It was 2010 when my daughter, who was 25 and working as an electrical engineer in Silicon Valley, clued me to a hamburger pop-up in a bodega in San Francisco’s Mission District. Soon thereafter it morphed into another pop-up, a Chinese one this time. Called Mission Chinese, it was housed in Lung Shan, a timeworn Cantonese restaurant. I excitedly stopped by when I visited her not long thereafter.

The chef was Danny Bowien, born in South Korea and raised in