Mystery Kitchen

There’s a brand new culinary pop-up club in town, where adventurous diners channeled Native Americans during last week’s launch at a remote location that wasn’t remotely near a desert…rather a secret place in Hollywood that was adjacent to the 101 freeway onramp. Which seemed quite appropriate for the inaugural Los Angeles Dinner Lab, where this new membership-based social dining experiment unites undiscovered chefs with fervent foodies. Entrepreneur Brian Bordainick is the founder of these intimate roving feasts that began in New Orleans two years ago, offering a chef’s table experience to a group of interesting strangers… just for the night. With operations in New York, Chicago, Miami, DC, Atlanta, Nashville, Austin, Los Angeles and San Francisco, each member is granted access to Food Lab’s bi-weekly events and happenings in all of their markets, where over the course of the year they could host up to as many as 100 dinners in just a single city.

Helipads, abandoned buildings and motorcycle deanships are just some of the venues where underground cuisine is crafted by up-and-coming chefs from all over the country. Five course meals are presented in a fashion that feels like an episode of Top Chef…where I sat with pencil and score card in hand commenting on each course with the intensity of Tom Colicchio- hopefully looking more like Padma Lakshmi. The theme was Native Nation, where Byron Stithem- Chef de Cuisine from the Nashville operations- created a menu celebrating the principles of culinary preservation, an homage of sorts to ancestral traditions and respect for all things that came from the earth…including the first course where a cricket landed inside a Mason jar. Yes, it was cooked… and I ate it. More protein included bison with blood vinaigrette and flowers, buckskin cake with potted salmon, and lamb which were all accompanied by different alcohol pairings. At the end of the meal, maybe I really did inhabit the spirit of a Native American…or at least some of their spiritual accoutrements that can be found inside a real lab. A great experiment indeed. www.dinnerlab.com