Danny Bowien Thinks Failure Makes Everything Easier

Last week, we kicked off MUNCHIES: The Podcast with none other than chef Danny Bowien of Mission Chinese Food and Mission Cantina. Unless you've been living under a rock, you've probably heard something about the infamous Mission Chinese Food shut-down in 2013. Since then, the James Beard award-winning chef has managed to open his Mexican-inspired spot, Mission Cantina, have a baby, and re-open a 2.0 version of Mission Chinese Food.

But instead of focusing on the nitty gritty details of the rise and fall of Mission Chinese, our editor-in-chief, Helen Hollyman, dug into another side of the chef, exploring his life and the personality that came before all the fame and the restaurants. The conversation included tornados, Oklahoma City, perfect food, and why failure defines greatness.

You can get MUNCHIES: The Podcast on iTunes, listen on Soundcloud, and don't forget to subscribe. You can also get the entire archive of episodes—plus transcripts and more—right here on MUNCHIES.

Here's the transcript of our conversation in MUNCHIES: The Podcast with Danny Bowien, edited to the main interview. For full discussions on the Smashing Pumpkins, tornados, and GotB2B hair dye, you'll have to listen to the audio above.

When was the first time you had Chinese food in Oklahoma? My mom's favorite place was this spot called Lucky's Chinese, which was a classic Americanized Chinese restaurant with pink table cloths. If you've sat at the communal table at Mission Chinese, there's a round table with a Lazy Susan that is very much designed around that place with the Chinese zodiac underneath the glass. We were super poor growing up, so I didn't go out to eat a lot, but on Sundays after church, if I didn't freak out during church, we would go eat at Lucky's, where everything was fried. It was an all-you-can-eat buffet, and I really looked forward to eating there. My mom's favorite thing to eat was Tex-Mex, so it was like a reward eating Chinese food.

So a lot of people don't know this about you, but you're an adopted Korean-American, and your parents are white. You've said in the past that you would all go out to dinner together and the host would look at the four of you, look at your parents, and back you kids and ask if you were lost. It was the worst. Now it's a lot different, but back in like '87, let's say we were going to like Golden Corral—because that was the kind of restaurant that we would go to—and they would just be like, "Is this the whole party? Are you waiting for more people? Who are these kids with you?" School was also brutal, because kids would always be like, "Why are you parents white?" And I'd just be like "What are you talking about? Those are my parents, idiot, I don't know what you mean."

And you used to go to church almost five days a week, right? You were a pro at the new testament Bible pop quizzes? This is super depressing, but I think a lot of it had to do with when I was growing up. My mom was super sick battling breast cancer, and then she had to have a heart transplant. I think it was a distraction for me, and I agreed to go to church because I think it was a lot more comfortable for me to be there, even if it was just memorizing lines from the Bible. It was also part of this weird puzzle, where we could meet up with our parents friends who are like, "Who are these weird Korean kids that are with you?" and my parents could brag and be like, "Oh this is Danny, our son, he's adopted, and he's the number four Bible quizzer in Oklahoma." And they could be like "Oh, that's great," you know? And there I am with my bleached Sun-In hair. It was silly. But then I started realizing who I was as a teenager and was just like was just like, Fuck this, but it unfortunately took me up until my junior year of high school to realize that I didn't have to do things the way that everyone else did it. I guess that's the way that most people figure it out, though.

How did you figure that out though, because that takes a pretty mature high schooler to realize, Screw this. I think it was when my mom passed away at that time that I took a step back and was like, Why do I have a Trans Am and a Kawasaki Ninja?Why am I working for all of this shit that I don't really need? What am I doing? Why am I working at Abercrombie and Fitch when I really just want to be playing in a band? I was just doing all of this to impress other people who could be like, "You're gonna be really good when you grow up." When my mom passed away—this is super dark—I think I was just trying to make her happy in a lot of ways and do things that she could be proud of. I think that there was a lot of pressure on me for that and I also put a lot of pressure on myself. It's so crazy that now I'm owning all of these restaurants. It feeds that anxiety to please other people but at least I get some happiness out of it, too.

What was the one dish that you mastered with her? I don't know about the word "master," but I used to make a lot of Hamburger Helper because that was super easy and cheap. My dad was the only one that worked, and he worked for General Motors my whole life. There was this beef noodle flavor that I enjoyed a lot that I made all the time. My mom actually was Polish, so she made a lot of interesting Polish dishes like stuffed cabbage with tomato sauce and she'd cook everything in an electric skillet.

I think to this day, the only thing my dad knows how to make is spaghetti or eggs. He'd make breakfast for dinner, which was really cool. He would always burn the bacon. I'm thinking about it now and wondering why my dad always puts the bacon in a sauté pan over high heat and just puts a lid on it. It always burns, but I guess he puts the lid on it so the oil doesn't pop.

Come to think of it, I was actually way more into cooking later after my mom passed away. It was a way for my friends and I—I had a cool, big back yard and my dad would allow us to drink alcohol as long as we didn't leave, because Oklahoma is super dangerous, because you're young and drinking, and then you have to drive everywhere. So a lot of kids would get DUIs, or worse, car wrecks, so my dad was accepting of the fact that we were 17 and were gonna drink because we were in Oklahoma cause' it's super boring there. So he made this deal that I could have people over, they could stay over, and no one left. That's how I got into cooking and started grilling a lot of stuff. Around my junior year of high school was when I started getting into cooking, and it was always a lot of skewers. I was really into making kebabs and I think I mastered the art of kebab.

