Mission Mission

“SF Mission Protector” posted this video busting a local graffiti artist last night:

In all fairness, the dude knocks on the window twice to let the guy know that he’s gonna call the cops. But this kid just waves and carries on putting a bird on it (“it” being a wall in this case). The cops show up and grab him.

Who is this mysterious “SF Mission Protector”? Does anyone know any orphaned billionaire business owners around the ‘hood?

[via Uptown Almanac, Mission Loc@l]

The Beijing Guitar Duo is playing for FREE tomorrow night, March 23rd at the Community Music Center on 544 Capp.

Watch as they shred circles around your 3 power chords with impeccable classical technique. See what tens of thousands of hours of practice and probable parental abuse can do. I wouldn’t wanna be caught in a hellish guitar duel for my soul with them, that’s for sure. Check ‘em out:

They start at 6pm.

Dust off those Big Lebowski quotes and those shoes you snagged from Albany Bowl, Mission Bowling Club is opening next Monday, March 17. For the first week, hours will be 6-11pm. It’s located at 3176 17th Street between Shotwell and South Van Ness.

Here’s a draft of the Anthony Myint-curated menu. Glad to see it contains such bowling alley classics as Blackened Catfish and Bucatini:

And here’s a making-of video to tide you over for the next few days:

[via Mission Loc@l]

I can’t get over the pictures of the Lung Shan staff from this week’s Vice feature on Mission Chinese Food.

I’ve always been fascinated with the dynamic between these grizzled Chinese cooks and their young, hip, culinary hot-shot restaurant-mates. In case you never bothered to look up at the sign, Mission Chinese Food rents its space from Lung Shan and has essentially taken over. Lung Shan’s menu is now largely ignored.

Mission Chinese chef Danny Bowien mentioned that the owners have operated the restaurant decades and never seemed concerned that business was slow, they just liked having a place to hang out. Sure enough, if you ever go in on a weekday during off-hours you’ll see them sitting at the round table in the back chatting and reading the papers. When you order something off their menu, one of them casually gets up, strolls to the kitchen, and cooks it.

I hear a lot of criticism of Mission Chinese Food from Asian Americans for not being authentic enough, notably from my parents who are restaurant owners themselves. But I don’t think that’s the point. Bowien has always admitted  that he’s still learning to cook Chinese food. Still, it’s clear his fresh approach has struck a chord with a generation that these old-timers could never reach.

Chinese food has sadly taken a turn towards the junk food genre in America, being generalized a cheap take-out experience. Did you know that Panda Express is in the running for the “Best of Milpitas” list in the category of “Best Chinese (overall)”? Shocking. Sometimes it takes an outsider to break out of the mold.

Me? I like both the old and the new. My grandfather was a cook in a restaurant much like Lung Shan while I was a kid. At home, his food wasn’t gourmet, but I’ll never forget such fusion creations as “vienna sausage fried rice” and “fried fish with ketchup”. Not exactly traditional. He also was fond of peanut butter and cheese sandwiches, something that I urge all discerning palates to try.

Sometimes I feel the urge to dust off my shitty 1st-grade-level Cantonese and ask these guys about how they feel about this new crop of oddly-dressed kids dining in their restaurant. But I’m sure they would answer like many folks of their generation do, with a subdued shrug and “business is good.”

Update:

Arlo tells us that the photos are by Alanna Hale. More great photos of the Lung Shan gang are on her site and tumblr.

Porto Franco Records hipped us to this video of the Rob Reich Trio looking sharp and performing Puttin’ on the Ritz. It was shot in that weird store that sells a bunch of neat expensive old stuff (AKA Viracocha).

Be sure to watch for the drum solo at the end. Drummer Beth Goodfellow kills me every time. She reminds me of Sonny Payne on some of that killer small combo Count Basie stuff on youtube.

You can catch Rob and Beth at Amnesia every Wednesday 8-10pm as part of Gaucho.

Forget Popeye’s Two for Tuesday. Unless Pizza Love has painted a couple of extra digits since Friday, this is looking like the end of world hunger (or at least the end to hunger when you’re totally slizzered and starving on a Saturday night).

[Pizza Love on 18th and Mission]

Bowien, chef at Mission Chinese Food, remarked that the Popeye’s Two for Tuesday increase (from $1 to $1.29) was “fucking bullshit” on a recent feature on Vice TV, the natural next step up from his Martha Stewart appearance.

Why isn’t the neighborhood in an uproar about this?

Oh if you want, you can see the rest of the episode here. My takeways: we’ve all probably eaten some of Danny’s hair, cleaning a live crab is gnarly as hell, and Spices is about to get some long-ass wait lists.

[via Vice]

Skitchin’!

There’s a video, but you’re gonna have to go over to tumblr to see it.

[via Tenderloin Geographic Society, who apparently hangs in the Mission to escape all the gentrification going down in their 'hood]

Looks like the secret ingredient to Mission Chinese restaurant Big Lantern’s delicious meatless sesame chicken was a heaping scoop of unfair labor practice. SF Appeal reports the eatery has been busted for $230,000 in unpaid overtime:

In total, $230,535 was paid to employees, with workers receiving settlements between $457 and $38,880 each. An additional $5,300 was paid in penalties.

$38,800! Sounds like drinks are on that guy tonight.

[via SF Appeal, photo by Ariel Dovas]

Well I sure know what I would do if I had a kick ass view of Sutro, make a bunch of timelapse videos of it. Thats what Jonathan did.

Check out this stunner. Kinda makes me feel like I’m soaring towards the Ivory Castle on Falkor, my trusty luck dragon:

The instructions for making your own are simple, just fire up that Linux machine you have lying around and dig through heaps of ffmpeg forums:

I used gphoto2 running on an Ubuntu machine to grab photos, basically as quickly as I could get them off the camera (roughly one every 5 seconds). I’m getting them at fairly large resolution (2048 x 1536), though I crop and downsample them for the video. To create a 20fps video from the still photos, I use ffmpeg, which is amazingly powerful provided you get the command line options right.

He adds:

So as the unrepentant perfectionist, I still see some areas of improvement. Despite a fairly decent camera mount, I still see more camera motion than I would like: I am going to try bolting the camera directly to the building, but I suspect the building itself moves.

God damn plate tectonics. Maybe he could bolt the camera to Sutro?

[via rotormind]