Danny Bowien on the Hard-Partying Chef Life—Now Fueled by SoulCycle and Spirulina
When you’ve abstained from something long enough, there’s a certain why-now pride in remaining a holdout. I have never dyed my hair. I have never gotten a tattoo. And I have never—and this is a feat for someone who covers wellness for a living—endured a SoulCycle class. At least, I hadn’t until one morning earlier this month, when I turned up at the Spin studio’s Noho location, ready to draft behind Danny Bowien.
The 36-year-old chef, wearing a threadbare Marilyn Manson T-shirt, blousy white pants, and Gucci’s New York Yankees loafers, smiled and held out a bottle of water—part moral support, part hospitality pro. Bowien had already warned the night before that he’d signed us up for the “second-hardest class” (led by Yavuz Akman, whose genial brutality is apparently matched only by his brother, Akin). But if anyone can be a Virgil into this cardio-fueled underworld, it might as well be Bowien: a shredded regular who clips in four or five times a week. He radiates a kind of neon, hyperkinetic optimism.
If you came to know Bowien in the early fever of Mission Chinese Food—conceived as a San Francisco pop-up in 2010, reincarnated in downtown New York, and newly expanded to Brooklyn this week—your memory is probably fogged over by nostril-flaring mapo tofu and bottomless kegs, which were poured out gratis to the wait-listers stranded outside on Orchard Street. That sense of up-tempo abandon front of house mirrored the scene back of house. “When Mission Chinese started, I was drinking a lot. Part of it was to have fun and get through service,” Bowien says, recalling impromptu karaoke outings with the kitchen staff. But it was as much about escape, he continues. “There was such a high level of expectation. I didn’t really know how to handle success in the beginning”—such as that exuberant New York Times review comparing his cooking to genre-exploding Led Zeppelin. “It was like this amazing party,” says Bowien of the days and nights running on fumes, “but it needed to end.”
And it did. By the time Mission Chinese moved to its current spot on East Broadway, in 2014, the chef had quit drinking (cold turkey); in its place came other coping mechanisms for the mounting pressure—such as the yo-yo swing of Adderall and cigarettes, as well as other forms of smoking. “I was just doing things that were not good for me,” he says. “It was like I had something I was trying to prove.”
All of which makes opening the new restaurant in Brooklyn something of a first for Bowien, who is riding on a year of squeaky-clean living. (And year two of SoulCycle mania: “I just don’t have enough self-discipline to go to the gym. I’m going to be that person on the elliptical watching the Food Network.”) Sure, stress levels still swing from a 1 to a 10, “but I’m pretty present in it, as much as that sounds like therapy talk,” he says with a laugh. This time, when a gas issue recently set off a weeklong delay in opening, it wasn’t panic at the disco. (“One or two restaurants ago, I would have had a complete meltdown.”) Instead, it was more like “makeshift karaoke to Céline Dion in the restaurant that wasn’t open yet.” He used that extra time to cross-train staff at the Manhattan location.
“Maybe it’s getting older, maybe it’s having a kid,” Bowien says, referring to his mullet-haired 4-year-old son, Mino, “but you can’t control everything.” (That includes the wine lists and cocktail menus, which he delegates to his team.) “It’s the same thing to me with fashion,” he says, alluding to his haute-idiosyncratic style that has led him to play muse to Moncler, VFiles, and Sandy Liang: “You only have one chance to really nail it, and not everyone’s going to think you did the best job, so you just have to believe in yourself.”
That might sound like the afterglow of too much SoulCycle wisdom—something that, outside of class, even die-hard Bowien might roll his eyes at. But in the thick of it, legs in a rapid-fire blur, “you just take this moment to reflect.” The way instructors give a daily boost—good class!—has encouraged Bowien to pass that along to his staff.
Bowien says the same to me after our 45-minute careen into the SoulCycle vortex, his precisionist technique akin to crisp knife skills. (The praise is not exactly earned: My inner metronome is frozen at adagio pace.) Afterward, refueling at nearby Atla, Bowien scoops up flaxseed-dusted chilaquiles with coral-painted fingers, the product of another self-care mission: simultaneous chair massage plus gel manicure at Think Pink on Houston Street. He talks about the buckwheat injera—a take on the fermented Ethiopian bread—that he’s planning for the Bushwick restaurant; there’s also a spirulina sourdough pita he’s dreamed up for a one-off pop-up.
I’m mulling whether I have any shot at becoming a SoulCycle convert when Bowien and his friend Lisa, who also came to class, show off their matching tattoos, still bandaged from the night before. It’s a three-eyed fish, in homage to a familiar tag seen around San Pedro, California. For Bowien, it’s just the latest addition to a constellation of ink—much of it visible on the Eckhaus Latta runway last month, when he walked his first fashion show in the label’s sheer blue top. But for me, red-faced and open-minded, I find myself once again reconsidering my never-have-I list. After all, I reason, there’s a first time for everything.
