The Star of Mission Chinese Is Shaking Up the Standard’s Hotels

As the new creative director of food and culture at Standard Hotels, Angela Dimayuga is charged with producing events that merge cuisine, design, fashion, and sound. At the Standard’s High Line outpost in New York, she’s already enlisted the queer Asian collective Bubble_T to transform the Jacuzzi at Le Bain into a “haute pot” art installation with floating sculptures of fish cakes and shrimp for a semimonthly dance party. And in Miami, during July’s Swim Week, she’s going to make an edible swimsuit sculpture out of kombu.

Dimayuga is best known as the founding executive chef of Mission Chinese Food in New York, an outpost of Danny Bowien’s cult San Francisco hole in the wall. The hit restaurant, with its rotating art installations and giddy Sichuan-inspired food, opened in 2012 when Dimayuga was only 26 years old. Her inventive cooking earned her a 2016 Rising Star Chef of the Year nomination from the James Beard Foundation. “She’s a force to be reckoned with, because her food goes beyond a restaurant,” says food writer and former collaborator Ligaya Mishan. “She doesn’t feel hemmed in by categories.”