What is the art of the kebab? I think you just marinate it in a lot of salad dressing and grill it, and that's it. That's my bad version of it.

And at that time, didn't your high school get blown away by a tornado? Yeah. But it was a saving thing for me. I mean it was a horrible thing to happen, but I was going to fail high school anyways because during my senior year, my mom passed away and I stopped giving a shit about a lot of stuff. I was still in school, and I had a conversation with my principle and he was like, "You can continue to come to school or not if you need to take time off, that's cool." He was a really nice and understanding guy. Then, my high school got demolished, so we had the option of going to a community college to finish our courses or the option of not going at all. It just ended up being this thing where I passed high school but didn't actually finish it at all.

So let's talk about the Stellas, your high school band. What's the best song off your first album? I don't even know, man. What's crazy is that when I joined the Stellas, they were kind of also going through an identity crisis, too. I met Rachel, the lead singer in the band, at the Guitar Center. I'd always go and fuck around by playing the drums there. I don't know how it happened, but she was like there and was like "I have a band and I'm looking for a bass player," but I really wanted to play guitar, so I was like "I can play bass" and weaseled my way into the band. It was supposed to be a Christian band, but Rachel and the drummer, John, were actually dating each other. The keyboard player, Casey, was the only one who actually wanted to be a Christian band. So we all conspired that it wasn't going to be a Christian band, and we were all secretly smoking cigarettes, drinking, but when the keyboard player was around, we'd put that part of it away. And it was really bad. I was really bad at playing the guitar, but I just wanted to sound like the Smashing Pumpkins on every single song. We opened up for the All American Rejects a couple of times—they're also from Oklahoma—but outside of that, it didn't really go anywhere. Towards the end, it was a classic story: the drummer and the lead singer broke up and things got really weird in the band. Then my friend Chaffey called me from California and was like, "Hey, you should come visit me and Eric. We have an apartment and you can come stay with us. There's a culinary school here and we know you like to cook." So I went for five days a week later and it was the first time that I was outside of Oklahoma. I ended up moving there, and the rest is history.

When was the first time that you ever ate Szechuan peppercorns? In 2006, I was hanging out with my friend Brandon Jew, and I was an annoying line cook back then. I was getting pretty good at cooking, but I was never really happy or satisfied with anything that I was eating. A lot of line cooks experience this—where you go out to eat and you're eating similar things to what you cook, so you can't help but pick it apart. When we would hang out, we would not want to eat the food that we knew how to cook. So he took me to this place called Spices Two and I remember him telling me, "You gotta try this place, it's amazing." He lived around the corner at the time and was like "You gotta try their ma-po tofu man, it's the best. When I tried it, I thought, What in the world is going on? and became obsessed with it. Two years later, we opened Mission Chinese Food in 2008. It was this good thing: instead of being shit-talking line cooks, we turned that energy into finding out everything we could about Szechuan food.

So not that long ago, if you really think about it. So what is perfect food to you? I don't know, that's a good question. Perfect food is food that you don't have to think about that often. For me, my idea of perfect food is very different than it was five years ago, or two years ago. I'm always around food, so when I go home, perfect food might be bland, unsalted pasta that my son is eating.

Yesterday, I was eating at this place where they had this big crab boil, and I just kept eating the potatoes and going back to them. There were crabs, mussels, shrimp, and vegetables, but I just kept going back to these potatoes, because as a chef, you're always tasting food that's at the edge of being seasoned.

Anyone that's married to a chef, or if you have friends that are chefs, and you go over to their house while they're cooking something, they always season things aggressively. That's why restaurant food tastes so good: it's all fat and salt. But now I think that perfect food is honestly bland. Or sometimes it's just take-out food with my wife. Perfect food to me should make you feel really good. If you asked Danny five years ago what's perfect food, I would have said that a perfect meal would be at el Bulli or noma or something like that, and that still is perfect food, but I think it really depends on the time and how you feel. Right now, anything that my wife and I eat together at the end of a long day, when my kid's asleep, safe, and sleeping peacefully is perfect food.

When we had our first apartment in New York, it was a big flat and we didn't even have a dining room table, so at the end of the night, the only room we could actually eat in was the bathroom, because our son's crib was on the other end of the apartment. We'd go in the bathroom, close the door, eat really quickly, and whisper. That was perfect food, because I hadn't seen my wife in like 19 hours.

Going back to the time between when you had to close Mission Chinese Food in New York and reopen it, how did you deal with not burning out, or did you? I definitely feel like there's been phases of burning out, but I think that that's what defines greatness. Whenever it gets to that point where you're hemorrhaging and then digging deep and then bouncing back and taking time to recover from huge failures makes everything easier. The worst thing that's ever going to happen to us has happened, and now that that's done, we can just chill and move on. It's really interesting to wake up every day and realize that that's out of the way now and not live in fear of a backlash or lose everything, because I've already done that.

What's next? Just chill. And make sure the restaurants are super fucking tight.