The Audacity of Hope... and Szechuan Peppercorn | A.Myint & D. Bowien, Mission Chinese Food

you got the touch you got the power thank you renee for the uh i don't know if i'm on okay thanks renee for the uh amazing okay all right guys thank you renee for the incredible opportunity to present here we're extremely flattered right now what we're going to do is this is an exercise in sharing so you guys open your bags obviously you're supposed to share the beer between you and your neighbor and uh don't be greedy try your hardest not to drink all the beer you can sip on it but just save us save one last drink because at the end we're gonna do a little a little demo so feel free to sip on it throughout our presentation it may make it a little easier for you to uh digest i can lose this this is okay so again thanks guys um for this it's an amazing opportunity we're extremely flattered to be here um four years ago um anthony and i uh were both just line cooks in san francisco um the fact that we're here in such in front of like an amazing and such prestigious audience today definitely deserves a bit of explaining so i'll i'll start by you know obviously the two of us have put in a few hours of work here and there but honestly we really are very blessed and chanced ourselves into a style of restaurant that fulfills two types of appetite obviously like anyone else we're trying to fulfill the appetite of the customer and make delicious food that satiates that appetite but also um you know we're trying to fulfill another kind of appetite and that's the appetite for a meaningful experience the audacity of hope refers to a phrase popularized by president obama and while it may seem a little bit you know over serious right now we think that it's it really captures something um in the spirit of our endeavors uh as well as a time and place so we'd like to tell you a little bit about ourselves and in doing so elaborate on these two uh types of appetite and how they fit together anthony and i have come an extremely long way together but you know it all began with an appetite that anthony had so without further ado anthony uh hello everyone uh thank you again to renee and all the staff for putting together such a wonderful event and you know really well welcoming us and making us feel at home here before i get started i just want to say that we'll be delivering or distributing kind of a small hors d'oeuvre of cucumber dressed in kind of a tahini sauce with um szechuan peppercorn on top uh i guess we'd ask that um yeah just if you can wait don't yeah maybe hang on to that for a minute and we'll describe it later um you should feel free to have a sip of your beer but maybe save a little bit of it for the end so as danny said we'll tell you a little bit about our story and hopefully tie it back into appetite as as much as possible in 2008 i was a line cook in san francisco i worked at a pretty good restaurant and i really liked the chef uh jason fox and you know i loved the camaraderie with the other cooks and the daily grind i'd been there for a couple years and i worked my way through all the stations and you know like i said i really enjoyed it but i i kind of wasn't that interested in the traditional career path like from line cook to sous chef to chef de cuisine uh to be completely honest i didn't know exactly what i wanted to do next um as i often do in such moments of uncertainty i'm sorry about that these are some of the themes that we'll be going over on the left are the themes and on the right are kind of like the chapters of the presentation as you can see there's we're basically covering two types of appetite kind of that for a good story and a meaningful experience and that for good food so as i was saying as i often do in such moments of uncertainty i ate a taco the mission district of san francisco is a lively mix of latin americans and young hipster cultures it has a good reputation for mexican food at least within the us standing there holding a taco on the street corner i started talking with the guatemalan couple who were on the truck and i asked them about maybe could i rent the truck on my day off and you know possibly serve different food there i had no idea at the time that something momentous was happening they agreed and i spent the next couple weeks kind of developing a recipe for a special flatbread since all they had was a small griddle um i would serve some gourmet tacos i guess my wife and i planned on just spending our evening hanging out in the truck and chatting um which was actually kind of a rarity as you know from like a cook schedule we definitely did not expect to be very busy um the project which began as basically a whim uh turned into something much bigger what we didn't realize was that uh food had entered sort of an information age and food writers were hungry for a story like ours the idea of a line cook serving upscale food from a taco truck resonated with the blogosphere and it catered to the natural human appetite for a good story before we set foot in the truck for the first time there was already a line of customers waiting which you can imagine is extremely nerve-wracking um is it as nerve-wracking as this or this is pretty uh yeah it was more nerve-wracking than this so we got in the truck and you know we scrambled to get set up and turn out food as fast as we could while maintaining a semblance of professionalism but truth be told it was kind of a [ __ ] show hopefully this isn't i mean this is not a relationship or hopefully it's one that has a happy ending yeah the next week we spent the whole week preparing kind of after work and before work and stuff like that and though we were more prepared there were more customers and so again it was kind of a [ __ ] show and things sort of just went like that for a while um uh ultimately a contentious neighbor forced us off the street corner and we had to find a new home so we went door-to-door in the mission and this is where we ended up uh a rundown chinese restaurant called longshon it was on kind of a questionable stretch of mission street and honestly there were not very many customers at