Mission Chinese Has Popped Up in Chinatown

A few days ago, Mission Chinese popped up on the premises of Cha Kee, a restaurant in the heart of Chinatown at 43 Mott Street, at Bayard Street, that debuted in 2021 with a Japanese-influenced Chinese menu. On its Instagram account, it announced Mission Chinese was taking over the space at 5 p.m. every Wednesday through Sunday through the end of the summer, while Cha Kee would serve a Hong Kong-style bill of fare in the morning and afternoon.

The colorful back-lit wall menu of the original New York Mission Chinese — which has graced all previous versions of the restaurant — hangs at the end of a room that is bisected by long communal tables. Foliage hangs from the ceiling along with lights that look like metal lily pads. One wall boasts a sponged-on design resembling leaves, while another is painted bright blue. In short, the décor of Cha Kee, with a few adjustments, falls within chef Danny Bowien’s eclectic design aesthetic — though there’s no trace of Twin Peaks.

Danny Bowien, Mission’s chef, guided a friend and me through the 18-item menu: Most of the dishes come from the original San Francisco Mission Chinese, with the exception of a few new ones. He also pointed out that beef chow fun had been borrowed from the Cha Kee menu, and we resolved to order a mix of old and new dishes, and the chow fun, too.

The Sichuan pickles ($9) provided a nice start, crunchy cabbage with a sweet and peppery flavor, but then the famous Chonqing chicken wings ($19) blasted our palates: They looked the same as previous iterations, dried red chiles scattered here and there, but, if anything, the almost-metallic peppercorn taste and chile heat were more aggressive, and I still tasted cinnamon — though the spice rub is more complicated, featuring fennel, clove, cumin, and star anise.

The original San Francisco Mission Chinese opened as a food cart in 2008 then moved into an existing Chinese restaurant in the Mission District, where veteran Chinese cooks remained. Mission Chinese opened in New York in 2012 on the Lower East Side’s Orchard Street, and later segued to a new location on East Broadway (opening a sibling restaurant, Mission Cantina, in the interim).

Meanwhile, the Bushwick location opened in 2017, overlapping with the East Broadway spot. In 2018, former employees sued Mission Chinese for a culture that allowed for racial discrimination, resulting in a 2020 New York Magazine report coinciding with the East Broadway closure. The Brooklyn location closed in 2022. The original San Francisco location was sold to new owners and remains open.

Today’s Mission Chinese is a throwback to the San Francisco original, with Bowien employing veteran Chinese cooks from Cha Kee. “I taught them the recipes over three days, and they got the idea immediately,” says Bowien. Indeed, the old recipes seemed one step livelier than they were in the Bushwick version of the restaurant.

The kung pao pastrami ($31) — perhaps Bowien’s greatest invention — seems like it’s awash in more red chile oil than before, the chunks of cured meat bigger and fattier, the heap of roasted peanuts on top more prodigious. I dug into it as if greeting an old friend, having enjoyed it at the earlier incarnations of the restaurant. The ma po tofu was much the same, but meatier.

From here, we tried a couple of new dishes: The West Lake lamb dumpling dish ($18) takes a beef-and-tofu classic soup and transforms it into hedgehog-shaped dumplings, which bob in a mildly spicy broth with glass noodles, surmounted by a tangle of greens, looking like a lake landscape with islands. The gamy flavor of lamb shines. There’s also a version of the classic wontons in red chile oil that we didn’t try.

Served cold, Jacky’s spicy Sprite noodles ($16) derives most of its tingle not from Sichuan peppercorns, but from soda pop — and some sweetness, too. Among the dishes we tried that day, it was lightest on the stomach. I look forward to trying it again when summer rolls around. Last to arrive on the table was Cha Kee’s version of beef chow fun — a standard at many restaurants up and down Mott Street, and a signature Chinese American dish. This rendition had plenty of smoky flavor from the searing temperature of the wok, with the usual brown sauce absorbed by the noodles.

The meal ended with a dessert that recalled the zany menu of the Bushwick Mission Chinese — a lemony granita with Pop Rocks mixed in on top of a custard — very refreshing despite the little explosions in your mouth.

Gone are the days when Bowien cooked large-format dishes like whole duck in lotus leaves baked in clay, or when flavored ice was an appetizer. The current Mission Chinese seems like a return to the basic principles the restaurant started nearly 20 years ago: powerfully flavored and sometimes brilliant Sichuan adaptations incorporated into the canon of Chinese American cuisine — this time right in the middle of Chinatown.