Anything That Moves (22 page)

Wild products, the foraging West Coast chef told me, have “that frisson of death,” which makes them extra delicious. Black trumpets—wizened, ash-gray eaters of the dead—are among Thornton's favorite ingredients. Their color speaks to his macabre side; he prefers to call them by their less common name, “death trumpets.” Their smell is faintly sweet; they like the damp and dark and do not gather at the base of trees, as other mushrooms do. To find them, you have to look straight down. Some mushroom-hunters say that searching for them is like trying to find black holes. Others report the best luck finding them when peeing. Thornton sautés and lightly braises them so they keep their bite.

Recently, he got his hands on a few fiddlehead ferns from Oregon. “They're poisonous when they open up,” he said, cleaning them carefully in the kitchen sink. “The toxin gets released. They can wreck you. They're, like, hospital poisonous.” He served them, one per plate, on a just less intense green backdrop of puréed asparagus: a tight, poised coil. I had known him for a year at this point, and had seen him fastidiously source and prepare many meals. Eating is an act of trust, and I knew him to be a careful person with a great deal of integrity—a stress case, actually. I studied the coil: exactly how open is “open”? I ate around it for a while. I don't remember the moment of deciding to take a bite. I can imagine the concentrated earthy green flavor, slightly bitter, and feel the ropy, muscular texture of something from the forest floor that strains toward light. But the mind plays tricks.

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A
lthough investors have approached Thornton with plans for making Wolvesmouth into a household name, he has been reluctant to leave the safety of the den, where he exerts complete control. “I don't want a business partner who's, like, ‘You know, my mom used to make a great meat loaf—I think we should do something with that,'” he told me. “I don't necessarily need seventeen restaurants serving the kind of food I do. When someone gets a seat at Wolvesmouth, they know I'm going to be behind the stove cooking.” His stubbornness is attractive, particularly to an audience defined by its pursuit of singular food experiences. “He is obsessed with obscurity, which is why I love him,” James Skotchdopole, one of Quentin Tarantino's producers and a frequent guest, says. Still, there is the problem of the neighbors, who let Thornton hold Wolvesmouth dinners only on weekends, when they are out of town. (He hosts smaller, private events, which pay the rent, throughout the week.)

But it is clear to Thornton that he has to bring Wolvesmouth into the light. His kitchen has three functioning burners and one small oven. Once, when the gas went off in the building, he prepped an entire Wolvesmouth dinner in a pair of pressure cookers. He has a dehydrator, an ice-cream maker, good knives, and, aside from a new, $3,000 Cryovac machine, nothing beyond what a moderately ambitious hobbyist might own. His version of the Smoking Gun is a gravity bong rigged from a plastic Voss bottle, a rubber stopper, and a head-shop pipe. One night he packed the bowl full of peachwood and lit it—only to discover, as his guests looked around in surprise, that Wolvesmouth's occasional dishwasher had used it for his own herb of choice and forgotten to clean it.

The Wolvesmouth crew is made up mostly of nonprofessionals; Thornton would like to be able to provide them with full-time work, and health insurance. Matthew Bone, a sweet, lugubrious man of six feet four, with tattoos up to his chin, is a painter; he and Thornton like to talk color theory while their girlfriends go out dancing. Andy Kireitov is an out-of-work heavy-metal guitarist from Siberia. Thornton went to high school with the dishwasher. Caleb Chen and Julian Fang came to Wolvesmouth as diners; so did Garrett Snyder, a husky, sweet-faced food writer in his early twenties who tweets as @searchanddevour
.
Thornton has taught them all to cook, after his painstaking example, slicing padrón peppers open with a razor blade and tweezing out the seeds. Lacking restaurant lingo, his crew members have evolved their own patois: “ramp” for a gentle-sided bowl that looks good for skating, “lifesaver” for one with a broad outer ring.

Only Greg Paz, a quiet, cat-like Filipino‒Puerto Rican former skateboarder who serves as sous-chef, has professional experience. He went to cooking school and then worked at “turn and burn” joints before apprenticing himself to Thornton. Snyder likened Wolvesmouth's stature in the underground-dining scene to that of Kogi, the Korean-barbecue food truck. “There was nothing like it before and there's been nothing like it since,” he said. “So many people want to be part of it.”