night so we talked to the owners about maybe could we rent your space could we rent your kitchen and dining room um for each thursday and you know this conversation was had in kind of broken cantonese so the owners deliberated for a minute and kind of wrapped their head around the idea of turning over their kitchen and dining room to basically a complete stranger serving different food and they agreed so we paid them 300 a night and rented their kitchen and dining room and the only condition was that they had to be allowed to continue doing their take out business during our dinner service which is interesting of course we did not invent the idea of underground supper clubs or pop-up restaurants as they've come to be known um but in 2008 the concept was pretty new in san francisco and the idea spoke to a lot of you know things that were circulating at the moment it was the height of the financial meltdown and i think people sort of liked the story of like an underdog or like a little guy starting a restaurant with no startup capital fortunately the appetite for a good story that brought people to the truck in the first place continued to bring people to the restaurant in droves we had started a restaurant that sort of fulfilled my interest for an unconventional career path and also diners interests for you know sort of appetite for a new experience but the project also had potential to fulfill an appetite of kind of a long-term appetite of mine to do kind of a social good i was an economics major in college and though i forgot almost everything i learned i did internalize some things and i kind of had a sense that the restaurant industry was an opportunity to do something good for the community that eating out is ultimately basically just a luxury you know no one has to eat out it's a discretionary use of disposable income um so you know as a chef or restaurateur that there's an opportunity here to basically you know make your food slightly more appealing and you could charge an extra 50 cents or a dollar and then donate that dollar to charity um mission street food at that time was just a hobby and so we didn't really care about the bottom line so we made sort of a bold decision to just donate all of our profits to charity in addition to being kind of a good story like for the press uh thanks in addition to being kind of a good story for the press uh it also i think gave you know fulfilled customers appetites um to tell kind of a good story about themselves as consumers uh we also invited local chefs to come cook half the menu as guest chefs um so they would you know choose a theme or a cuisine and we would kind of work things out with them and we would serve the other half of the menu um that meant radical changes in the menu each night from things like modern portuguese food to silly themed nights like fancy mcdonald's or flat-out weird stuff like mexiterranean food there's a stoner at this point i had already stopped working at bart hartine and you know many thanks to jason fox for letting me use his kitchen um and only complaining a little bit about it but i had already stopped working at barchartin and we had started doing mission street food twice a week um so each week was basically like an endless nightmare of logistical you know issues um but at the same time it provided like an incredible opportunity for learning we got to see what ingredients and flavor combinations any given chef was interested in we got to see you know how 100 different people created a menu and set up stations and you know worked with their cooks so while we had stumbled into a way to kind of feed people's appetite for new experiences i think what was really important was that we kind of created or fed like cook's appetite for community this is also how i first met danny um so i heard about mission street food you know as a cook in a restaurant cooks talk sometimes oftentimes too much but you know they basically i've heard about mission street food from some friends and i heard it was kind of like crazy and you go stand in line for an hour and drink beer on the street which ultimately i think is what why they had to move out of the taco truck um so i heard about the internet and but from other from other cooks and upon first glance i mean it was really that's that's actually nicer than it looks whenever we moved in but um you know as i i kind of like had to throw everything any pretense i had about like restaurants and whatever else out the window and go into this situation is like look it's just like kind of like a dive bar it's kind of like a party we have to clean it up um but again it was like we're sharing it with the owners of the restaurant so it's like if you're staying at someone's house you can't go in and be like hey i'm gonna just move your couch you know like we had to finesse our way into like maybe we should replace this or that um but it was an insanely good opportunity because as a cook you can go in and have complete creative freedom and you know you're going to be cooking for a packed house every night they were like three hour waits so like you know you'd be setting up at six o'clock and there'd be a line wrapped completely down the block around the corner and no one even knew what the menu is going to be people just were interested in this weird thing that was happening um like anthony i've been working as a cook sous chef chef to cuisine but i wasn't sure how i was going to continue my career path because i didn't really want to work for like you know a big restaurant anymore so anthony convinced me to eventually do my own guest chef night which was followed were followed by many more and then you know what was cool is after work cooks would come by and visit to see what the chef daddy meeting had done and it was kind of like it was careful it was kind of like bringing building a community of cooks and chefs and you know our industry is is it's riddled with you know one upsmanship and like you know com competition which is good and it drives us but it was cool to be under this like it was an unpretentious chinese restaurant where like some of the best chefs in the