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.
• • •
Thornton’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.
Pomeroy and Hebb were inspired by an article that Michael had read about paladares in Cuba, and Family Supper, their event, had something of that subversive air. “It was challenging the notion of the restaurant and the limited number of responses to this basic idea of cooking for people and taking their money,” Hebb told me. “It wasn’t a middle finger to the health department so much as an indie-rock, anybody-can-do-it, DIY call to arms.” He designed collapsible tables out of hollow-core doors, and later, when he and Pomeroy moved their catering business to a commercial kitchen and started holding dinners there, built Murphy tables that could disappear into the walls during the inspector’s visits. “We’d get sloshy with our guests and do dishes in the morning,” Pomeroy said. “It became a thing, like, ‘Ooh, I got invited to Michael and Naomi’s for dinner.’”
Eventually, they had ten thousand names on their e-mail list and were open for business five nights a week. With the success of Family Supper, Pomeroy and Hebb founded two restaurants in Portland; in spite of their popularity, food costs got out of control and they were forced to sell, losing hundreds of thousands of dollars of their investors’ money. Pomeroy recovered by starting another underground, which she ran out of her backyard. There, Pomeroy, who has become a cooking-world star—a Food & Wine Best New Chef, a contestant on Top Chef Masters—perfected the ideas for her next restaurant, Beast, a twenty-six-seat place where, five nights a week, she cooks whatever she wants. “When major chefs hear about the way I run Beast, they say, ‘You’ve created a chef’s dream restaurant, because you don’t have to compromise,’” she told me. “What happens when you do a million-dollar build-out is that you have to be open seven days a week, be really high end, and have a million choices, and that may not work in today’s economy.”
The lessons of the underground are spreading. “Suddenly, diners are along for the ride. You’re paying for insight into one very specific idea of what food should be,” Kaitlyn Goalen, an editor at the food newsletter Tasting Table, says. “Now it’s ‘If you don’t want what we’re offering, you can leave.’” Little Serow, in Washington, D.C., was named one of the country’s te
n best new restaurants by Bon Appétit in 2012; there are no choices and no substitutions, and the menu changes every week. Everybody who goes there knows that the food will be super spicy and the music very loud, and it’ll cost $45 a head. Payment, the moment in the restaurant ritual that embodies the emotional drama at its core—you please me, I pay—is also being upended. At Next, which Grant Achatz opened after his success with Alinea, you reserve your seat and buy your meal in advance. As at the theater, you can get season tickets. You pay me, I cook.
• • •
The goal of this kind of dining is not seduction so much as it is experience. In the name of gathering some more, I went to pHeast, an itinerant underground restaurant that bills itself as “live art.” Isaiah Frizzell, the chef at pHeast, is an amateur molecular gastronomist and a grandson of the honky-tonk singer Lefty Frizzell. “A lot of people claim to be the sons, daughters, and grandchildren of Lefty, but I have his ring in my pocket,” he told me. We were standing at a tiny counter in the tiny kitchen of an architect’s apartment in Santa Monica. On the floor was a sweating canister of liquid nitrogen. On the counter were deli cups filled with Seussian blobs of green-pea purée that had been spherified with sodium alginate and calcium lactate. “The skin on it creates a gusher inside,” he said, depositing the blobs into bowls. They kept bursting. “It’s OK, it’s OK, if it’s gone it’s OK,” he said nervously. “You still get the effect ’cause you get the gel for the skin.”
Frizzell went out to the patio, where the guests were assembled at a long table. “This is nose-to-tail eating, in a vegetable fashion,” he said, presenting the peas. Several courses followed, meager and mainly protein-free. At a certain point, even the hostess’s enthusiasm seemed to be growing forced. “It is totally amazing what you can do with my tiny kitchen!” she chirped, over a plate of red-cabbage juice that had been turned into what Frizzell described as a “fluid gel” thickened with a tapioca starch. When a tray of bacon-infused whiskey cotton-candy pops, made by the bartender, came around, the diners snatched at them desperately. Then it was time for “nitrogen play.” Luckily, one of the other diners was an emergency-room surgeon.
