dannybowien &amp;amp; team is insanely delicious, spicy...appears simple but deceivingly complex. Very inspiring #thefuture.&amp;quot;\n\nIn the past decade, Chang&amp;#39;s Momofuku restaurants have had as big a role as any in changing the conversation about what American dining is like (downtown, loud of volume and flavor, heavily meatcentric, filled with intoxicating cross-germinations of East and West). They also ushered in the era of so-called hipster-Asian restaurants that has now reached critical mass\u2014a Brooklyn branch of Andy Ricker&amp;#39;s Portland Thai street-food restaurant, Pok Pok; Bi\u00E1ng!, the built-out Momofuku-ized version of what was once a basement stall in a Flushing, Queens, mall which introduced the city to the foods of Xi&amp;#39;an; RedFarm, from the great Chinese chef Joe Ng and his Brooklyn-born partner, Ed Schoenfeld; Lukshon, Night + Market, and Red Medicine in Los Angeles; Little Serow in Washington, D.C.; the dangerous-to-Google Asian Box in Palo Alto.\n\nIt&amp;#39;s a remarkable flowering of new tastes, served in settings that at once make them more accessible to middle-class, largely white diners and risk monotony: the black-clad staff, the backless cube seats, the exposed-brick walls, the endless lines. With them have come a whole set of hotly debated culinary and semiotic dilemmas, no less thorny for being fancy problems to have: Who is entitled to present any ethnicity&amp;#39;s cuisine? What does it mean to have &amp;quot;outsiders&amp;quot; cooking it? Is fancified street food just a way to mollify white yuppies\u2014with cocktails, hostesses on walkie-talkies, and the like\u2014at the expense of a more genuine experience? Or is the chowhounder&amp;#39;s myth of the hidden gem, staffed by a sainted grandmother/genius, just another form of self-gratifying culinary Orientalism? (One might also say that a culture that has time to debate who gets to cook what\u2014instead of, say, who gets to eat\u2014is in either a very good or very decadent place, or both.)\u00A0\n\nIn any event, Bowien largely hurdles this particular thicket by making no claim whatsoever for authenticity. It wasn&amp;#39;t long after returning from Liguria that he fell in with a chef named Anthony Myint, who, with his wife, Karen Leibowitz, had begun Mission Street Food, a community-minded pop-up in an ordinary Cantonese restaurant. There, Bowien decided to try his hand at a version of the Sichuan cuisine he loved eating. He went to China only after the pop-up had become a hit. Bowien has had no luck employing cooks with previous Chinese-cooking experience or who have even used a wok before. &amp;quot;As soon as you get a wok cook, it&amp;#39;s all, &amp;#39;No, this is the right way to do it,&amp;#39; &amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;I&amp;#39;d rather have people who are earnest and humble and want to learn.&amp;quot;\u00A0\n\nThe clearest heir to Bowien&amp;#39;s pesto on the Mission Chinese menu may be the\u00A0mapo tofu. It is simultaneously a respectful replication of a venerated dish\u2014tofu, minced meat, and fermented black beans\u2014and something from outer space. Instead of MSG, it builds its flavor from layer upon layer of umami- and spice-charged ingredients: ginger, Japanese kombu, fish sauce, cilantro. Instead of little nuggets of ground meat, hidden among cubes of tofu, it features braised pork shoulder so deliquescent it all but matches the texture of the silken bean curd, making it unclear what&amp;#39;s topping what. It&amp;#39;s unlike any\u00A0mapo you&amp;#39;ve had, and yet it also faithfully and recognizably does exactly what\u00A0mapo is supposed to do. As Bowien puts it with characteristic lack of piety, &amp;quot;Basically, it&amp;#39;s chili.&amp;quot;\n\nComing back to New York, this time on his own terms, proved to be both a logistical and a psychological mountain to climb. Opening was a brutal process. Bowien would work eighteen-hour days and then drink a bottle of whiskey at night, throwing up every morning, more from the nerves than the booze. He lost thirty-seven pounds, causing his father to temporarily relocate from Oklahoma to help take care of his son. &amp;quot;This restaurant almost killed me,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;It&amp;#39;s like my baby.&amp;quot; Since the place opened, he&amp;#39;s quit hard alcohol but not late nights or early mornings\u2014he&amp;#39;s up at 6\u00A0a.m.\u00A0every day.