Anything That Moves (21 page)

For myself, I began to feel that the principle I had eaten by—I'll try anything once—was inadequate to the times. Foodie-ism is pushing things too far and too fast for that. I felt a new line etching itself on my conscience. The Tailless Whip Scorpion Rule was: Don't be the first to try something. After thinking about The Hump, I arrived at a new criterion for consumption: Don't be the last.

A
t Starry Kitchen on the night of the
escamoles,
I struck up a conversation with a young chef named Craig Thornton, who was at the table next to me. He had on a camouflage hat and black T-shirt and was eating dinner with Eva Card, a dark-haired actress who models for women's magazines and was his girlfriend at the time. Habitual extreme eating had led her to conclude that ignorance was to be preferred. “I probably wouldn't have eaten it if I'd known what it was,” she said about the ant pupae. “I don't ask anymore.” Thornton said he'd had
escamoles
a bunch of times, and had even served them. “It's hard to find a clean source, though, and I'm very, very particular,” he said. In order to find goat that meets his standards, for example, he drives to a farm forty miles east of L.A. and kills it himself. “When you're killing something, you have a whole new outlook,” he said. Scarcity was on his mind, and the developing world's demand for meat. “I get more and more paranoid about food. It's affecting the way I'm cooking. I'm cooking thinking about the future of food rather than thinking about right now,” he said. He was planning to start a hydroponic garden so he'd have more control over his produce. I asked him where his restaurant was. “My apartment,” he said.

Jonathan Gold's ideal restaurant is one where people cook personal, home-style food in an intimate setting with the weird music they like and their strange art on the wall. For him, this means the “traditional” restaurants of Los Angeles: unassimilated ethnic cooking intended for a narrow audience. Thornton also cooks what he likes, on his own terms, for a tiny, very specific group; it's his music on the stereo, his bedroom just beyond that makeshift door. Here, I thought, was a chance to look unobstructed at the new American cooking that is taking shape. With no health department to worry about and no investors to please, and an audience made up of adoring foodies who have sometimes waited years for a spot, the features of the movement would be laid out plain.

Several nights a week, a group of sixteen strangers gathers around Thornton's dining-room table to eat delicacies he has handpicked and prepared for them, from a meticulously considered menu over which they have no say. It is the toughest reservation in the city: when he announces a dinner, hundreds of people typically respond. The group is selected with an eye toward occupational balance—all lawyers, a party foul that was recently avoided thanks to Google, would have been too monochrome—and, when possible, democracy. Your dinner companion might be a former UFC heavyweight champion, Ludo Lefebvre, a foodie with a Lumix, or a kid who saved his money and drove four hours from Fresno to be there. At the end, you place a “donation”—whatever you think the meal was worth—in a desiccated crocodile head that sits in the middle of the table. Most people pay around $90; after buying the ingredients and paying a small crew, Thornton usually breaks even. The experiment is called Wolvesmouth, the loft Wolvesden; Thornton is the Wolf. “I grew up in a survival atmosphere,” he says. “I like that aggressiveness. And I like that it's a shy animal that avoids confrontation.”

Thornton is known never to prepare a dish the same way twice, an ideal conceit for the age of social media that also speaks to his nimbleness and resourcefulness, his hunter's sense of opportunity. From above, the food—smeared, brushed, and spattered with sauces in safety orange, violet, yolk yellow, acid green—is as vivid as a Kandinsky; from the table's edge, it forms eerie landscapes of hand-torn meat, loamy crumbles, and strewn blossoms. Being presented with a plate of Thornton's food often feels like stumbling upon a crime scene while running through the woods. A recipe for Wolves in the Snow, a dish of venison with cauliflower purée, hen-of-the-woods mushrooms, beet-blackberry gastrique, and Douglas-fir gelée, which Thornton published in the
LA Weekly,
instructs, “Rip venison apart with two forks, which will act as sharp teeth. . . . Attack the plate with your blackberry beet ‘blood.'”

He introduces his courses with minimal fanfare, rattling off the main components almost dismissively. “This is rabbit, with poblano pepper, Monterey jack, sopapillas, apple, and zucchini,” he announced at a recent dinner. Later, he told me, “We say ‘apple.' But we took butter, vanilla, lemon juice, and cooked it at one twenty-eight—at that temperature, you're just opening up the pores to give it a little punch—then we took it out, cooled it, resealed it, compressed it. When you put it on the plate, it's just an apple. And then you're, like, ‘Holy crap, this is intense.'”

