The rented truck that launched a revolution
Mission Street Food changed everything in S.F.
What was to become the most influential San Francisco restaurant of the past decade materialized in an antojitos truck on the corner of 21st and Mission streets. There, on a random October 2008 evening, a few hours after the vice presidential debate between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin, a group of friends decided to sell scallion flatbreads topped with pork belly and jicama for a few bucks. They were led by a married couple — a young cook named Anthony Myint and a grad student named Karen Leibowitz. Even before the first PB&J emerged from the steamy window, a line snaked down the block, appearing just as suddenly as the truck itself.
This was the beginning of Mission Street Food, an experimental venture born out of a perfect confluence of factors, in both the local restaurant scene and greater San Francisco as a whole. In the midst of the recession, when safer businesses like pizzerias and burger joints were
proliferating through the city, Mission Street Food flaunted a new kind of underdog dining experience: weird, communitydriven, charitable, inexpensive, accessible and just ... fun.
Mission Street Food ushered in the era of modern food trucks and pop-up dinners — pillars of the way the Bay Area eats today. Perhaps more important, Mission Street Food shattered all expectations of what a restaurant can and should be, a sustained revolution that continues to impact both chefs and diners.
I’ll never forget the opening line of the email that landed like a bomb in my in-box on the afternoon of Oct. 2, 2008: “High-falootin’ line cook from Bar Tartine goes all nitty gritty and s—.”
The email went on to outline a food truck popup happening that night. It wasn’t a press release, nor even anything sanctioned by the cook in question, who would turn out to be Myint. It came from one of his friends, and explained that he would be subletting a Guatemalan antojitos truck on a weekly basis, every Thursday from 8 p.m. to 2 a.m. Then, San Francisco street food barely existed beyond our beloved taco trucks, lagging far beyond the myriad options of other major metropolitan areas. For me, then the editor of Eater SF, this breaking news item was supremely interesting.
The note ended as suddenly as it began, with a line that may have been a mission statement, a plea to support the unseen workers that make restaurants possible: “Support local line cooks.”
If you’re a local restaurant junkie, you know where this story goes. On that first night, a large crowd gathered on that Mission corner. The same thing happened the next week. The crowds persisted, so after a few weeks, Mission Street Food moved into Lung Shan, a nondescript Chinese restaurant up the road, at 2234 Mission St. In this hermit-crablike arrangement, Mission Street Food would operate twice a week, each night with a different menu and different guest chefs. On the five other days of the week, Lung Shan would be the site’s sole occupant. Each pop-up dinner would contribute a portion of proceeds to charities of the visiting chef ’s choice.
Just as important to this origin story is how it’s so very different from the stories of the time. Buttoned-up restaurants like the Plumed Horse and Spruce were among Esquire’s top new Bay Area restaurants. The Ritz, Danko and Masa were the town’s fine dining stalwarts, holdovers from another era. Otherwise, the economy was struggling, and San Francisco dining was in a bit of a lull. Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, Kogi was starting a food truck revolution, thanks to a new communication platform named Twitter, and hot spots like Animal and Gjelina were bringing new swagger — and raucous fun — to sit-down restaurants.
Now, San Francisco had its obsession. Fueled by a power vacuum of innovation and a rush of technological advances (blogs! social media! iPhone cameras!), Mission Street Food became a runaway hit. Even as it was largely ignored by mainstream media in those initial months, it spurred San Francisco into our current landscape, where multicultural food trucks are on every corner and pop-up restaurants are a de facto part of young cooks’ resumes.
The cultural shift extended to the kitchen, too. Mission Street Food gave a platform to young cooks, the invisible soldiers behind your favorite restaurants, the worker bees you rarely hear about. The pop-ups showed a generation that new opportunities were available. Until this moment, talented local cooks were trapped in a system where they had to work their way up the ladder until they had enough money or investors to open a restaurant. Here, within a Chinese takeout restaurant, for one night, they could cook the food they dreamed about. A Magnolia chef named Brandon Jew got to cook his version of Chinese American food, eight years before opening Mister Jiu’s in Chinatown.
Nick Balla served $9 ribeyes. San Francisco diners got to eat the food of Tia Harrison, Veronica Salazar, Ryan Farr, Mari Takahashi and even a then-unknown pesto world champion named Danny Bowien.
Mission Street Food attracted a group of people who might not have felt like they belonged in a white tablecloth restaurant world. For someone like me, making $40K a year but hugely interested in food (yet not the Myths and Aquas of the city), Mission Street Food was also a place to experience innovation and learn about global food. It was where I heard names like Rene Redzepi, Michel Bras and Pascal Barbot, and tried to understand Heston Blumenthal’s granulated burger.
And it was fun. Hell, Bowien did an egg-tasting menu. It included bacon cheeseburger scotch eggs and egg nog milkshakes. Chris Ying, who would go on to win media awards at Lucky Peach, hosted Mission Stoned Food, complete with dishes like inverted nachos and a “terrine of candy bars” that bore the name Milky Snwixerteers Kat. That was Mission Street Food at its core.
This week, Los Angeles’ dining community is mourning the loss of a small, funky Korean restaurant, Baroo, itself a short-lived favorite.
Many of the words used to describe Baroo today — unlikely, spirited, affordable, experimental — could be used to describe those first months of Mission Street Food. Its singularity said as much about Myint and Leibowitz as it did about the greater San Francisco restaurant industry.
It didn’t matter that the food was served on paper plates, or that it took forever to come out of the cramped kitchen. It was honest and transparent. Under the neon lights, eating at Mission Street Food felt cool, insurgent and exciting.
By summer 2010, Mission Street Food became Mission Chinese Food, a permanent restaurant that quickly garnered national acclaim. It’s still there, as are its sister restaurants, Commonwealth and the Perennial. They are still raising money for charity — Commonwealth alone has raised over $350,000 for various local causes.
A few weeks ago, I ran into Leibowitz at the Perennial, a restaurant built to combat climate change. I brought up the first Mission Street Food pop-up, in the truck on Mission and 21st. We laughed about how she thought that would be a one-night thing, and here she is, a decade later, still in the business and getting highlighted in the New Yorker as one of the country’s most innovative restaurateurs.
Then I had lunch at Smokebread, a pop-up restaurant from Nick Balla blending Asian and European influences. On my way back to the office, I walked by too many food trucks to count, and then I saw small restaurants tucked into larger restaurants.
Mission Street Food would prove to be an unsustainable, impractical dream. But look around San Francisco, and you’ll see its legacy everywhere.