LED ZEPPELIN was thumping and moaning at stadium volumes inside Mission Chinese Food. Everybody knew what Robert Plant was thinking:
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I am a traveler of both time and space
To be where I have been.
As for our little group, it wasn’t as clear. We were sitting below the wooden chairs and the Chinese dragon that hang from the ceiling, shouting into one another’s faces, gesturing like mimes and attempting to put an order together.
They talk of days for which they sit and wait
All will be revealed.
Outside on Orchard Street, they were waiting, all right, with plenty of time to peer in at the backlighted takeout-style pictures of kung pao pastrami and ma po tofu. Beneath the photos was a keg, and free beer in plastic cups for anybody who could fit inside the door. Unseen others were sitting in bars nearby, wondering whether they would order a third round before the phone rang.
When the call came at last, they would return to Mission Chinese Food, go down a few steps, pass behind a curtain and enter a narrow corridor separated from the kitchen by one long window. It must have been hot as a forest fire in the kitchen, because the burners were raging and Danny Bowien, the chef, was in swim trunks.
All I see turns to brown
As the sun burns the ground.
Hot woks run fast. Minutes after we’d ordered, our table was covered with plates. The ma po tofu that had looked impressive on the menu board was staggering in real life. Ivory cubes of bean curd were sunk deep inside quantities of simmered pork and fermented fava paste under a shimmering lake of chile oil.
It burned and buzzed in the pulsating manner of Sichuan, but in China the meat would be a mere seasoning. Mr. Bowien’s version emphasized and amplified the pork to the point where it knocked you down and left you happily breathless.
We cooled down for a minute with smashed cucumbers that had the old-fashioned tang of barrel-fermented Lower East Side half-sours. Then came the cumin lamb, and conversation (never exactly free-flowing) ceased completely. Hissing on a hot iron platter were pickled long beans, powerfully fragrant fresh bay leaves, sticky dates that we chewed as if they were taffy, and slabs of lamb breast, thick cut around a bone that jutted out like a stick from a Popsicle.
Robert Plant was keening now. He wanted to take me there, baby baby. But I was there already, a lamb rib in one hand.
Mr. Bowien does to Chinese food what Led Zeppelin did to the blues. His cooking both pays respectful homage to its inspiration and takes wild, flagrant liberties with it. He grabs hold of tradition and runs at it with abandon, hitting the accents hard, going heavy on the funk and causing all kinds of delicious havoc.
The story of how Mr. Bowien — the Korean-born, Oklahoma City-raised, retired indie band frontman; dark-horse world champion of pesto; Food Network reject, and serial workaholic — ended up pillaging and celebrating Chinese cuisine does not follow a straight line.
In brief, he and a collaborator, Anthony Myint, were reverse engineering the cuisine of celebrated restaurants from around the world. They did this two nights a week in a not particularly celebrated Chinese restaurant in the Mission District of San Francisco. Somehow this led to their deciding to invent what Mr. Bowien came to call “Americanized Oriental food” with the blessing of the restaurant’s owners, who dished out chow mein in the same dining room.
The rest can be told in a montage: Long lines. Newspaper and magazine clippings. TheManhattan skyline.
Because he more or less makes stuff up, Mr. Bowien is free to hallucinate dishes like kung pao pastrami, with a riotously smoky housemade pastrami. It’s laughably inauthentic, but the only reason you laugh while eating is because you can’t believe how well it plays out.
He is also free to make his own mistakes. A recent take on mouthwatering chicken, a Sichuan classic, substituted a chicken roulade stuffed with pickled ramps for the traditional plain boiled chicken. But the roulade was so thickly sliced and tightly wrapped that there was almost nothing for the hot-and-numbing dressing to cling to. (Mr. Bowien apparently thought so, too, and now he uses poached chicken thigh.) And a delicate monkfish liver sashimi was trampled underfoot by an intense soy dipping sauce.
Such stumbles are rare. More common is the random sequencing of the meal. Apart from the night our rice (steamed with nutty grains of barley) showed up just before the check, this was only a minor problem, but it did tend to pit subtle dishes against more fiery ones. You can guess which team lost. A version of chawanmushi, an egg custard topped with raw scallop, a little confetti of green apple and comma-sized basil seeds, was so quiet and defenseless I wanted to take it into another room and bolt the door.
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