Cut Your Teeth

One thing I have learned over the last few years as a chef is that waiting for someone to pave the road so you can move ahead is completely pointless. If the idea or platform doesnʼt exist, go out and create it. It's going to be a pain in the ass, but anything worth its salt has a lot of hidden work and obstacles you donʼt know about until you do it. For me, creating a new paradigm within which I view my food, art, and music, has been a longtime goal that I have learned through the evolution of Wolvesmouth, my underground supper club. Working with a small-scale team allows me to properly curate and control my true vision.

I created the supper club five years ago, and currently host it four nights a week for 24 complete strangers in my loft in LA. It's never the same experience. We have been lucky enough to start traveling to New York to host dinners, and last summer, as I was homeward bound after a trip, I started contemplating the sheer organizational chaos it takes for us to properly execute the logistics for these events. It also created an awareness of how much money I lose every time my business travels. Every person that's a part of Wolvesmouth joins me to ensure we provide the best experience possible. This keeps the experience authentic to my original vision. Wolvesmouth is my investment: It's money, time, work, sweat, frustration, stress, and a high stakes game of self-financing every single aspect of the project. But while it's stressful, I've kept it running in such a way that the goals I set are always true to my original vision: taking cooking further than the kitchen. "Thinking past the plate" is something I always tell myself; I force myself to look past ingredients, trends, and other food-related events and minutea in order to see inspiration and execution through a broader lens.

Honing in on one particular vision happened during a conversation I had three years earlier with LA-based painter, Matthew Bone. We came up with an idea to create a series of temporary traveling installations that would create a cohesive flow of food, art, and music—an immersive art and dining experience. In the fall of 2013, Matthew, myself, and the Wolvesmouth team set out to execute our idea, dubbed Cut Your Teeth.

My vision for this comes from my perception of where culinary experiences can reside within our contemporary social paradigm. It is an expression of where I see food progressing. And while I love doing my dinners for Wolvesmouth, shouldn't it be more? This is the state of mind I found myself swimming in when I received a phone call from the Santa Monica Museum of Art sitting at JFK. The call culminated in a conversation that led to a physical space within the museum where we could execute the installation. Instead of taking notes or drawing out what it would look like, we walked through the space, envisioned the end result, and made adjustments along the way. Bone painted two pieces for the show and I built a nine-course menu; everything else that was brought in we worked on together, building a space inspired by nature that ran the gamut from taxidermy to a live forest.

The first and last course of the menu reflected the artwork, the ambient Lynch-inspired lighting, the aggressive-yet-elegant feel and flow of the space, while the seven middle courses reflected the traditional concerns of a cook: creating a dinner party vibe while taking into account the awareness of sustainability, seasonality, and my personal cooking style that people have come to expect from Wolvesmouth over the last seven years. The two art-inspired dishes that became synonymous with our first installation revolved around the idea of "flesh and bone." The first dish (venison, blueberry meringue, cauliflower purée, cauliflower panna cotta molded as coyote teeth, crispy moss, pine gelée, stewed hen of the wood mushrooms, cacao and coffee crumble, preserved blackberry, and beet gastrique), named "Wolves in the Snow," was aggressively plated and meant to be eaten with your hands, followed by a pine-scented steamed towel. This dish was a visceral yet elegant expression, where the colors tied into the two paintings Matthew created, entitled "Horizon Line" and "Vanishing Point." The final dish was an echo of the first. Composed of olive oil and lime parfait in the shape of deer bones, green tea crumble, cacao coffee crumble, blackberry curd, black sesame steamed cake, green tea meringue, and key lime curd, the two dishes bookended the meal portion of the installation experience.

Once we began, we realized that the art and the dishes were the easy parts: It came down to the challenge of logistics. There is no training that can prepare anyone for doing everything that needed to be done. It was like smashing together fine art, set design and construction, lighting, landscape design, gardening, custom taxidermy, and a restaurant build all at the same time. And then it all needed to make sense together. The installation costs were as high as the start-up fees for some brick and mortar restaurants, but this particular experience is temporary.

Organizing in my own space with Wolvesmouthʼs day-to-day helped me—as well as the years of cooking experience—but when you see three 30-foot trucks dropping off loads of live plant life, 16-foot-tall trees being unloaded into a driveway—and youʼre in the hole for $20,000—$35,000 if the plant life dies—there is a very big reality check as to the size and scale of whatʼs actually happening. And that was just the cost of the forest: There's still food, staff, permits, taxidermy, and a slew of other things both creative and logistic to take care of.

In May, Wolvesmouth will be setting up an LA edition of Cut Your Teeth in a warehouse space with some new additions. All of this is a riff off of what the exhibition has represented, which has been the story of man and nature coexisting. The journey through life and how, at some point, everything ends up in the same place. We own nothing but our own stories; hopefully the worlds we build will be a part of yours.