city were coming and like drinking beers and like asking if we could make them chinese food which we didn't know how to make at the time so it was really really awesome uh i eventually became co-chef of mission chinese food i'm sorry mission street food and anthony and i pushed ourselves because we didn't have a teacher at that point besides the chefs that were coming in and you know you have a guest chef coming in to cook a menu and they can choose the theme you don't want to look bad so we would obviously push ourselves to become better the whole experience definitely fed my appetite for creativity both in terms of making up the dishes but also in terms of being resourceful it was 180 degree turn from the restaurants we've been working in each night we would face insane hang-ups you know like we had to work where you know failure was maybe an option and we had to be outside of our comfort zones into it and adapt um mission street food had been operating for about a year over a year and a half while we were still learning from other cooks that would come in being around all these chefs you'd always ask them like what chef are you most excited about um with special apologies to pascal barbeau and rene redzepi and you know michelle broad and yaki what happened was we were like let's let's start doing homage dinners and like let's cook the food that we're excited about and maybe hopefully we can make it almost as good as you know like just that so we would spend the whole week like dorking out on blogs and like asking people that you know maybe it's stodge at this restaurant or this is that how how they did stuff and we still don't know how to make this stuff but um we were very naive and excited and and i feel like the community the public really caught on to that um like there were four of us in the kitchen and we'd be trying to plate up like garnier and then like again the chinese restaurant was still functioning so sometimes they would actually get like a delivery order that was big so you're trying to make this composed dish and then the chinese chef just comes over and like bumps you off and dumps like 80 egg rolls in the deep fryer and so like you know what are you going to do so that being said there were many compromises we learned to like put binchot inside of a wok and put a lid on top put a grate on top and use that as like a robota we you know we were like holding um you know pulae and bessie in like a rice swimmer and stop and then we would steam it in that rice formula so it was like it was a really insane experience um eventually we just asked ourselves why don't we just use the walk as a walk you know we'd been we'd both we'd always eat chinese food on our days off um admission street food was coming to an end so we're like let's just make chinese food anthony speaks cantonese i don't speak any chinese at all so he was a liaison to the owners all the time he was like look danny wants to make chinese food and i think they said something like he's an idiot but so they just watched me fail a lot a million times but eventually as a cook you just you know you you adapt and you and you make it happen so um it was a lot of trial and error um unlike mission street food we could develop the dishes over time because it was the same menu constantly so we'd like to talk now finally about appetite for food we'll start with a quick demonstration the sizzling cumin lamb dish is probably one of the oldest tricks in the book um is it hot if this is this hopefully this sizzles um but you know put meat on meat or anything onto a hot platter like the egg at noma or like fajitas at a tex-mex restaurant it really it really appeals to your senses both visually and you smell it you see it every time we see all these dishes out in the dining room people are like what's that and then we like sell like if we send one out we still we fire six because we know we're gonna sell a ton of them but you know it's it's not you know for what for what it is it's just like that's how we kind of trigger certain things for us cooking at mission chinese food is like we're trying to try to coax the most out of something because we have the least you know our restaurant's just a crappy chinese restaurant um and same with spicy dishes too like we will start and we'll know that maple tofu is a spicy stewed pork and tofu dish we just try to take our technique that we've learned in the past and like you know how do we make it better how can we make it as good as if not better so anthony's going to talk about spice a little bit sorry i guess can we cue the next slide maybe we can get back to the cooking demo afterwards um so speaking of a spicy dish like maple tofu the food admission chinese food is legitimately spicy um kind of unlike uh sort of what you see in a lot of fine dining um you know a lot of people complain that it's too spicy the word piquant uh comes from the french for picare uh sorry french piquer to prick um and it refers to kind of the pleasantly painful sensation of capsaicin registering on the tongue um i guess spice has demonstrable physiological effects uh the first of which is kind of on the trigeminal nerve in the palate sort of changing the way that we perceive different textures and flavors and then also because you're actually talking about the body coping with pain there's the release of endorphins and which those are shown to stimulate and increase appetite from kind of a bigger picture like a macroeconomic perspective or something um i think in like europe and the united states uh traditionally there has not been that much spice in the diet but in the rest of the world there's really a lot of spice and i think we're seeing now sort of like a globalization where you know as people become more familiar with like thai food and indian food and szechuan food not only are they just more interested in spicy food but they're also sort of like building up a tolerance for spice so you see this in the market at all kinds of levels from uh like you know chocolates with chili in them uh to the british supermarket chain tesco um which released the nada gelothia pepper and on the