By Geoff Carter
Craig Thornton is passionate about many things. He loves traveling; he loves wild nature; he loves Tom Waits and Joy Division. But all of these things are subservient to his first love: cooking.
More precisely, the 29-year-old loves cooking for others — and at his Los Angeles loft, which he calls the Wolvesden, Thornton does just that. Other great chefs may dream of opening restaurants, but through a series of Wolvesden events where attendance is limited to a dozen people who have signed up online, Craig Thornton hopes to bring back the old-school dinner party.
“I really enjoy having people walk up and talk to me while I’m cooking,” says the chef, whose previous jobs included cooking for Nicolas Cage and at one of Thomas Keller’s prestigious restaurants. “They’re talking about a dish or about somewhere that I need to go try, and I like that exchange more than I enjoy feeding 200 people. The whole idea is that you come in, you eat, you leave and you’re like, ‘What the hell just happened?’”
That question is difficult to answer if one perceives iconic chefs as being lofty restaurateurs or reality show contestants. Thornton approaches a new dish as a painter approaches a fresh canvas — he considers what he wants to say with it, what mood he’d like to infuse it with, what materials he needs to make it perfect, and how it might work in context with the art surrounding it. And if it comes out looking a bit weird, that’s fine.
“When I make a plate, it’s very aggressive-looking,” Thornton says. “I don’t like the idea of everything being perfectly square and symmetrical. My stuff looks more raw, more organic and more aggressive. I’m trying to get across a feeling of movement, of energy.”
Thornton created two dishes for Fresh Perspectives, on the themes of empowerment and escape. The escape dish, which Thornton calls “Wandering the Forest,” hints at his love of sitting around a campfire in the woods. “That’s my escape from reality,” he says.
But for empowerment, he played a bit of a trick.
“It looked sweet, but it was savory,” he says. “When I think of the word empower, I think of liberating yourself. Looks can be deceiving; you look at something, and you assume that it is what it is. You assume that it’s going to be yogurt and berries and granola, and then you bite into it and it’s a pickled beet in the shape of a blackberry. Feta cheese was the yogurt — it had more the texture of a whipped yogurt. And the granola was a sweet and salty granola that I made. Underneath that was a beet salad that you couldn’t see at first.
“The idea behind the dish was that of liberating yourself by actually looking and tasting and really thinking about what’s actually going on before passing judgment. Once you do, that’s when you can empower yourself to move forward.”
Moving forward is Craig Thornton’s central preoccupation. He wants to bring Wolvesden dinners to other cities and towns, provided he can maintain the quality of the experience. And more than anything, the chef wants to continue blurring the lines between art, music and cooking — creative mediums that, to his mind, come from the same place and fill the same human need.
“Food is very much how you would view art in a gallery,” Thornton says. “Cooking is a craft, but you can use it to create art as you would anything else, like painting. Everything starts out as a craft. Once you have the idea and express it, that’s when it becomes art.”
Craig Thornton is passionate about many things. He loves traveling; he loves wild nature; he loves Tom Waits and Joy Division. But all of these things are subservient to his first love: cooking.
More precisely, the 29-year-old loves cooking for others — and at his Los Angeles loft, which he calls the Wolvesden, Thornton does just that. Other great chefs may dream of opening restaurants, but through a series of Wolvesden events where attendance is limited to a dozen people who have signed up online, Craig Thornton hopes to bring back the old-school dinner party.
“I really enjoy having people walk up and talk to me while I’m cooking,” says the chef, whose previous jobs included cooking for Nicolas Cage and at one of Thomas Keller’s prestigious restaurants. “They’re talking about a dish or about somewhere that I need to go try, and I like that exchange more than I enjoy feeding 200 people. The whole idea is that you come in, you eat, you leave and you’re like, ‘What the hell just happened?’”
That question is difficult to answer if one perceives iconic chefs as being lofty restaurateurs or reality show contestants. Thornton approaches a new dish as a painter approaches a fresh canvas — he considers what he wants to say with it, what mood he’d like to infuse it with, what materials he needs to make it perfect, and how it might work in context with the art surrounding it. And if it comes out looking a bit weird, that’s fine.
“When I make a plate, it’s very aggressive-looking,” Thornton says. “I don’t like the idea of everything being perfectly square and symmetrical. My stuff looks more raw, more organic and more aggressive. I’m trying to get across a feeling of movement, of energy.”
Thornton created two dishes for Fresh Perspectives, on the themes of empowerment and escape. The escape dish, which Thornton calls “Wandering the Forest,” hints at his love of sitting around a campfire in the woods. “That’s my escape from reality,” he says.
But for empowerment, he played a bit of a trick.
“It looked sweet, but it was savory,” he says. “When I think of the word empower, I think of liberating yourself. Looks can be deceiving; you look at something, and you assume that it is what it is. You assume that it’s going to be yogurt and berries and granola, and then you bite into it and it’s a pickled beet in the shape of a blackberry. Feta cheese was the yogurt — it had more the texture of a whipped yogurt. And the granola was a sweet and salty granola that I made. Underneath that was a beet salad that you couldn’t see at first.
“The idea behind the dish was that of liberating yourself by actually looking and tasting and really thinking about what’s actually going on before passing judgment. Once you do, that’s when you can empower yourself to move forward.”
Moving forward is Craig Thornton’s central preoccupation. He wants to bring Wolvesden dinners to other cities and towns, provided he can maintain the quality of the experience. And more than anything, the chef wants to continue blurring the lines between art, music and cooking — creative mediums that, to his mind, come from the same place and fill the same human need.
“Food is very much how you would view art in a gallery,” Thornton says. “Cooking is a craft, but you can use it to create art as you would anything else, like painting. Everything starts out as a craft. Once you have the idea and express it, that’s when it becomes art.”
