The Danny Bowien Recipe

I have a book that was due April 1st. All vegan plant-based recipes. I’m not vegan, but I eat fairly vegan. It’s very chef-y to think of a project, and then think how hard you can make it. I wanted to do a cookbook that takes away all the foundations you have as a chef, typically animal-based fats—meats and dairy—which is actually really hard. So I’ve been testing a lot of that, and a lot of kid food. Mino, my son, is homeschooling right now, so it rotates: Wednesday through Saturday it’s all kid’s food, and then Sunday through Tuesday it’s cookbook R&D.
It’s been cool convincing Mino to try stuff. There are some things he’s really into right now, like cauliflower. We told him it was white broccoli.

It’s a hyper-color, it’s heat reactive. It’s a dye that reacts to heat.

When you sweat, your armpits would turn one color, when people put their hand on you, it would leave a handmark. I feel like that would probably be [an analogy for] the way I approach food now––I mean, I don’t want to speak for everyone, but a lot of the chefs I worked for are heritage-based chefs. I worked for a lot of Japanese food restaurants for a long time, like sushi bars. And there would be practices that had been passed down to chefs from family, or other people they’d worked for, master chefs. They’d been taught one way to do things. But now, I feel like I’m more reactive to the people around me, who aren’t necessarily chefs. People I’m close with. Like that fabric: if you touch it, it turns a different color.

I love telling people, “I’m not your expert,” because I’m not. I’m not making this kind of food, and doing it well because I’ve done it my whole life. It’s really based on the people I have around me. Like I want to make people happy, but what really gets me going is––I’ll call up [a friend] and be like, “Come by, I’m working on this thing and I want you to taste it.” I need to see the reaction. As a chef, you’re not in the dining room. I get the courage by asking the people I care about.

A lot of people who are chefs or in creative fields are obsessive. I was obsessive for a really long time. Overindulgence. I would drink as much as I could, eat as much as I could, do as many drugs as I could. First I quit drinking. That’s when I started getting really into clothes. And it wasn’t a healthy thing. I was really obsessed with buying the hottest, newest designer thing. I was really into Demna. I always had to have the newest Vetements thing. I’d quit drinking, but I was still self-medicating in other ways, like with fashion. And it just got to this point where I wasn’t able to financially keep up with all these clothes. I started thinking about why I had been running towards these things: I wanted the validation. When I was a kid, I wanted to have expensive clothes––like Jordans or whatever––but I couldn’t afford them. And when I got older, I could start buying things I’d wanted. I think of that now as me using that as a coping mechanism for dealing with discomfort. Sorry, that’s a heavy answer.

I’m really fortunate that Mission is a restaurant that is also a hub for creative people. A lot of the downtown New York designers, I really identify with them in a way. With fashion and restaurants and food, there’s this perception that it’s this glamorous life. But people don’t really know the amount of work that goes into it. And much like fashion, with food, it’s very cyclical, very based on [youth] and proving your value, becoming credible, and then maintaining that place. There’s a lot of pressure that comes with that. It’s all kind of a popularity contest. If you play the game in certain ways, you go further. If you don’t, you don’t. That’s what I was scared of when I was burying myself in retail. I was so scared I’d be forgotten if I didn’t have the newest coolest thing. But then I realized I have other value to offer.

A lighter answer would be that I’m just really trying not to look like an old dad.

I’m trying really hard to not look like the old dad who’s trying not to look like an old dad. But I also just want to be me, because I was so scared to be that for a really long time.