first morning they pretty much sold out of the whole month supply i'll just touch briefly on szechuan peppercorns and if you guys haven't already eaten your cucumbers you can eat them now the cucumbers are just there's a ton a tiny bit of szechuan pepper and you may not notice it at first but harold mcgee describes the sensation of szechuan pepper as like a numbing strange tingling buzzing sensation and you'll notice it kind of once you start to feel that if you do feel that it'll make your beer taste different that's why i said save your beer give it a few seconds to kick in that that's that definitely counters in sichuan quick cooking like the spice it's like the ma in la ma means numbing and la means spicy um it's a death it's the hardest thing to do in the world of insanely spicy food that make it balanced so over time we're definitely not serving authentic chinese food at mission chinese uh but it is an authentic experience i think that we talked about earlier renee touched on but our prices are extremely low and it's really interesting because we have like food critics like cooks families chinese families all eating in the same restaurant catering to not one demographic but every demographic and in doing so we're able to donate 75 cents from each entree to charity in the last two years we've donated over 130 000 dollars to san francisco food bank and that's uh thank you in new york we're doing the same thing um we just opened like a month ago um every day we come to work and it's extremely rewarding um it's a rewarding community like familial community kind of feeling to come into we're going to show you a short video to give you an idea of the restaurant that we work in um and the kind of atmosphere which i can create okay i will be diving here this is the owner yeah uh give me a phone number yummy thank you bye so during the lunch break every day the chinese cooks they all like will play mahjong and we'll make a big staff meal and we'll eat together and our cooks will go get coffee or you know talk to their wives on the phone for a few hours and then they'll play matcha and i don't know how to play luckily because i think that sometimes money's involved um whoever whoever's not playing is usually taking a nap somewhere yeah we have like a nap area downstairs in the basement so this is the owner's mother she insists on waiting cables at lunch still which is uh it's good it's charming but uh i feel it's pretty it's pretty funny this is jesse's arm this is jesse so he's the chef in san francisco now we've cooked together over 10 years at like 19 different restaurants but definitely um one of my best friends this is me and my hair so this is t-bone and lolita these two guys we hired after the first night of being open anthony and i completely [ __ ] to bed and like we were not able to do it by ourselves so we called the hotline and the two chinese cooks showed up and they never cooked before but they're like but they're like but that was good because you don't want like a chinese chef being like well you're making this completely wrong so they you know we've trained them over the last you know two years and they're amazing cooks amazing cooks this is kind of like dinner service it gets really crazy at night it's like three hour waits um but again it's like a really laid-back environment it's kind of like you're going to like your friend's barbecue or something only as chinese what's interesting about that hallway there is as you can see here there's kind of like a pass where there's a lot of food coming out of the kitchen and on the other side there's sort of like a to-go packaging area and like when the camera zooms out there's like this crazy frenetic traffic jam of like people running food people packaging food like customers walking through to go to the bathroom and like it's total chaos which is kind of fun we made like a handful noodle station up front because there weren't enough rooms for seats in the front so we make handful noodles there or we used to i'm not that's a great shot so we i'm going to show you a short video of new york now we just up in new york and we got to open um you know the same idea but we got to actually make a kitchen it was functional and we would not have been able to do it without a lot of chefs that are actually in this room right now that have helped us so at the end of the day we're just trying to make a memorable experiment experience and exciting food that appeals to you know people's appetite for fun it's a lot of fun you can play the video i hope we don't get stupid um all right we're running low on time so anthony's gonna close it out that's my ideal restaurant he's gonna talk about his ideal restaurant now um so i wanted to close briefly on the idea uh topic of the ideal restaurant um a couple years ago i had the pleasure of hearing renee speak in sport of this book and he said something which you know it wasn't the focus of his book but it really made an impression on me um he said he wished that he did not have to charge money um renee's probably had 10 better ideas since breakfast but you know again it really just made an impression on me because if you think about it um restaurants are fundamentally capitalistic endeavors uh you know a restaurant has to operate as a business if it fails as a business it's going to fail as a restaurant so i thought it kind of made me think about what would make an ideal restaurant like how we could transcend kind of the economics of the restaurant industry or maybe transcend capitalism altogether and so we have plenty of restaurants now that source great ingredients from farms but you know maybe could we see farms uh opening restaurants um admission chinese food as danny said we donate a few cents to a san francisco food bank for each entree that's a really small gesture could we see uh you know food banks opening their own restaurants that would operate as daily fundraisers and you know without getting into the details too much um you know they would have great advantages from like subsidized labor or donated food as well as offering like a really meaningful experience to people or