Secret Suppers

By Joel Stein

I'm pretty jaded, but I had no idea that people were getting sick of restaurants. Apparently, though, hipster foodies in cities from Portland, Ore., to Melbourne, Australia, find the whole look-at-the-menu, eat-the-food, pay-the-check monotony so soul crushing that they're taking refuge in underground restaurants arranged by groups like the Oakland, Calif., outfit Ghetto Gourmet. You pay online, show up at someone's house and sit next to strangers while an off-duty chef prepares a fixed menu of whatever surreal creations he or she has always wanted to try: rabbit adobo, fried grasshoppers, Brie ice cream. It's like a salon for people who don't read.

I liked the sound of that, so when I heard that Ghetto Gourmet was coming to Los Angeles, I prepaid my $50 (via PayPal) and started salivating. The night before the event, the location was e-mailed: the courtyard of a Koreatown apartment building. I was told to bring my own wine and a pillow to sit on. Since Ghetto Gourmet events aren't advertised or listed anywhere, you have to hear about them from friends. All this is partly to make it seem more exciting and partly because running a restaurant out of a house isn't particularly legal.

There was a hippie vibe to the event, perhaps because we were outdoors, or because there was a guy playing jazz on an accordion, or because of the misspellings on the printed menu, or because the guests recited impromptu poetry, or because the Ghetto Gourmet's logo of a skull with chef's hat hung on a sheet, or maybe it was just because our host kept taking long hits off a joint.

Jeremy Townsend, the original Ghetto Gourmet, came up with the idea when his brother, a line cook, wanted to try some dishes. They started in their house. Two years and one visit from a health inspector later, Townsend took his idea mobile, trying out chefs in other cities. "My ultimate dream is to tour the country like a rock band, except with dinner parties," he says.

The concept behind these events is that restaurants are impersonal, stuffy and not nearly adventurous enough. "What if you could actually cuss and high-five people and lick the plate?" Townsend asks. The answer, of course, is that you would never go to that restaurant again. Still, there is something exciting about sitting on a pillow grabbed from a couch and stuffing steamed white roughy and green-mango salsa into a savory shiitake-mushroom doughnut that I know damn well the Man doesn't want me to eat.

"When you take an opera singer out of the opera house and put her in a living room, people get goose bumps," says Townsend, trying to describe the experience. I suppose if you're single, meeting people by eating great food prepared in a bad kitchen probably beats volunteering for charities. But to me, underground restaurants feel a little '90s, infused with that anticorporate, Burning Man, do-it-yourself zine enthusiasm. I'm glad they exist, but the sad truth is, much as I wish it weren't true, I would rather sit antisocially at a stuffy restaurant where no one is reading poetry at me. And where they have chairs.