Mission Street Food Cookbook And Memoir

Sometimes, a restaurant is more than simply a place to dine.

A delicious case in point: San Francisco's short-lived Mission Street Food and its current incarnation, Mission Chinese Food, are social phenomena.

Improbable San Francisco businesses that started in a taco truck and graduated to a rundown Chinese eatery while eschewing most typical restaurant conventions, both quickly captured the hearts and stomachs of intrepid eaters and the food cognoscenti alike.

In the smart, new cookbook-cum-memoir Mission Street Food ($30), founder Anthony Myint and his wife, Karen Leibowitz, try to explain how it all happened.

Much like the restaurants it details, the resulting book is plucky and irreverent, both in its casual tone and format. In addition to recipes for superb dishes that range from French Toast Crunch to Bone Marrow-Stuffed Squid (click here to see the step-by-step slide show and recipe), Mission Street Food contains comic strips, origin stories and thoughtful profiles of the restaurants' collaborators, all recorded with disarming honesty, humility and humor.

It is less a cookbook than a recording of a series of experiments undertaken by an inspired batch of cooks with little to lose. Some were successful; some weren't.

The lasting impact of the book lies in its inspirational value. For every cook who believes a restaurant requires investors, fancy sauté pans and name-brand tableware, this book–and the restaurants themselves–suggest a compelling, perhaps revolutionary, alternative.