For forty-eight hours this week, some of the world’s most acclaimed chefs, who hold twenty Michelin stars and myriad awards between them, were living in hiding in New York City. The twenty non-New Yorkers were sequestered together deep in Williamsburg, in dingy rental apartments with thin mattresses on wooden slats, horrible lighting, and half-eaten bags of Doritos strewn about.

Downstairs at one apartment, René Redzepi, (of Copenhagen’s Noma, two Michelin stars, named the best restaurant in the world three years in a row by S. Pellegrino’s infamous list), was bunking up with Daniel Patterson (San Francisco’s Coi, two Michelin stars). Aprons spilled out of hastily unpacked luggage on the floor. Across the hall, Ben Shewry (Australia’s Attica) and Magnus Nilsson (Sweden’s twelve-seat Fäviken Magasinet, No. 32), who sports shoulder-length blond hair and considers dried, ground moose meat to be a seasoning, were sharing a room. And Fulvio Pierangelini, formerly of Tuscany’s Gambero Rosso, which was once ranked the twelfth-best restaurant in the world, and was largely considered the best restaurant in Italy before it closed, in 2008, was in a third room. Upstairs was a small, shoddily equipped kitchen and a couple of bedrooms set aside for women, including Agata Felluga (formerly of Le Chateaubriand, in Paris, No. 18). They’d all be there together for three nights.

It was as if MTV were making “The Real World: Chef’s Edition.” But while they were living together, the chefs, instead of making bad decisions in front of cameras, had to prepare for a multi-course meal of a lifetime in honor of their friend Wylie Dufresne (wd~50, one Michelin star). And no one, least of all Dufresne, could know about it.

This massive surprise party started taking shape years ago. The bespectacled Dufresne helped pioneer envelope-pushing molecular gastronomy, which has become popular in recent years—he deep-fries mayonnaise, makes noodles out of nothing more than shrimp and a chemical substance known as “meat glue,” and serves pizza in pebble form. Dufresne is beloved by members of the food world but often looked at a bit skeptically by those in other worlds—and his friends, an international chefs’ collective of sorts, thought that he was in need of some recognition, some love, on his home turf. Fried mayonnaise is not for everyone, particularly Americans, and while each of these chefs has been wholly embraced at home, Dufresne remains “big in Europe,” said his former sous chef, J. J. Basil, who was helping out by frying chicken. So, with the help of Andrea Petrini—the food journalist and organizer of international arts-meets-food performance gatherings called “Gelinaz!,” in which chefs honor each other by reinterpreting signature dishes of fellow chefs—they started putting together a plan. It would be a Gelinaz! but smaller and more intimate—and organized in secret, just for Wylie.

They’d focus on three of Dufresne’s signature dishes: shrimp noodles, cold fried chicken, and scrambled egg ravioli, a cube-like concoction made of scrambled eggs encased in a sheath of egg yolk. They’d form cooking groups, pick their dishes, and converge at wd~50 on a Tuesday, when the restaurant was closed. At the appointed hour, someone would call Dufresne to inform him that the restaurant was flooded. When he came rushing over, he’d arrive to the party of his dreams.

Of course, the whole incognito thing was a bit of a challenge. On Sunday, after landing, Alex Atala posted a photo on Instagram from the Ace Hotel. It got more than thirteen hundred likes. On Monday morning, Redzepi, Nilsson, and Shewry ventured to the farmer’s market at Union Square and stopped in a nearby café for a coffee. The barista took one look at Redzepi and asked, “So, do you all work at Noma?” They skedaddled out of there quicker than you can say fäviken.

On Monday afternoon, the chefs attended a multi-course, three-hour secret lunch at the Scandinavian-inspired Luksus, in Greenpoint, where everyone caught up over dishes like chrysanthemum broth with smoked egg whites and a smear of rutabaga. After picking up overpriced grapeseed oil and vegetables from a nearby store, the cooking team of Felluga, who is thirty-two, and Nilsson, thirty, returned to their Williamsburg rental to prep their take on shrimp noodles. Their plan was to make a shrimp paste, which they’d serve with Asian noodles and a yogurt kimchi that Felluga had brought in her luggage. Nilsson knew a guy who’d be making them plates out of solid ice.

