A couple of years ago in San Francisco, Anthony Myint and Karen Leibowitz borrowed a Guatemalan snack cart and started selling edibles under the name Mission Street Food. Their whimsically inspired offerings — like the PB&J: pork belly and jicama — quickly set the foodie blogosphere afire.
But the police weren’t as smitten. With a permit problem at hand, Myint and Leibowitz struck a deal with a run-down Chinese establishment. They used its dining room every Thursday night for Mission Street Food; the kitchen, however, was shared, allowing the existing restaurant to continue to serve delivery customers.
“Mission Street Food: Recipes and Ideas From an Improbable Restaurant” by Myint and Leibowitz, chronicles the whole affair in a book that is as quirky and innovative as the restaurant that inspired it.
“One of the things we wanted to show was how cooking doesn’t exist in a vacuum,” Leibowitz says. “Our food was coming out of a story, and it was important to tell that story.”
This is the first cookbook by McSweeney’s Insatiables, a food-centric imprint from the publishing house founded by author Dave Eggers. The cookbook follows the debut of Lucky Peach, a food quarterly edited by Momofuku chef David Chang and writer Peter Meehan. Both publications clearly reflect McSweeney’s direction so far: high on design and jammed full of ideas.
Glossy food porn — as well as the softer-focus farm porn typical of the Edible Communities sort — is nowhere to be found. Instead, the art reflects its purpose: Traditional recipe formats are reinvented by using utilitarian photography to provide step-by-step instructions.
Further cookbook irreverence is provided by cellphone photo collages documenting the lines that stretched down the street for the original Mission Street Food cart and a comic book that breaks up the flow of the oral history offered by Myint and Leibowitz about the restaurant’s evolution.
Chris Ying, co-publisher and editor at large of Insatiables, says the imprint set out with two general ideas: Writers would be given space and the license to write in whatever fashion they chose, and stories wouldn’t necessarily provide a lot of introduction or context for a topic.
“You can go too far in producing a book that’s too insider or alienating,” Ying says. “But readers are generally smart enough to make assumptions and look things up if they need to.”
The recipes in “Mission Street Food” take that approach as well. The intro to the recipe section sets the tone: “Decision-making is more important to cooking than exact amounts, temperatures, or times.” Myint says he tried striking a balance by including recipes that would help people understand broader cooking techniques that could be applied beyond the food being made.
But this cookbook is about more than recipes. The oral history of the restaurant entertains. The short essays scattered throughout the book fascinate: What does culinary authenticity mean when you’re cooking high-end Chinese food in the same kitchen where General Tso’s chicken is cranked out for delivery? Myint and Leibowitz chose to forgo higher-priced organic food and instead donate a portion of their profits to food banks; how do you balance humanitarianism and environmentalism?
The success of Myint and Leibowitz’s restaurant was underwritten by a food-obsessed generation that’s as concerned about the social and intellectual implications of as much as how it tastes. They’ve written a book that captures a moment in American culture. That it comes bound in the guise of a cookbook is only fitting.
Chicken wings
“Mission Street Food” offers visual recipes: brief written instructions paired with photos that show how the food should look at that stage (see photo, above). Here, we’ve taken a more traditional approach, but we’ve attempted to maintain the authors’ voices, including their advice between steps. The recipe calls for just the middle segment of a chicken wing, which the authors say has “an ideal ratio and juxtaposition of skin to meat.” The wings are fried three times to achieve “a papery crisp skin.”
Servings: 6 people
Approximate cost: $20
You will need:
4 pounds chicken-wing middle segments, salted liberally and refrigerated overnight on a rack (or in a bowl, if you don’t have room)
Oil for frying
Salt and whatever seasonings you want (try cayenne, or, if you want to be culturally diverse, za’atar)
1. Fry the wings at 280 degrees for 6 minutes.
2. Freeze the wings for at least 2 hours. It’s OK to buy frozen wings. Freezing bursts cell walls in the skin so that more water can evaporate during subsequent frying sessions. Freezing after each frying also prevents the meat from getting overcooked.
3. Par-fry the frozen wings again for 6 minutes at 280 degrees. Freeze again.
4. To serve, fry the wings at 350-375 degrees for about 5 minutes, until crispy.
Season with salt and whatever spices you desire, but don’t add sauce! If you have an allegiance to Buffalo wings or a fish-sauce glaze, serve it as a dipping sauce, but don’t ruin your crispy little masterpieces by soaking them in wetness.
You’re ready to open the best wing shop in the country — just make sure you have no social life, because your days will be consumed by an endless cycle of par-frying and freezing.