\n\nIn a two-star\u00A0New York Times review, Pete Wells likened the cooking at Mission Chinese to Led Zeppelin&amp;#39;s transformation and amplification of American blues\u2014so ballsy, so thrilling, so, well, rock &amp;#39;n&amp;#39; roll, that to question what white British boys knew about backdoor men and low-down women instantly seemed churlish and moot. To that I could only add that Bowien has shed even Zeppelin&amp;#39;s lingering affectations in favor of a KISS-like exuberance and excess. Everything, from the music to the michelada to the bathroom, is designed to pile on\u2014sensory umami overload\u2014until you&amp;#39;re blissfully dazed and happily confused. This is what Bowien means by a line he has frequently used, one that has the force of a Zen koan: &amp;quot;You won&amp;#39;t get authentic food at Mission Chinese, but you&amp;#39;ll have an authentic\u00A0experience.&amp;quot;\n\n&amp;quot;I want it to be like a great show, like you&amp;#39;re seeing your favorite band,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;Or even a band you don&amp;#39;t usually get into, but on this night everything is\u00A0popping: The lights are awesome, the sound is awesome. Everything is just right.&amp;quot;\u00A0\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nBack at the\u00A0restaurant, there&amp;#39;s one kid\u2014maybe 11 years old\u2014seated with his parents in the dining room, holding his ears against the strains of &amp;quot;Ziggy Stardust.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;He&amp;#39;s a vegan,&amp;quot; the mother tells the server. Otherwise, things are popping indeed. Much of the kitchen&amp;#39;s day shift has hung around for a drink at the bar and to eat the same food they&amp;#39;ve spent all day feeding others, a sure sign of a happy family. Outside, the crowd is at its usual strength\u2014pacified by the keg of beer and, as a special bonus, a platter of homemade hot dogs from Brooklyn&amp;#39;s Prime Meats, popped in the fryer, placed on potato rolls, and topped\u2014chili-style\u2014with\u00A0mapo tofu.\u00A0\n\nSuch communal touches are part and parcel of what Bowien imported from the San Francisco Mission Chinese. The most obvious manifestation is the donation of seventy-five cents from every entr\u00E9e to the Food Bank For New York City. But in an era when the pendulum of power has swung dramatically toward chefs and restaurateurs and away from customers, Bowien has restored at least some semblance of balance. Yes, you&amp;#39;ll wait to get into Mission Chinese, but when you do make it inside, nobody will make you feel like you should be grateful just to be there. If a meal there is a kind of trip, Bowien wants it to be the groovy, good-vibes kind\u2014not some speedy, Fellini-esque cabinet of horrors.\n\n&amp;quot;If you&amp;#39;re going to wait for hours, my concern is, &amp;#39;How can I keep you from being totally pissed off by the time you sit down?&amp;#39;\u00A0&amp;quot; Bowien says. Even picky little darlings find themselves accommodated. &amp;quot;We&amp;#39;ll do a vegan version of whatever we can,&amp;quot; he says, a shocking position in a world where chefs are more likely to take cyanide than requests for substitutions. &amp;quot;The thing is,&amp;quot; Bowien says, &amp;quot;I really just want everybody to like us.&amp;quot;\u00A0\n\nThe night before the restaurant opened, there was a pre-opening party. David Chang was there, and he pulled Bowien aside on the back patio.\u00A0\n\n&amp;quot;Ask me anything,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;What do you want to know?&amp;quot;\n\nBowien didn&amp;#39;t even know where to start. &amp;quot;Dave said, &amp;#39;Take care of yourself. People are going to fuck you over. Don&amp;#39;t be upset when it happens. It&amp;#39;s the nature of the beast.&amp;#39; &amp;quot;\u00A0\n\nChang still worries about him. &amp;quot;Danny&amp;#39;s got this crazy gift of knowing how to make things delicious,&amp;quot; he told me. &amp;quot;But I worry people are going to eat him up.&amp;quot;\n\nAt this Bowien rolls his eyes, little-brother-style. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#39;t know why Dave says that. I&amp;#39;ve been doing this a long time. Yeah, I try to approach things with na\u00EFvet\u00E9. But I&amp;#39;m not an\u00A0idiot.&amp;quot;\n\nAlready at Mission Chinese the energy level is rising, conversations getting louder, punctuated by gulps of water, goofy wide-pupiled expressions. I know well where they&amp;#39;re at. At the tiny bar, elbow to elbow with my kind brothers and sisters, I, too, am preparing myself for another ride up Michelada Mountain. The plates come fast and furious\u2014braised pea greens swimming in a chest-warming pumpkin-and-peanut broth; sizzling cubes of lamb breast, exploding with cumin; a plate of simple, whole pickled carrots, as if to say &amp;quot;What&amp;#39;s up, Doc?&amp;quot;\u2014but first I sneak off to the Dreamatorium of a bathroom, close the door behind me, let that music wash over me, and whisper to Laura Palmer: &amp;quot;Honey, I&amp;#39;m home.&amp;quot;\n\nBrett Martin\u00A0is a\u00A0GQ correspondent."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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