Nilsson kicked off his shoes, revealing an enormous hole in his sock, and began ripping the heads off of sun-dried Norwegian shrimp. Meanwhile, Felluga assessed their tools: two small pots, a French press coffee maker, a blender, and an electric stove. She stopped short when she opened a cabinet.

“We must have salt,” she said, motioning towards the pasta. “We cannot cook without salt.” Deep in the closet she found an old forgotten bag of seaweed, which she opened, sniffed, and then sprinkled in as a salt substitute. She turned to the carrots, and stopped again. “I cannot peel the carrots,” she said. No peeler. Nilsson shrugged. In went the unpeeled carrots.

As the water came to a boil in one pot and vegetables and shrimp bodies cooked in the other, the air hung heavy with the smell of crustacean. It began to rain outside. Pierangelini shuffled in, soaking wet and wearing tasselled shoes. He sat down and, without speaking, began cleaning a pile of young green shallots that had been picked up at the market that morning, before being recognized. Felluga gave Nilsson a look. Tuscany’s beloved son, here, peeling shallots, for us!

The next afternoon, the chefs were supposed to arrive at wd~50 no later than 2 P.M., bearing all their prepped food. At the appointed hour, the kitchen was pleasantly empty, with just a smattering of chefs in different corners. A portable speaker, blasting Iron Maiden from Redzepi’s playlist, gave the kitchen the feel of an abandoned rave. On a shelf nearby, there were traces of Dufresne: a tub of “kelcogel LT 100,” another of “genuvisco carageenan type j.”

At their station, Redzepi and Shewry were futzing with their riff on fried chicken, which they were calling “rotten chicken and corn for deadheads.” A pint container of dark brown liquid, which smelled meaty and pungent and was labelled “fermented rotten chicken,” sat next to a squeeze bottle of “rotten corn,” a chalky yellow liquid. “It adds this wonderful milky, acidic taste to the dish,” said Redzepi, reassuringly. Both would be drizzled over a porridge of grits and topped with cold fried chicken that had marinated in aromatics overnight.

At 2:30, Matt Rodofker, twenty-seven, the executive chef Momofuku’s ssäm bar, arrived with family meal for the chefs: lettuce wraps, rice cakes, kimchi. When he saw Redzepi, Shewry, and a handful of other culinary titans in the kitchen, he smiled. “I got this e-mail, and in the subject line, in all caps, it said ‘SUPER SECRET DON’T TELL ANYONE CAN YOU BRING FAMILY MEAL.’ So I was like, O.K. I didn’t have any idea what was going on.” It was unclear if he even did now that he was in the restaurant.

After lunch, the kitchen began to fill up—ten, fifteen, then twenty chefs dancing around each other in effortless rhythm, running up and down the stairs to the pastry kitchen with steaming bowls of this, sheet trays of that, calls of “behind” and “corner” echoing from the walls, the steady thumping of heavy metal coursing underneath it—all as if they did this every day. Nilsson and Felluga meditatively coiled five strands each of pasta together, tangling a single green shallot shoot into each bundle. Blaine Wetzel, the soft-spoken young chef of Willow’s Inn, on Lummi Island, in Washington, was experimenting with plating cones of deep-fried halibut skin and razor clams on a bed of shiny, black rocks. Redzepi came by. “That clam, it looks like the thing that pops out of her belly in ‘Alien,’ right?” he said. Wetzel grinned, sheepishly. “I guess, Chef,” he said. Claude Bosi (London’s Hibiscus, two Michelin stars) stood to the side, grating salt-and-sugar cured frozen egg yolks into a bowl, which he’d use to top his ravioli dish.