12 Days of Holiday Food Memories: Danny Bowien Was a Barbecue-Loving Shepherd Boy
We asked a dozen food world luminaries to help us count down the next 12 days with culinary nostalgia, and they gave us their favorite stories of supermarket eggnog, standing rib roasts, discounted candy, and lots of cheer. Enjoy, and happy holidays!
Photo credit: Getty. Lettering: Brian Kaspr
Korea-born, Oklahoma-raised chef Danny Bowien is perhaps best known for the culinary mashups he creates at San Francisco’s Mission Chinese Food and New York’s Mission Cantina. “Kung pao pastrami” is the name of one famous MCF hybrid. Another: At Cantina, he tosses barbecued pork ribs with odd bedfellows tamarind and jalapeños and wraps them all in a tortilla. Here he tells us about his holidays in the heartland.
I grew up in a pretty Christian house. I went to church like literally 4 or 5 times a week. We celebrated Christmas. One of my most vivid holiday memories was Black Friday, because my mom would make us wake up at, like, 2 a.m., to get all the sale stuff for Christmas.
My fondest holiday memory was this really big Christmas production we did every year. I was in the production with my Dad—it was cool, it was a really big bonding session. They would rehearse for like a month, they would…have these actual physical cranes. Angels would be flying through the air. It was pretty insane. I was in the crowd—some shepherd boy—my dad would be, like, a Roman soldier. My Dad worked a lot, I didn’t see him that often…it was a cool time because he was off work.
Christmas Day we would go to both my grandparents’ houses. Just the standard stuff: there were a lot of casseroles, and a lot of ham. I ate ham a lot. I like ham products now, but they would get, like, the spiral-cut ham with the pineapple and maraschino cherries on it. My mom always made stuffing; I remember it was really dense, not fluffy, basically the wrongest way you could make stuffing. It was like a brick. I never even saw fresh parsley or sage, I think it was, like, dried spices, she would put it into a sheet pan and like, bake it. I think it looked like a veggie burger—[but] it was super delicious, very flavorful.
I don’t think I liked the ham that much. There would always be some sort of barbecue—someone would be smart and pick up a bunch of ribs, some brisket. I always liked that, barbecue, growing up. My dad’s friend would smoke a turkey. He’d take an oil barrel, he’d cut it in half and make a smoker out of it. I liked that. I didn’t like the candied—I don’t even think it was ham, it was more like ham parts molded together.
[In Oklahoma] everyone would have their favorite thing, like ribs or whatnot, it’s very by the book. They really like to sauce their ribs…it always rules.
Does eating barbecue today remind me of childhood? Yeah. Seriously.
