Danny Bowien Played NYC Host to Chinese Food Cookbook Queen

U.K. Chinese cookbook author, the prolific Fuchsia Dunlop, came to New York for an event hosted by Danny Bowien at Mission Chinese on the Lower East Side, where Chengdu "superchef" Yu Bo was cooking. The chef, who used to cook in restaurants before he opened Yu's Family Kitchen in his Sichuan mansion, prepares multi-course meals with six cooks, including his sister and his wife. Cooking at home gives him more flexibility, he told Vice, "and it's near an excellent vegetable market."

Dunlop also hit up the Museum of Chinese in America and Red Farm, where she ate dim sum, “irresistible” crispy fish skin nachos, and Peking duck. At Michelin-starred Cafe China, she ordered liangfen with a "sweet/sour/spicy/tingly sauce," and she visited Hao Noodle and Tea in Greenwich Village — the U.S. branch of Madam Zhu’s Kitchen the Chinese import that both Robert Sietsema and Pete Wells gave two stars. Dunlop said, "The sticky rice siu mai. . . are exceptionally good, soft and rich and sticky, luxuriously flavoured with bacon,” along with Leshan spicy chicken.

Back at Mission Chinese, she partook in a "wildly eclectic feast" that included raw scallop and seaweed, noodles with uni and egg, lamb rib, as well as clams in black bean sauce laced with pig's blood.

Dunlop, author of five Chinese cookbooks, including the most recent Land of Fish and Rice: Recipes from the Culinary Heart of China, she’s considered one of best western writers when it comes to Chinese cuisines.