Anything That Moves

by Dana Goodyear

  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.

  • • •

  Dining 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 o
ffer 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.

  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.

  • • •

  Although 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 hear
t. “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.

  • • •

  Thornton 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.