taking that example like even further could could governments open restaurants i mean we see you know museums dedicated to the proliferation of the aesthetic arts um but really apart from like incredible gatherings like this uh we don't really see like dedicated forums for the advancement of you know the culinary arts uh out beyond capitalist endeavors basically um so ultimately we recognize that mission chinese food is not the ideal restaurant um like this but you know i think that it demonstrates that there's a real appetite for the audacious um and that it provides real hope that anybody could start a restaurant or you know hope that anybody could turn any restaurant into a special one um or real hope that uh you know somehow through events like this um we could create like a real community amongst cooks and chefs thank you thank you okay um should we um stand on front of the kitchen because then everybody can see how you're dressed and uh renee reckons you've got the prize for the best dressed speaker well thank you it was hot here yesterday that was just wonderful and i think everybody is going to feel that you're not only talked but you demonstrated and you filled the tent with beautiful beautiful smells and you filled our mouths with beautiful tastes so thank you so much and where is our first question going to come from over here yeah hi thank you for your wonderful presentation and inspiring the involvement of the community and also inspiring the community thank you i was wondering you uh started this in san francisco with the computer community and friends and how are you doing this in new york are you are going to both work there or how is this going to work in new york since are out of the other community are you going to try and get something similar yeah yeah so so basically we're both um we saved a lot of money and you know we're in a lot of debt now but we have the restaurant in new york and it's you know it's only been open a month i go back and forth anthony is there all the time he lives in san francisco and then our chef really honestly jesse um he's been making the food for like the last year and a half with me but you know i can do things like that because he's such an amazing chef and he's always there so um our through our working relationship of working over 10 years we just think alike and we we just know like i know i can trust him but yeah i go back to mission uh chinese food once a month um you know back and forth from new york to there and once new york gets up and running i may be back in san francisco a little bit more but we're trying to open a few more locations soon so okay uh any more questions any more yes question over here i think your use of social media is really clever in the end what do you think was more important the good story or the food or perhaps it's the sense of community um i mean i think it's really all of the above uh as you can tell danny's kind of a free spirit but he's also like an incredibly incredibly talented chef um i mean in 2008 or something 2007 i think he went to italy and his chef got too drunk so he had to compete in the world championship of pesto um and you know it's an amazing story because here's like an adopted korean american from oklahoma in genoa competing in the world series or the world championship of pesto and he wins it i won you know and then he's also worked in sushi restaurants you know working his way up from like a rice washer to cutting fish etc um you know and like italian fine dining um you name it uh so the food is definitely like legitimate and very important um but as we're saying i think that a big part of the success um was these other aspects like the community the goodwill and interesting story now i can wear shorts which is better okay we we have time for one more one more last question i just wondered if you could talk a little bit more about something you said earlier that you're not really cooking anything anyone might recognize this chinese food i'm going to i'll make that statement but you're serving a very authentic experience and if you talk a little bit about what you mean by that well i mean at the end of the day i think we'll touch it on music i always make references to music as well it's like when your favorite band is released as an album that they're just insanely excited about or you know maybe it's their first album um that's what we strive for it's just that like that sense of of personality that comes through the food and then if you're an amazing band like you know the beastie boys the radiohead you can continue with that same like tone and and evolve and what we're trying to do is offer an experience that is fun and that that isn't it's like it's just different and if we're excited about it and it's the food that we want to eat on our day off that's going to translate and if you you know some people like it a lot of people don't like it sometimes but like at the end of the day we're happy with what we're putting out and that's that's that's what we think is the authenticity of the experience and that like we're not catering to we're not doing something because we have stuff so we have to like we're not making roast chicken because our chef like the owner wants a roast chicken on the menu we're getting to make like weird chinese food that's not necessarily authentic but you know it's all derived from an amazing chinese dish you know i think also basically the the food is delicious and involves you know fine dining techniques or different things and so it's really kind of like bottom up food where you know we're not trying to make it over fancy um but we are incorporating technique almost like as a fusion of techniques instead of you know ingredients um you know so it's not traditional chinese food because in traditional chinese food they would use like crappy meat and msg and stuff like that you know but it is traditional in the sense that it's kind of staying true to the identities of the dishes i mean not every dish but a lot of them okay for a fabulous demonstration of cooking but also talking about compassion community creativity mission street chinese