Frizzell decanted the liquid nitrogen into a small bottle with red-bell-pepper coulis and whippits inside, and shook it wildly before shooting the contents into a bowl. Cold smoke tumbled out and rolled down the long table. “Red-bell-pepper Dippin’ Dots!” Frizzell announced triumphantly, spooning a pile onto every plate. They melted on my tongue—the ghost of nourishment. I thought of something the founder of a reservation site for underground dining had said about the industry. “We liken it to going to a doctor,” she told me. “You don’t say, ‘This is the medicine I need.’ They tell you what you need. The chef tells you what you should be eating.” In this case, I was able to self-diagnose: what I needed was some food. I saw a gourmet truck on the way home and stopped for a hot dog.
• • •
The traditional restaurant business, with its expensive leases and fickle clientele, can be unforgiving. In the spring of 2007, Gonpachi, an izakaya-style place popular in Tokyo—scenes from Kill Bill were filmed there—came to Beverly Hills. It had three buildings and a large garden with a koi pond, and occupied thirteen thousand square feet on a stretch of La Cienega Boulevard. The build took three and a half years and cost more than $18 million. The beams in the main space, a two-story room meant to evoke a traditional village during a festival, were from a nineteenth-century house in Japan. Gonpachi offered sushi, yakitori, and sumiyaki, and had a glass-walled room where patrons could watch a soba master making noodles by hand. In the winter of 2011, it closed.
It was still sitting vacant the following June when Thornton and his crew found themselves with 2,500 servings of food and nowhere to serve it. An event that Dos Equis had planned to throw in an old Bank of America building downtown, with Thornton cooking (and belly dancers, Chinese acrobats, and Brazilian Carnival dancers performing), had been canceled that morning because of a problem with a permit. With half a day’s notice, Thornton decided to pop up at Gonpachi.
When I arrived at Thornton’s apartment in the late afternoon, I found him in an inside-out green army shirt and his camouflage cap, counting and quartering grilled peaches for a pork-belly dish. “This is a good opportunity to make some people happy who have never eaten the food,” he said. The menu—eight courses, designed for a broader spectrum of the beer-drinking public and meant to be consumed in just twenty minutes—was the diffusion version of Wolvesmouth. “I’m trying to appeal to foodies with the technique and consistency but also to have a hook to bring in a mass audience,” he had told me earlier. He went over to the fridge, where a menu was posted, and crossed out items that were completed. “Peach done,” he muttered. “Tuna done. Tomato relish done. The rib eye we might be able to cook whole. Strawberry. Tres leches done. Done done done done done. Finishing fritter. Relish done.”
At the dining table, Julian Fang, a heavyset Chinese-American man who is the slightly forbidding keeper of the Wolvesmouth e-mail list, leaned over an Apple computer. Beside him was another computer, a Dell, for his day job as a strategic-account manager at AT&T. He was trying to multitask, and his forehead was covered in sweat. He had written an e-mail to alert the list to the change of plans: the first two hundred to respond would be let into Gonpachi, starting at seven o’clock. The food would be free.
“Is that e-mail sent out?” Thornton asked.
“I can’t get anything out of my outbox,” Fang said. “It’s three fifty-eight p.m. For the love of God, get this thing out!”
The e-mail finally sent, and ten minutes later Thornton peered over Fang’s shoulder and said, “We’re already half full. Crap.” He laughed.
By six o’clock, Thornton and his crew had convened at Gonpachi, and were exploring the kitchen, with its array of burners, ovens, fridges, sinks. Amid the bounteous wreckage, they set up a survivalist kitchen: a fryer to make cheddar fritters, a circulator to sous-vide the pork belly. Thornton ran his hand along the omakase bar, disturbing a thick layer of dust. “If I had just this, like, permanently, I would be the happiest guy on the planet,” he said.