One rainy spring day, a few hours before a Wolvesmouth dinner, Thornton stood over a tile fish, a dour, square-headed creature with a mosaic of silvery and mustard-yellow scales along its back. He wasn't yet sure what to do with it. The fish had come from a sushi wholesaler that supplies Nobu and ships choice specimens to Las Vegas and Aspen. “This morning, they called and said, ‘Hey, we just got in some tile fish that's insane,'” Thornton told me. “They know with me I don't care what something costs.”

The apartment was quiet and dimly lit. Small pelts were draped here and there; a preserved rat bobbed in a jar—a gift from Eva. Over a long dining table hung a mobile that Thornton fashioned from deer ribs and a jawbone he found in Oregon, and some lichen-covered pieces of applewood he once used to make ice cream. (He burned it, cut it, and soaked it in milk for a couple of days to make the base; finished, he said, it tasted like a campfire.) Paz, who, like Thornton, was dressed in dark, slim-fitting clothes and a black apron, cleaned vegetables. “People have this distaste for vegetables,” Thornton said. “They're a lot more work. That's why I like cooking them.”

After Thornton finished breaking down the fish, I went with him and Paz on a produce run, a fifty-mile round trip to a two-acre farm near the Long Beach airport. Thornton and a chef friend, Gary Menes, had persuaded the farmer to grow fava beans for them. By the time we arrived, it was pouring. Thornton jumped out of the car and spent the next hour ignoring lightning while picking the beans and a few handfuls of kale—only the smallest, purplest leaves closest to the heart. “Rather than getting it at the farmers' market, this is still alive,” he said. “It will have that sweetness. This is what the diners want to hear about.” He paused. “You couldn't do it in a restaurant.” A patch of bronze fennel shivered in the wind. Thornton picked some and, a few hours later, served it with the final savory course: a tender piece of lamb half buried under snippets of cat grass, periwinkle-blue borage blossoms, yellow-foot mushrooms, and cocoa soil. One side of the plate was devoted to a splat of beet-rhubarb
verjus
, darkly clotting. He called it Spring Slaughter.

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T
hornton rarely has a chance to test dishes, and much of what he makes he has never eaten before. The education of his palate happened paradoxically: exposure to poor food made him hypersensitive to quality. Growing up, in Bullhead City, Arizona, he shopped for government-supplied groceries in the back room at the St. Vincent de Paul thrift shop. “The peanut butter came in a white jar and had the stamp of a peanut on it; we had powdered milk, powdered eggs, canned meat,” he says. “I had a lot of bad, so I can detect bad quickly. I can taste it. I know when a piece of meat has been sitting and reheated, because it has the same flavor as that canned meat.” The first meal he remembers making, in his grandmother's kitchen, was a turkey-pickle quesadilla, which he sold back to her for seventy-five cents. On Sunday nights, she made chicken-fried steak, fried okra, and collard greens, or white beans with ham hock and yeasty biscuits. In her honor, he sometimes pickles green strawberries or intentionally adds too much yeast when he bakes.

At Thornton's own house, a boarded-up travel trailer in a part of town that his cousin described to me as “the slum of Bullhead,” there often wasn't any food at all. His mother, Elesa, and his stepfather, Emmett, would sell their food stamps to buy drugs. When they cooked, it was meth in the back room. In addition to being an addict, Thornton says, Elesa was mentally ill and susceptible to drug-induced paranoia. He remembers that one time when a social worker made her regular visit to the trailer, Elesa was naked on the couch repeating the sentence “I cut up and chop the hamburger meat”—the only thing she said for several weeks—while he watched
Dennis the Menace
on a TV set with the back torn off to expose the wires, in case they housed surveillance equipment. After thirty minutes, the social worker said, “OK, see you next month!” and left. “Why I have such a hard time with ‘authority figures' who want to come in and tell me what to do is that they don't
do
anything,” Thornton told me.

