My spouse and I dined for lunch on a Sunday in mid-February
2017. Mission Chinese food is open daily for lunch and dinner. You can make a
reservation online 14 days in advance using the Reserve app, but walk-ins are
accepted. If you must wait, you can do so at one of the two bars/lounges (where
the full menu is available). On a Sunday afternoon at opening time, there was
no wait for tables; everyone who walked in was seated promptly. On Sunday
afternoon, only one of the bars was operational, so perhaps the days when
patrons lined up on the sidewalk to wait for tables have ceased. San Francisco
hosts the original outpost of Mission Chinese. The chef/owner once operated the
Mexican restaurant Mission Cantina in Manhattan.
The 130-seat restaurant has been located on East Broadway on
the Lower East Side/ edge of Chinatown since 2014 in the space previously occupied
by Rosette. (Originally, Mission Chinese opened on Orchard Street in 2012.) The
restaurant offers three places to sit: in the front bar-room, in the rear main
dining room, or in the basement (beneath atrium windows and dangling art). The two-level dining room features individual
tables in the center of the room, as well as tables along the sides that share
a padded banquette, as well as some semi-circular booths. To walls sport gold
dragons with glowing red eyes beneath chandeliers. One large round tables
with a lazy Susan in the middle offers group seating.
Danny Bowien (who
holds a James Beard Award for Rising Star Chef, and The New York Times selected
Mission Chinese Food as the best new restaurant of 2012) is the chef/owner of
Mission Chinese, but it is the Filipino-American executive chef who is responsible for its most famous
dish, Josefina’s chicken. (This dish pre-ordered dish that serves 4-6 people includes
a chicken stuffed with chorizo, raisins, olives, and pickles, carried to the
table whole. When the chicken is cut into slices, the center of each slice has
the white-and-yellow ring of a hard-cooked egg). Some dishes offer Sichuan
cuisine (which contain chilies and Sichuan peppercorns; the spiciness is
indicated by appropriate symbols on the menu. We shared a few dishes,
including the salt-cod fried rice (which although delicious did not seem to
contain any fish), the beef short rib and (leafy Chinese) broccoli, the spicy
pastrami kung pao, and the even spicier peanut noodles.
We enjoyed our delicious lunch at Mission Chinese!
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