October 22, 2013
Served in the midst of a menacing forest, this looked like a savage rip and run found moldering amongst the leaves. It was, instead, the first course of nine served Saturday night in the art installation cum pop-up restaurant titled Cut Your Teeth: Wolvesmouth at Santa Monica Museum of Art (SMMOMA).
Ingenious chef/artist-in-residence Craig Thornton requested we eat our bloody strip of venison, hen of the woods mushrooms, cauliflower puree and sprinkling of coffee “soil” with our hands.
We did.
It was a delicious paradigm shift.
An artist and cooking collective founded by Thornton and Matthew Bone, Wolvesmouth’s mission, according to the handwritten wall text, was to remind us we are predators, that which “pricks an animals ears, causing it to flee…”
Suddenly everything looked edible. We twenty diners seated at a communal table stuffed ourselves on a wildly inventive, beautifully plated assortment of dishes that included butternut squash with dungeness crab soup, halibut with lemon gelee and romaine aioli (like tartar sauce only better), pork belly napped in squid ink sabayon with a slash of piquillo pepper puree,
and fried quail with corn nuts and deviled egg puree. The smashing dessert finale looked like something dropped from an overpass, with chunks of black sesame steamed cake, smashed bits of green tea shortbread and meringues, pop rocks and a generous sprinkling of cocoa “soil,”
was a delightful mash up of tastes, textures and visual.
While we ate, drank wine and probed deeply into our dining companions’ lives,
these stuffed creatures lurked menacingly in the forest just beyond our table. 
Thousands of coyote teeth rained down from above, sourced, we were assured, by a humane purveyor of such things. A flock of artificial birds wove its way through the exhibit overhead, as if in migration, while a raccoon watched from his perch, literally out on a limb. On the museum’s back wall, alongside the open kitchen, a movie loop played clips of a dead fox’s time lapse decay on the forest floor, followed by a wolf gnawing at a carcass in the snow.
We were to measure “humanity’s detachment from its basic animal origin,” according to the wall text, and be reminded of “What it means to die. Where our food comes from…and what it truly takes to sustain us…there is violence and death, that death feeds you and there is beauty in the organic cycle of growth and decay…”
Like a contemporary version of the ancients’ practice of parading skeletons about the dining hall to remind the living to enjoy themselves in the face of death, Cut Your Teeth worked its spell.
Next stop is New York, where former MOCA Director, Jeffrey Deitch, will be installing the Wolvesmouth pack this November in an old Financial District bank building, a neighborhood known for its love of carnage and craving for fresh meat.
Craig Thornton and Matthew Bone will face the challenge, no doubt, with bags of coffee soil, strips of bloody venison and vast reserves of cheerful, tattooed equanimity.
