San Francisco’s New Pop-Up Restaurant

The third is in San Francisco. Mission Chinese Food is a pop-up restaurant housed inside a pre-existing, old-style Chinese spot called Lung Shan. (Picture two menus, separate chefs, one shared kitchen and a shared dining room.) It’s the screwy, brilliant idea of the chef Danny Bowien and his collaborator, Anthony Myint, who share managerial duties at the restaurant.

The rest of the Mission Chinese story is just as unlikely: Bowien is a 29-year-old Korean guy adopted at birth by non-Koreans, brought up in Oklahoma City, inspired by watching cooking shows with his mother. He never cooked Chinese food until the restaurant opened about a year ago. The staff is composed largely of the Chinese family that owns the building and still runs Lung Shan. Many of Mission’s dishes are precisely as “Chinese” as Bowien himself (which is to say not at all); and the owners maintain a zany idea to deliver anywhere in the city, as well as a larger commitment to changing the food system.

All of which brings us to their wild success and national acclaim. Bowien is hardworking and good-natured, and Myint — who is about to publish his first cookbook, “Mission Street Food,” which describes the history of this local mini-movement (some of the book’s profits will benefit Slow Food USA) — is no slouch. Wonderful, charming, fascinating stuff. But if the food weren’t terrific, it would just be a story.

The food is terrific. The ingredients are top-notch (in the beginning, Bowien had to fight with the Lung Shan owners in order to spend “way too much” money on meat and vegetables), often local or organic, though no fuss is made.

The fuss is in the flavors: there is a stir-fried-rice dish with escolar and Chinese sausage that is superb; a kind of spring roll — “tiger salad” — that is more Vietnamese than Chinese and so herb-fresh it almost jumps off the plate; and a mind-blowing assortment of pickles and other little savories. There is a spin on chawanmushi, the Japanese egg custard, so perfect and elegant it seems out of place. At the menu’s core is a handful of slow-cooked meat dishes, some of which involve four or five cooking techniques and begin in the smoker, like kung pao corned beef and thrice-cooked bacon tossed with duk (Korean rice cakes), bitter melon and tofu skin. I’m not the first to compare all this to the famed Momofuku in New York.

Make no mistake, though: unlike the Momofukus, which were graceful almost from the start, Mission Chinese Food is, like the creature from “Alien,” an unreal exotic that bursts out of a normal skin. The “dining room” is barely changed from the Lung Shan days, and the kitchen is laughable. When I showed up to cook with Bowien, there was almost no way for me to stand next to him.

But we did cook some of the simpler and more approachable dishes — those that didn’t require you to braise oxtail, smoke corned beef over cherrywood or steam, freeze, slice, fry and then stir-fry bacon. The Westlake rice porridge is a mash-up of Westlake soup and jook — a perfectly hearty, deep-flavored dish that belies its (relative) simplicity. Bowien’s salt-and-pepper shrimp, which he begins by making curried pork fat (easy enough, once the shopping is done, and worth it), is the best I’ve made at home. And the pickles, which require time and labor, are exactly as they should be: irresistible.

Yes, the story is fabulous. The food is even better.

Recipe: Salt-and-Pepper Shrimp With Curried Pork Fat and Fennel

1 stalk lemongrass

1 inch fresh ginger

1 head garlic, halved

1 tablespoon fennel seeds

5 pieces star anise

2 tablespoons black peppercorns

1 tablespoon white peppercorns

5 bay leaves

1 cinnamon stick

1 cup lard or rendered pork fat

2 cups canola or other neutral oil

3 pounds head-on shrimp

1 onion, cut into 1/2-by-2-inch strips

1 leek, cut into 1/2-by-2-inch strips

2 jalape?os, cut into 1/2-by-2-inch strips

1 large fennel bulb, cut into 1/2-by-2-inch strips

1 tablespoon ground turmeric, or more to taste

Salt

2 teaspoons fried garlic or shallot (available in many Asian supermarkets), for garnish.

1. Smash the lemongrass and ginger with the side of a knife. Put the lemongrass, ginger, garlic, fennel seeds, star anise, both kinds of peppercorns, bay leaves and cinnamon stick in a large, dry skillet over high heat and toast until fragrant, 2 to 3 minutes. Add the pork fat; when it melts, cover the pan, turn off the heat and leave on the stovetop for 1 hour. Strain and discard the solids. (The curried pork fat can be made in advance and stored in the refrigerator.)