For the past two years, in a loft apartment in downtown Los Angeles, Craig Thornton has been conducting an experiment in the conventions of high-end American dining. Several nights a week, a group of sixteen strangers gather around his dining-room table to eat delicacies he has handpicked and prepared for them, from a meticulously considered menu over which they have no say. It is the toughest reservation in the city: when he announces a dinner, hundreds of people typically respond. The group is selected with an eye toward occupational balance—all lawyers, a party foul that was recently avoided thanks to Google, would have been too monochrome—and, when possible, democracy. Your dinner companion might be a former U.F.C. heavyweight champion; the chef Ludo Lefebvre; a Food Network obsessive for whom any meal is an opportunity to talk about a different meal; or a kid who saved his money and drove four hours from Fresno to be there. At the end, you place a “donation”—whatever you think the meal was worth—in a desiccated crocodile head that sits in the middle of the table. Most people pay around ninety dollars; after buying the ingredients and paying a small crew, Thornton usually breaks even. The experiment is called Wolvesmouth, the loft Wolvesden; Thornton is the Wolf. “I grew up in a survival atmosphere,” he says. “I like that aggressiveness. And I like that it’s a shy animal that avoids confrontation.”

Craig Thornton’s Wolvesmouth dinners are the toughest reservation in town. Cooking, he says, is “creating a big fucking problem and learning how to solve it.” Photograph by Jessica Craig-Martin

Thornton is thirty and skinny, five feet nine, with a lean, carved face and the playful, semi-wild 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.

Thornton 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 a hundred and eighteen.) 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.

For a confluence of reasons—global recession, social media, foodie-ism—restaurants have been dislodged from their traditional fixed spots and are loose on the land. Established chefs, between gigs, squat in vacant commercial kitchens: pop-ups. Young, undercapitalized cooks with catchy ideas go in search of drunken undergraduates: gourmet food trucks. Around the world, cooks, both trained and not, are hosting sporadic, legally questionable supper clubs and dinner parties in unofficial spaces. There are enough of them—five hundred or so—that two former Air B-n-B employees founded a site, Gusta.com, to help chefs manage their secret events. The movement is marked by ambition, some of it out of proportion to talent. “You’ve got a lot of people trying to be Thomas Keller in their shitty walkup,” one veteran of the scene told me. If you’re serving the food next to the litter box, how else are you going to get people to pay up?

At Wolvesmouth, Thornton has accomplished something rare: above-ground legitimacy, with underground preëminence. In February, Zagat put Thornton on its first “30 Under 30” list for Los Angeles. “Top Chef” has repeatedly tried to get him on the show, and investors have approached him with plans for making Wolvesmouth into a household name. But 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.) And there are the authorities, who have occasionally shut such operations down.

Getting busted is not always a calamity for the underground restaurateur, however. In 2009, Nguyen Tran and his wife, Thi, who had lost her job in advertising, started serving tofu balls and Vietnamese-style tacos out of their home, and within a few months their apartment was ranked the No. 1 Asian fusion restaurant in Los Angeles on Yelp. (Providence, a fantastically expensive restaurant with two Michelin Stars, was No. 2.) When the health department confronted Nguyen with his Twitter feed touting specials and warned him to stop, Thi was unnerved, but Nguyen insisted that the intervention was a blessing. They moved the restaurant, which they called Starry Kitchen, into a legitimate space, and burnished their creation myth. “It increased our audience,” he told me. “We were seedy, and being caught validated that we really were underground.”

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 to Wolvesmouth, there was half a roasted pig’s head, teeth in, glistering fiendishly on the counter: a conversation-starter for the guests. Understatement, however, is one of the key production values. Thornton introduces his courses with minimal fanfare, rattling off the main components. “This is rabbit, with poblano pepper, Monterey jack, sopapillas, apple, and zucchini,” he announced at a recent dinner. Later, he told me, “We say ‘apple.’ But we took butter, vanilla, lemon juice, and cooked it at one twenty-eight—at that temperature, you’re just opening up the pores to give it a little punch—then we took it out, cooled it, resealed it, compressed it. When you put it on the plate, it’s just an apple. And then you’re, like, ‘Holy crap, this is intense.’ ”

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. He is known never to prepare a dish the same way twice, an ideal conceit for the age of Twitter. From above, the food—smeared, brushed, and spattered with sauces in safety orange, violet, yolk yellow, acid green—is as vivid as a Kandinsky; from the table’s edge, it forms eerie landscapes of hand-torn meat, loamy crumbles, and strewn blossoms. Being presented with a plate of Thornton’s food often feels like stumbling upon a crime scene while running through the woods. A recipe for Wolves in the Snow, a dish of venison with cauliflower purée, hen-of-the-woods mushrooms, beet-blackberry gastrique, and Douglas-fir gelée, which Thornton published in L.A. Weekly, instructs, “Rip venison apart with two forks, which will act as sharp teeth. . . . Attack the plate with your blackberry beet ‘blood.’ ”

For someone who is known to make 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. Last year, 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.” The dish that lingers for me is one of his 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.

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 and Son of a Gun, who staged 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.’ ” But limitations serve as a goad to Thornton. At a dinner last winter, when he learned that one of his regular guests 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.”)

Many of the guests that night were members of a circle who call themselves the Panda Clan and Team Fatass, referring to their panda-related Twitter handles and their appetites. They approach their meals competitively. Kevin Hsu noted on his blog, KevinEats, that he ate more courses at the “40 at 40” than at Alinea, Grant Achatz’s restaurant in Chicago. “Only à la carte marathons at Picca and The Bazaar have produced higher course counts,” he wrote. 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.

For a long time, it has been 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, three-thousand-dollar Cryovac machine, nothing beyond what a moderately ambitious hobbyist might own. His crew is made up mostly of non-professionals; he 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. John Cortez is a high-school friend of Thornton’s. Caleb Chen and Julian Fang came to Wolvesmouth as diners; so did Garrett Snyder, a twenty-three-year-old food writer for L.A. Weekly. 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, catlike 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 that started in L.A. and instigated a national craze. “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.”

Running a tiny operation with a set menu allows Thornton to buy, in small quantities, 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 (fiddleheads, ramps), or too labor-intensive (cured bonito loin, which he shaves by hand). Ideally, diners will try three or four things they’ve never had before. Sourcing takes days, and Thornton does almost all of it himself.

One rainy day this spring, a few hours before a Wolvesmouth dinner, Thornton stood over a tilefish, 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 tilefish that’s insane,’ ” Thornton told me. “They know with me I don’t care what something costs.”