It felt good to be back at Mission Street Food this week.  In the back, Anthony, Danny and Emma (the core MSF kitchen team) knocked out a stellar offal-tastic meal that featured some of the my favorite plates to ever come out of that Chinese kitchen.   I got the real sense they weren’t just making food for the customers – they were making food they loved too.

Our first plate was a great surprise – tripe!

charcoal grilled tripe with preserved melon, salmon roe, sweet herbs, shallot pickles, bitter greens

Hands down the best tripe I’ve ever had.  It was braised for hours, then grilled right before service to put a nice char on it.  Normally I find tripe too dense and chewy.  Here, they seemed to have given it a new texture, one which I found delicious.   The addition components of the salad were good too, with a great texture from ribbons of pickled melon, and a nice burst of salinity from the roe.

trotter flatbread: ham hock rillette, cornichon, sauce gribiche, on a homemade flatbread

This week’s flatbread was great too – all of the pickled veggies cut through the rich trotter, balancing the dish.

country-fried chicken livers with brussels spouts, buttermilk dressing

They’re like chicken mcnuggets, for grown ups.   Again – great use of bitter greens to balance the richness of the plate.

seared beef tongue with blackened grits, spicy mustard greens, pickled anchov

Anchovies are one of the few foods that i just can’t get behind – I find them to briny.  However, everything below it was great.  And I’m told by anchovies lovers, that there were  delicious.

roasted bone marrow with fresh dill, tomato toast

Ah marrow.  Always a winner.  The roasted tomato was candy-sweet, and a nice contrast to the marrow. We ordered a second one of these.  Mostly because I don’t share well.

crispy sweetbreads with spicy scallop crudo, pear and elderflower soubise, pea leaves, white soy

While the sweetbreads were good (the crusts were slightly overcooked), it was the scallop that was the real star of this plate – sweet, slightly briny with a perfect firm texture, they were a great foil for  the crispy sweetbreads.

And finally we came to dessert:

foie gras sundae: vanilla ice cream, huckleberry compote, shaved foie, corn pops

The ice cream below was nothing special, but the toppings were outstanding.  Corn Pops for texture, and then a classic foie and fruit compote combination.  I was away taking pictures when this dish was delivered to the table, and the vultures I was eating with very nearly cleared the bowl before I got back.

A really outstanding meal from Mission Street Food  - once which made deft use of both bitter greens (the real star of these plates?) and offal. Much of the menu originated from Danny Bowien – he’s the one flipping your burger at Mission Burger every day.

The end of the year tends to bring a lot of reflection and list making.  Looking at Mission Street Food, it’s amazing to see how much has changed as they’ve refined their concept, expanded into Mission Burger, and smoothed service and food issues.  It’s also impressive how fully formed the concept was at the very first service.

I can’t wait to see what they do next year.

Tags: mission street food, MSF, offal

This entry was posted on Friday, December 11th, 2009 at 11:38 am and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.