For someone who makes beautiful-looking food—at a recent dinner, I heard an architecture student say that she'd based models for her thesis on dishes from Wolvesmouth—Thornton treats appearances as beside the point. For a time, when he felt that too much emphasis was being placed on the visuals, he instituted a brownout. “I started making ugly plates on purpose,” he says. “Potato purée with a nicely cooked scallop.” Of all the dishes I've eaten at Wolvesmouth, the one that lingers for me is among the unloveliest, a puce-colored pile of rabbit meatballs and mushrooms, leaning sloppily against a folded crêpe, in a puddle of yellow sauce: a briny, cool, and sour-sweet concoction made from lobster shell, shallot, vermouth, and tarragon, with a rich zap of lemon-lime curd. The rabbit still had the whiff of trembly, nervous game.

Thornton is thirty and skinny, five feet nine, with a lean, carved face and the playful, semiwild bearing of a stray animal that half remembers life at the hearth. People of an older generation adopt him. Three women consider themselves to be his mother; two men—neither one his father—call him son. Lost boys flock to him; at any given time, there are a couple of them camping on his floor, in tents and on bedrolls. He doesn't drink, smoke, or often sleep, and he once lost fifteen pounds driving across the country because he couldn't bring himself to eat road food. (At the end of the trip, he weighed 118.) It is hard for him to eat while working—which sometimes means fasting for days—and in any case he always leaves food on the plate. “I like the idea of discipline and restraint,” he says. “You have to have that edge.” He dresses in moody blacks and grays, with the occasional Iron Maiden T-shirt, and likes his jeans girl-tight. His hair hangs to his waist, but he keeps it tucked up in a newsboy cap with cutouts over the ears. I once saw him take it down and shake it for a second, to the delight of a couple of female diners, then, sheepish, return it to hiding. One of his great fears is to be known as the Axl Rose of cooking.

•   •   •

D
ining at Wolvesmouth is a dramatic event: nine to twelve elaborately composed courses prepared in an open kitchen a few feet from the table. Thornton stands over a saucepan with his head bowed intently, his hands quick and careful, a sapper with a live one. Between maneuvers, he darts over to the refrigerator, where he posts the night's menu and, next to each course, the time it was served. Every so often, he steals a glance at the diners and makes a small adjustment on his iPhone, turning up the volume on the music to make people lean in if they seem hesitant to talk and turning it down once the social mood has been established. The first time I went, a few weeks after meeting him, there was half a roasted pig's head, teeth in, glistering fiendishly on the counter as a conversation starter for the guests.

The pressure involved in long-form, dinner-party-style cooking is extreme. “That food has to go out,” Miles Thompson, a twenty-four-year-old alumnus of Nobu, who did a stage at Wolvesmouth while figuring out his own underground concept, said. “You promised twelve courses, and you only have that one striped bass. There's no server error, no cook error, no ‘Here, I'll buy you a cocktail.'” Thornton's menus are three-dimensional puzzles that remain in pieces until the final hours before the guests arrive. “Cooking is creating a big fucking problem and learning how to solve it,” he says.

Because Thornton has no apparatus around him—no wall, even, separating the kitchen from the table—his diners can imagine he belongs to them. Without them, they sense, he would not exist. He is particularly beloved among a circle of Asian eaters who call themselves the Panda Clan and Team Fatass, referring to their panda-related Twitter handles and their appetite for food marathons. When he learned that one of them was about to turn forty, he proposed cooking him a forty-course meal to celebrate. It was a typical Wolvesmouth dinner, miniaturized and quadrupled, and served in four hours. Course No. 24: “chicken liver mousse, pickled pear, watermelon radish, brioche, fleur de sel.” No. 31: “lobster, celery root remoulade, black sesame, cherry-white soy vinaigrette.” Thornton didn't sleep for three days before the event. “I could've designed the menu differently, but I was, like, I gotta prep everything at the very last minute,” he told me. The hardest part was trying not to repeat ingredients, given that each course had four or five components and each component had four or five elements. “All of a sudden, you're going through four hundred things,” he said. One of the diners, Kevin Hsu, noted on his blog,
KevinEats,
that he ate more courses at the “40 at 40” than at Alinea, Grant Achatz's three-star restaurant in Chicago, where the tasting menu, which usually runs to twenty courses and costs around $200, is one of the most elaborate and extensive in America.

Wolvesmouth is part of a larger dismantling of fine dining. Nowadays, it's not just menus but restaurants themselves that are seasonal, popping up like chanterelles after a heavy rain. Established chefs, between gigs, squat in vacant commercial kitchens. Young, undercapitalized cooks with catchy ideas go in search of drunken undergraduates: gourmet food trucks. Cooks, both trained and not, host sporadic, legally questionable supper clubs and dinner parties wherever they want. You can pay for a meal in a West Hollywood apartment that belongs to a cook who is by day an assembler of mystery boxes on
MasterChef
and whose only oven is of the toaster variety. In New York, there are dinner parties on subway trains. In Austin, they hunt and field-dress wild boar. Often, you prepay for your “ticket” on PayPal. In most cases, these restaurants are underground in name only. Many of them have websites. A few have “underground restaurant” in the URL.

