It’s not a coincidence that three of the country’s hottest destination restaurants are more or less dives — the kinds of places for which you have to put on your worst clothes. And it’s not a coincidence that they all take chances; as with television shows, the best new restaurants aren’t copycats. Two of these places — Torrisi Italian Specialties (written about in the magazine a few weeks ago) and M. Wells, a reborn diner — are in New York and have European roots.

The third is in San Francisco. Mission Chinese Food is a pop-up restaurant housed inside a pre-existing, old-style Chinese spot called Lung Shan. (Picture two menus, separate chefs, one shared kitchen and a shared dining room.) It’s the screwy, brilliant idea of the chef Danny Bowien and his collaborator, Anthony Myint, who share managerial duties at the restaurant.

The rest of the Mission Chinese story is just as unlikely: Bowien is a 29-year-old Korean guy adopted at birth by non-Koreans, brought up in Oklahoma City, inspired by watching cooking shows with his mother. He never cooked Chinese food until the restaurant opened about a year ago. The staff is composed largely of the Chinese family that owns the building and still runs Lung Shan. Many of Mission’s dishes are precisely as “Chinese” as Bowien himself (which is to say not at all); and the owners maintain a zany idea to deliver anywhere in the city, as well as a larger commitment to changing the food system.

All of which brings us to their wild success and national acclaim. Bowien is hardworking and good-natured, and Myint — who is about to publish his first cookbook, “Mission Street Food,” which describes the history of this local mini-movement (some of the book’s profits will benefit Slow Food USA) — is no slouch. Wonderful, charming, fascinating stuff. But if the food weren’t terrific, it would just be a story.