NYC: Mission Chinese – Lower East Side hipster Chinese

On our first evening in New York, we went for late dinner at Mission Chinese. Poul wasn’t too thrilled about the prospect of having Chinese food for dinner, (why eat Chinese food, when we could have New York pizza?), but I told him that Mission Chinese wasn’t just ordinary Chinese food. In fact, I’m not sure how to describe the food at Mission Chinese. Maybe hipster Asian would be a suitable term?

We didn’t have a reservation, so we just went there and waited our turn. While you’re waiting, you can order cocktails in the bar, so I tried an interesting, black cocktail called The Moonwalk.

It didn’t take more than 10 minutes before they had a table ready for us, so I brought the rest of the cocktail along with me. We weren’t very hungry so we ordered less food that what our waiter had in mind, but more food, than what we knew we could eat. At Mission Chinese they don’t spend a lot of time on unnecessary stuff such as food styling, so I was pleasantly surprised when I found out that most of the dishes tasted a lot better than they looked.

Take the stir fried cellophane noodles with egg, dried scallops and pork belly. It looked like a greasy mess on the plate, but it tasted really, really good. Though the dish I liked the most was the scallops topped with kombu (kelp) and wrapped in crispy nori (seaweed). Really light and delicious, and just the kind of food my jet lag and I were craving.

One of the neighboring tables ordered the Beggar’s Duck, which is Mission Chinese’ most famous signature dish. It’s baked and served in a clay shell which is cracked at the table, and it’s supposed to be amazing.

Mission Chinese, 171 E Broadway, Lower East Side, New York