The Mission Chinese Food Cookbook

I never thought of myself as a chef at Mission Street Food, but in a sense we—Anthony, me, and another chef friend of ours, Ian Muntzert—had become our own chefs there. No one was telling us what to cook or how to cook it. We were pushing ourselves every week to be better. When we stopped bringing in outside help, the responsibility fell on us to come up with new themes for the menu every week.

Chris: I was still pretending to be a cook back then, moonlighting in the kitchen twice a week. Me cooking—that’s how free and naïve Mission Street Food was

We’re not experts or historians. We’re fans

If I had it my way, I’d just keep adding recipes to this book forever. But what this book represents is the body of work we’ve created to this point. Our dishes evolve every day as ingredients change and as we learn and improve our techniques, but everything in this book is presented as it’s made—or was made recently—at the restaurants.

The driving engine of gastronomy in America now, and the restaurants determining those things we, as consumers, diners, restaurant goers, and cookbook buyers want, crave, and will soon demand,are places like Mission Chinese and people like Danny Bowien. They are boiling down the Asian immigrant experience into newer, ever more reckless, ever more delicious adventures. They are taking us further and further away from the antiquated notions, long meaningless, of “the way things should be.”

Great restaurants teach us something—not just about food or hospitality, but about ourselves and our desires—that we didn’t know before