For chefs, being underground means sidestepping regulations they may find onerous. The ban on foie gras was meaningless to Quenioux, who before it took effect said, “We are known to be a little bit rebellious. They can fine me every day.” After the ban, he sent me a picture of his fridge, loaded with glass jars full of gorgeous-looking product. “We have been serving foie at most pop up . . . I won't stop,” he wrote. “It is my cultural heritage. It is like taking kimchi away from a Korean.” Quenioux's itinerant cheese cart, which rivals Robuchon's, occasionally contains crottin, Rove des Garrigues, or Norman Camembert, all of which are made with unpasteurized milk and not aged the sixty days that the FDA insists upon. “We go
around
,” he told me. “I cannot say how. I know it's illegal to do so but I don't mind. Some of my cheeses cannot age that much because the taste changes.” At CR8, an expensive dinner that attracts a wine-collecting clientele, the chef recently designed an Alexander McQueen‒themed meal. The fifth course featured tonka beans, which he had smuggled from Berlin in his backpack. Tonka beans contain a fragrant compound called coumarin—it accounts for their vanilla-like aroma, and their popularity in European ice creams and desserts—which is also found in strawberries, sweet clover, and mown hay. Fermented, it converts to an anticoagulant and causes hemorrhaging, known as “sweet clover disease,” in cattle. In 1954, the FDA deemed coumarin dangerous, and banned it as an additive; tonka beans are still on the FDA's list of “Substances Generally Prohibited from Direct Addition or Use as Human Food.”

Chefs continued to cook with tonka beans anyway. “We had them until they went on a door-to-door jihad shutting people down who had them,” Wylie Dufresne, the chef at WD-50, a highly regarded experimental restaurant in Manhattan, told me. “There was a moment when you were better off having a firearm than a tonka bean.” In 2006, the FDA inspected Alinea's spice cabinet and ordered Achatz, who says he had no idea that it was illegal, to remove the offensive bean. The chef at CR8, whose kitchen doesn't exist, didn't have to worry about the feds. His dish involved a length of mushroom-filled puff pastry rolled to resemble a cinnamon stick, and a sabayon made with tonka bean and cinnamon oil. He said the inspiration came to him after looking at a bowl of potpourri in his bathroom. “Whenever something is forbidden, it automatically gets cloaked in preciousness,” he said. “My guests feel special because they get to experience something most people can't or won't.”

Thornton uses the freedom that lack of scrutiny confers to offer ingredients that are impractical for most regular restaurants: too expensive (watershield, a kind of Northwestern lily pad), too weird (oak leaves, which he salted and served with pine broth and matsutake mushrooms), too fleeting (fiddlehead ferns, ramps), or too labor-intensive (cured bonito loin, which he shaves by hand). In the hundreds of meals he has prepared, he has only once served chicken meat, and that was for a private dinner, by request. Hanger steak, of which there are only two per cow, is an unthinkable waste; he serves rib-eye cap if he feels like cooking beef. Ideally, diners at Wolvesmouth will try three or four things they've never had before. Sourcing takes days, and Thornton does almost all of it himself.

In order to serve certain wild ingredients, chefs in regular restaurants must evade forest rangers, health inspectors, and, sometimes, the truth. “I'm very specific about sourcing,” one prominent West Coast chef, who gathers by hand in places he's not necessarily permitted to but runs an otherwise very proper dining room, said. “But I don't tell our waitstaff where anything comes from. I just say ‘nearby.'” In New York, a well-known chef told me that he has offered birds shot by friends upstate to diners who may or may not realize that what they're eating is illegal: because of the USDA's premortem inspection rule, you can't serve wild birds unless they are imported from the UK—which for some reason is allowed—or your hunting buddy happens to be an inspector. The chef said, “We've served whatever we can get our hands on as long as it's something we could use up quickly enough. It's a ‘don't ask, don't tell' kind of thing. It's really not that we're trying to get away with something. It's just that we get excited about it and we know that our customer's expecting the greatest level of quality with all of our ingredients.” Because of his unofficial status, Thornton can cook game without fear of losing his business. When the actor Jason Biggs shot a passel of pheasants, Thornton aged them for five days, plucked them, and served them to Biggs and his friends with handmade tagliatelle.