Mission Chinese Food is not exactly--or maybe at all--a Chinese restaurant. Born out of a revolutionary food truck that roamed the late night streets of San Francisco’s Mission District, it started life as a pop-up: a restaurant within a restaurant, a rough-and-tumble joint that served radically reimagined “Chinese food” inside an old Americanized Chinese spot after hours. This incredible resourcefulness and unbridled inventiveness infuses each and every dish at Mission Chinese Food. Hungry diners queue up outside both the San Francisco and New York City locations, waiting hours for a for a tiny table in a cramped room just to try such dishes as Sizzling Cumin Lamb Breast and Kung Pao Pastrami. The mastermind behind the phenomenon, Danny Bowien is, at only thirty-one, the fastest-rising young chef in the United States. Food & Wine awarded him the highly competitive title “Best New Chef” of 2013 and he was the recipient of the ultra-prestigious James Beard Foundation “Rising Star Chef” in the same year. In 2011, Bon Appetit named Mission Chinese Food the second best restaurant in America, and in 2012 New York Times chief restaurant critic Pete Wells lauded the Lower East Side outpost as the #1 Best New Restaurant in New York City. Now, in The Mission Chinese Food Cookbook, Bowien and his team chronicle the restaurant’s unconventional and meteoric rise to popularity in a “cookbook in conversations” that combines raucous storytelling with delicious recipes. Each chapter in the book--from that describing the development and opening the restaurant, to an ill-fated trip to China, to the opening of Mission Chinese’s first New York location in the Lower East Side--unfolds as a roundtable discussion with the various crew members who brought the restaurant to life, accompanied by beautifully shot full color photography of the recipes that run throughout. From schmaltz fried rice to hot-and-sour soup dumplings to a “Chinese chicken salad” made with escarole and tea-smoked chicken, these creative, addictive, and surprisingly simple recipes that borrow from both ends of the high/low food spectrum will inspire Mission Chinese’s legions of fans as well as home-cooks of all levels to rethink what’s possible in the kitchen, while offering a passport to a wholly unique dining experience.