Mission Chinese Chills Out

Does time heal? The last we heard of Danny Bowien’s Mission Chinese, all was not well. Its East Broadway and Bushwick locations closed in 2020 and 2022 under the shadow of reports that the workplace had been a “nightmare.” (A San Francisco location is still open, but Bowien has no involvement with it.) Bowien seemed to have moved on. Lately, he’s been taping Chopped and turning up in Supreme campaigns.

Long before I pulled on the restaurant critic’s plastic bib, I ate at Mission’s old New York locations (and once in San Francisco) — first with pleasure, eventually with exhaustion. By the time of Bushwick, Mission seemed more rave than restaurant: neon lights bouncing around the room, karaoke blasting at deafening levels. Maybe I aged out, or maybe Mission hadn’t grown up. Either way, those visits dropped off.

And then, this summer, Mission came back: quietly (sort of), temporarily (maybe). Wednesday through Sunday evenings until July 31, Mission is popping up at Cha Kee on Mott Street, cooking mainly its classics. Bowien is back in the kitchen every night, with his chef Patty Lee and the Cha Kee staff, who got a crash course in Mission’s ethos and cooking. Cha Kee does its own thing for breakfast and lunch service and goes Mission in the evenings. One of Bowien’s favorite light-up Chinese takeaway photo-menu signboards now glows from the back wall, but other than that, the restaurant looks much as it usually does.

When I went back to Mission Kee (if I may), I found I’d missed it, and we both seemed better met for the time apart. On a recent Friday night, the room was full and buzzing. A birthday dinner, a pair of Bear-ish grizzled beard guys, hot girls: social má là, but of a calmer, more focused kind. The drinks list that used to fuel the party has been mostly pared back to a few batched cocktails and Tsingtaos. The dishes that used to define Mission are back — the chongqing wings, the kung pao pastrami — like Bushwick-chastened authors of “Why I Left New York” essays returned for a penitent visit. And like those authors, it’s nice to see them again. These were great ideas, great dishes, potent ones, and they blasted their way onto the scene to burn hot and fast. A Chinatown-residing friend — six-foot-plus, Alaska born, a former forest firefighter — who had frequented the East Broadway location remembered that on one visit, the wings were so spicy he got a nosebleed.

Here they’re joined by a couple new fun ones. Jacky’s Sprite noodles strike me as classic Mission: ballsy, irresistibly bad for you. Jacky, one of Mission’s hosts, is a big booster of Haidilao in Flushing (a China-based chain, home of the dancing noodle), where cold noodles are made with Korean cider. Here, the “effervescent dressing” is dosed with Sprite, which gives the cold, chile-oil-slicked noodles a little tingle. I found them to be overly sweet, but how are you not going to try a Sprite noodle? Go ahead, and while you’re at it, get the new crispy beef “Louis,” braised for four hours and then finished in an umami-deep sweet soy caramel and Sicilian orange oil, or the returning cumin lamb ribs, punched up with dates. I worried for the vegetarian among us, but she agreed with the menu (how often does that happen?) that the “addictive cabbage salad” was, in fact, addictive, whatever was in its “seaweed secret dressing,” and the shiso fried rice buried beneath a mountain of shredded shiso basically off-gassed enough herbaceousness to feel substantial.

Will Mission come back for a more permanent stay? As of now, it’s uncertain. Cha Kee’s owners have invited Bowien to do another run. “After I closed the last Mission Chinese Food, I thought it would never come back again,” he told me by email. “I’m glad it has, and I’m not ruling anything out at this point. I feel very privileged to be cooking in the city again, and I definitely don’t take it for granted.”

For now, it’s nice to have it in town on a visit. A little older, a little — hopefully — wiser, a little calmer, sure. But not toothless. I brought the forest firefighter back, and we dug into a dish of rice cakes with thrice-fried bacon, poppy with Sichuan peppercorn, and yuba. His eyes bulged. “That’s a nose-bleeder,” he said.