i track consumer prices. i am the nyc food critic for bloomberg news. i am ryan sutton.
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
As The Price Hike’s “Most Excellent Menu Contest” continues, we’re showing how restaurants can (creatively) use to Tumblr to create a conversation around new menu items and new price points.
This Indiana Jones photo is the sort of thing we’d love Mission Chinese to do. They recently added mung bean noodles to the menu for $9 bucks. I like to call them melting face noodles, because when you get’em at Legend in Chelsea (Ask for “Tears in Eyes”), they’re so hot they make your face want to melt off like that bad guy in Raiders of The Lost Ark. How great is that?
The Mission version isn’t as face-meltingly spicy as Legend’s, but it’s still pretty hot. The mixture of eggs, cilantro, onions, gelatinous noodles and chili vinegar is a dead ringer for Chef Boyardee’s Chili Mac, if Chili Mac was made with great ingredients. We dig it. So there you have it. Melting Face noodles at Mission.
New(ish) Dishes at New York's Mission Chinese
- Sliced Lotus Root: Wild Sesame, Soy Caramel, Chives: $4
- “Married Couple’s” Beef: Sliced Beef Tongue, Heart, Tripe, Numbing Chili, Peanuts, Shaved garlic: $9 (same price as Cafe China’s “Husband & Wife” beef and tripe dish).
- Hand Torn Wheat Noodles: Chopped Lamb, Fresh Chili, Mung Bean Sprouts, Red Oil: $12
- Red Braised Pig Tails: Root Beer, Sweet-Sour Pineapple, Celery: $10
- Skate Wing Porridge: Pork Trotter, Pumpkin, Ginger Scallion: $12.5
- Fish Fragrant Eggplant: Celery, Sunflower Seeds, Tomato, Basil: $12
These are the type of simple, useful posts we’d like to see restaurants doing on Tumblr, and this is exactly what we at The Price Hike are trying to encourage with our “Most Excellent Menu Contest.” Tell us what’s new and what it costs. Show us what it looks like and you’re golden.
We could make an insane truffled soup dumpling if we wanted to and charge like $45. We could do that. We know how to do that. But we don’t want to do that. We want to make stuff that’s nourishing and restorative. If it’s your day off, if you’re gonna go out of your way to wait and hour or two, we want you to be happy.
So says Mission Chinese’s Danny Bowien in an awesome interview with The Price Hike. And for those who are still tempted by the prospect of truffles in their Chinese food, let us give you a moment of pause with our takedown of Hakkasan (via Bloomberg News).
Is Mission Chinese Undercharging for its Philanthropic Food?
This week in my Bloomberg News column I awarded 2.5 stars to the sometimes cramped but always comfortable Mission Chinese on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Mission serves “Americanized Oriental Food,” much of it seasoned with a lifetime supply of mouth-numbing novocaine sichuan peppercorns. This is the second of four or five planned locations; the San Francisco flagship debuted in 2010; a Williamsburg outpost will likely open within the year, followed by Atlanta and Oklahoma City.
To many, Mission Chinese is about philanthropy. While some chefs take the Warren Buffet approach to giving (get rich then give it away), Mission’s Danny Bowien takes a community-based “empower-the-diner” approach: Mission donates 75 cents from the purchase of every entree to the Food Bank of New York. It also donates 75 cents from the purchase of every glass of wine or soju cocktail to a rotating series of New York-based charities, including the Bowery Mission and Edible Schoolyard.
To others, Mission Chinese is about a different form of charity — free beer while you wait, a thoughtful gesture that saves you from blowing $30 bucks at a nearby cocktail bar when your table is sixty-minutes away. There was Bud in the beginning, then Miller High-Life, and now Bowien tells me he’s working on getting a better Brooklyn-based brew. It’s a nice little courtesy to take the edge off the queue, a blue collar amuse bouche of sorts. It’s something you’d expect from a Danny Meyer restaurant, not a $15-and-under venue on the Lower East Side. It’s something that makes you feel welcome.
So for me in particular, Mission Chinese is about hospitality. We’re living in an haute-hipster era where high-end food at a (theoretical) discount reigns supreme while all other creature comforts are expendable. But Mission Chinese proves that an ambitious and affordable restaurant can maintain its street cred while still coddling the customer a little bit. I’ve consistently had better service at Mission than at other “budget gourmet” spots like Pok Pok Ny, Acme or Il Buco Alimentari. Mission is also proof that a small restaurant can accept American Express and still (presumably) turn a profit.
Of course, we like to focus on numbers here at The Price Hike, and as such it’s worth noting that not a single drink or dish exceeds $15 at Mission Chinese. No, we’re not talking about small plates; many of these items easily feed two or three guests. So given the long waits and given the low prices, Mission could clearly charge more, per to the laws of supply and demand. And given the charitable component, Mission could easily get away with hiking the prices, per the laws of philanthropy. But Mission doesn’t.
Danny Bowien was nice enough to chat with me, over the phone, about prices. And since that stuff can get boring, we also talked about other things, like, well, women, liquor and monosodium glutamate. Here are some snippets from my hour-long conversations with Bowien (dude can talk):
- “It’s hard to tell my investors `look, I’m not going to charge $20 for a plate of food here because that’s not what we’re about’”
- “We’re opening in Brooklyn, for sure, within the next year.”
- “Oklahoma City won’t have crazy chicken hearts on the menu. It’s going to have to cater to that demographic.”