Thornton showed Caleb Chen how to assemble his dish: corn soup with mole, lime gelée, and cotija cheese, designed to change from sweet to salty to sour to spicy in your mouth. To Fang, he said, “Tuna, lingonberry, lime, black sesame, bok choy.” He taught Garrett Snyder how to fan a stack of paper cocktail napkins with the back of his wrist.
The sky darkened and the smell of searing meat filled the garden. Lights came on in stone lanterns and the koi gulped at bubbles on the pond’s surface. When the diners started to arrive, Thornton was still putting plastic forks out on the tables. He hurried back to the omakase bar and started slicing pork belly. “That gelatinous texture you sometimes get with pork belly doesn’t necessarily translate, so I wanted to do a more porky texture that people are used to,” he said. A crowd of foodies gathered around. One of them, a recent college graduate, told me that he worked at his aunt’s software company, a job he despised, to finance his hobby. In the previous six months he had made two trips to New York, strictly to eat. On the first, he spent five nights in the city and went to eight restaurants, including Daniel and Le Bernardin, each of which has three stars from Michelin; on his second trip, a weekender, he had the extended menu at Per Se. During the same six months, miraculously, he had lost eighty pounds, due to a running regime and abstemiousness between sprees.
Matthew Selman, the Simpsons writer who cast Marge, Lisa, and Bart as food bloggers, leaned toward the bar. “I almost offered you our backyard,” he told Thornton, as his wife, a willowy redhead, looked at him querulously. “Renee’s given me permission to leave the marriage to eat,” he said. “She eats gluten-free bread.” The first trays of food went out and disappeared three seconds later. “Are these the guys that cook at Wolvesmouth?” a woman asked her date. “No,” her date replied scornfully. “Wolvesmouth is not
a restaurant.”
A hundred and fifty people showed up. At the end of the night, Chen said, “That felt like Top Chef. You’re thrown into a space and it’s, like, ‘Now find some stuff to use.’ We’re so used to a home kitchen that we’re, like, ‘Oh, my God, what do you do with all this equipment?’” Thornton emerged from behind the bar. He looked a little stunned. “All I had was part of a sandwich today,” he said. “I’m wiped.” But he was happy. He’d talked to someone who’d been trying to get into Wolvesmouth for two years.
One late-summer evening, Thornton held a Wolvesmouth dinner at his apartment. Fang had his hands in a bowl of bitter steamed black-sesame cake, as porous as volcanic rock. He ripped it into pieces, which he placed on lifesavers lined up along the counter. “Smaller,” Thornton said, looking over his shoulder. “We want one big one and one small, so it looks like two mountains.” Thornton added chunks of compressed melon; they glowed like moonstones. He walked the length of the counter flicking lime curd from a metal bowl so that it pooled at the base of each mountain. “Saucing takes a confident stroke,” he said. “It’s messy without being messy. There’s a feel you have to have, like being able to paint.”
Matthew Bone stood nearby, moping. He was on day ten of a two-week raw vegan cleanse. He watched a plate sail past. “It kills me that he’s making something and I don’t know how it tastes,” he said. He wrapped two cherry tomatoes in a piece of lettuce and took a big bite. “He never makes the same fucking flavors twice,” he said. “They’re rainbows. You can’t catch them.”
• • •
When I was twenty-four, my father died in a blind, hunting snow geese on an island in the Rio Grande. At home in suburban Maryland, in the basement where he kept guns locked in a huge steel safe the size of an upright man, we unpacked the duffel from that last trip: dark green, trimmed with tobacco-colored leather, sturdy, simple, well made. Inside, like outlines, were his waders and his crushed boots. There was a small silver flask, half filled with whiskey. My older brother, one of my sisters, and I each took a swig, and said good-bye. The elk that remained in the freezer fed us for years.
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