Emmett, who was covered in neo-Nazi tattoos and boasted to Thornton about having served time in the penitentiary, was violent and cruel. For fun, he would fill a Super Soaker water gun with gasoline and douse Thornton, threatening to light him on fire. He also hit, dragged, and pepper-sprayed him, and zipped him into a sleeping bag, which he filled with cigarette smoke. (Elesa denies that Emmett was abusive, and that she and Emmett used illegal drugs—though he has an arrest record for drug-related infractions.) At fourteen, Thornton, four feet eight and nicknamed Pudge, started lifting weights for baseball. One summer, he grew a foot. He thought about killing his torturer; instead, he planned his getaway.

Waiting till his mother was coming down from a binge and in need of cash, he paid her fifty dollars saved from his lunch money to sign a form, which he told her was a baseball permission slip. In fact, her signature transferred power of attorney over Thornton to his cousins, evangelical Christians in Riverside County, California, who had offered to take him in. He left the house with his bike and the clothes on his back, pretending that he was going to stay at a friend's. “See you Sunday,” he told his mother, and never saw her again.

In 2003, Emmett died, from blunt-force head trauma and a possible overdose of methamphetamine, after he and Elesa had been fighting. She was not charged with a crime, but, according to the death investigation, she was “wishy-washy” about what had happened, and asked the firemen who responded to the scene if she had killed him.

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T
hornton's California cousins lived in a tract home in Menifee, which locals call Dirttown. To Thornton, it was a deliverance to middle-class normalcy. He rode his BMX, bleached his tips, and had a crush on a neighbor girl. When he went over to friends' houses, he spent his time talking to their parents and grandparents. After high school, he took classes at a local community college and worked at a skate-and-snowboarding shop, where he met Paz. He snowboarded at Mammoth and worked the night shift at Costco; because he didn't have a car, he ran to work four miles on the shoulder of the freeway.

Painting was his primary interest, and he considered going to art school, but he changed his mind and applied to Western Culinary Institute, a branch of the Cordon Bleu, in Portland, Oregon. Wendy Bennett, a chef who taught him there, remembers him as being instinctive and original. “There are very few students that come through culinary school that get it on that level, that don't just rotely re-create what the chef made,” she told me. “It's like going to a museum and you see a piece of art and it inspires you to make your own art piece. He wasn't afraid of anything.” When class let out, in the late afternoon, he jogged forty blocks to Serrato, a Mediterranean restaurant where he'd landed a position after offering to work for free, and learned to prep in one hour what took the other cooks three.

After graduating, Thornton got a job in Las Vegas on the line at Bouchon, the French bistro owned by Thomas Keller, of The French Laundry and Per Se. Thornton worked eighty hours a week for minimum wage. A few months later, his student-loan debt became overwhelming and he left. Eventually, he moved to Los Angeles, and in 2007, through an agency, got a job working for Nicolas Cage and his family as a private chef. While with the Cages, he began to assemble the pieces to build Wolvesmouth: the table, the chairs, china, glasses, and flatware. “I didn't want to do it janky,” he told me. He held his first dinners in an apartment near Larchmont Village, where he lived at the time, and then at a house in the Hollywood Hills belonging to the Olympic gold medalist Shaun White, a friend from his snowboarding days. (He cooked White's meal the night before he won gold in the half-pipe in Vancouver, in 2010.) In 2010, he left the Cages, moved to the loft downtown, and started working on Wolvesmouth full-time.

A hundred years ago, before Progressivism introduced food-service regulations to cities, all restaurants were essentially underground. (As soon as there were regulations, people skirted them: Jacob Riis wrote about a sandwich, “two pieces of bread with a brick between,” that sat on the bar at a drinking establishment to prove that it was a restaurant and therefore exempt from blue laws.) At the low end, there were taverns, frequently run out of people's houses, where strangers drank and dined communally on whatever the proprietor was making that night. The rich, on the other hand, entertained in formal hotel restaurants, working with the steward to devise intricate meals with musical and literary interludes. The underground restaurant in the twenty-first century reclaims features of both: the raucous dinner with random tablemates, and the self-conscious staging of an elevated social interaction. Michael Hebb and Naomi Pomeroy were originators of the movement, starting a restaurant in their house in Portland, in 2001. Hebb said that he saw an opportunity to “reinvigorate the convivial in this country.” Thornton often finds himself still playing host at two in the morning, hours after the last dish has been served and the burners cleaned in full view of the guests.