His wildly popular Mission Chinese restaurant got run out of Manhattan by rodents — and now star chef Daniel Bowien wants his former landlord to pay.
A lawsuit served up by Bowien on his former landlord tells the stomach-churning tale of how his trendy pop-up eatery was forced to close because of a rodent-infestation so bad that it included a foul, hidden graveyard of mice.
The Lower East Side eatery, which opened to long-lines of hungry patrons in 2012 and was closed by the Department of Health in 2013, “was a cultural and short-term economic success,” Bowien says in his suit against 154 Orchard St. owner Abraham Noy.
“However, behind the veil of what the public could see, the space was fraught with various issues,” the Manhattan Supreme Court suit says.
The most unappetizing of those was a locked storage space hiding “drain water and sludge emptying into a veritable swamp with the corpses of mice littering the ground.”
The mouse infestation was “too severe to allow food service to continue,” the owners learned after the November 2013 shut down.
They decided not to reopen fearing that another closure “would expose the brand to horrific public-relations damage if the name ‘Mission Chinese’ began to be associated with rats, mice and assorted vermin.”
Bowien, dubbed a “Best New Chef” by Food and Wine magazine in 2013, and his partners are suing Noy for entrapping them “in a space [he] knew be unusable.”
Noy had promised that the space would be “in good and satisfactory condition,” according to the suit.
But shortly after Mission Chinese opened in 2012 Bowien was shocked to learn that not only did rats have the run of the place, but there were also serious code violations that required a $300,000 fix.
While Bowien cooks a mean Kung Pao Pastrami, he and his business partners “had no background or experience in negotiating leases,” according to court papers.
Their first San Francisco pop up operated out of an existing Chinese restaurant and thus didn’t require a new lease.
So the Mission Chinese operators are now suing to break the lease for the Orchard Street space and recoup over $500,000 in profits and rent.
Noy’s attorney, David Brody said,”Our clients have heard the tenants complaints and we deny them.”