Galloping gourmand

Efrain Cuevas is just like you. He’s a regular guy who worked a regular job but liked to cook for friends. He whipped up simple family recipes, flipped through cookbooks and food mags every now and then, kept up on new restaurants around town. But unlike you, he took an idea—throwing underground dinner parties in various locations as a movable, constantly evolving restaurant—and steamrolled it into his life.

The idea took root two years ago during the methodical rolling, filling and pressing of 100 samosas on a wax paper–covered washing machine in a Bay Area apartment (there’s a lot of time to think when you’re making samosas). The apartment was Jeremy Townsend’s, who, along with his brother Joe, is behind Ghetto Gourmet, a roving dinner-party group that’s made national headlines since its launch two years ago. Cuevas was basically an Illinois boy who’d relocated to San Fran for a mechanical engineering job, but at his first Ghetto Gourmet dinner, he was enlisted to churn out samosas.

“That’s the way it worked,” Cuevas says. “I met Jeremy, I said I liked to cook, he told me about this Ghetto Gourmet thing he was doing and said, ‘Come to dinner, come volunteer.’ Six months of volunteering later, he asked me to chef my own dinner, write the menu and everything, and that was it.”

That wasn’t exactly it, but that was the beginning. After a SF health inspector paid a visit to Townsend’s apartment and told the guys what they were doing was illegal but slyly suggested they could move it around to skirt the law, weekly dinner parties got the same secrecy treatment as raves. Diners who signed up on the Ghetto Gourmet’s website were sent an e-mail 24 hours before the dinner disclosing the location. They arrived for a $45 four-course meal with a bottle of wine and an open mind to break bread with a couple dozen people they’d never met.

“People have crossed paths and there’s been friction, other people have met and ended up hooking up…all of that and more has happened at these things,” Cuevas says. As he talks, his cell phone is ringing, he’s jotting down a reminder to contact his Web host and he’s only hours away from prepping for dinner for a dozen people with politics on their mind. He’s in Chicago now, and he’s brought a bag of ideas and a plan to stay.

He originally came to visit his family in Aurora. But that was last December, Ghetto Gourmet was gaining some online and print buzz, and Cuevas and Townsend decided if the Bay was feeling the concept of a roaming restaurant, Chicago couldn’t be far behind. “Coming to Chicago to do an underground dinner. Looking for a space with a kitchen. Can pay a little, but not much,” the craigslist post read. An Internet-trolling artist who lived in the building that once housed Cafe Privata on the 900 North block of Damen saw the ad and shot Cuevas an e-mail about the empty café space. One call to the building owner later and Chicago had its first Ghetto Gourmet dinner on the books. 

“It was packed,” Cuevas recalls. “Forty people each night, two nights in a row. I made red-leaf salad with goat cheese in berry-hibiscus dressing, spicy carrot soup with coriander, roulade of lemon sole flounder filled with scallop mousse and braised brussels sprouts in browned butter with pine nuts.” After rattling off the menu as if it were tonight’s specials, he pauses and adds, “Damn, that was too many people. My goal has always been about the bigger social impact of these dinners but also that the food should be top-notch. It hasn’t always been. It suffered with too many people, so now it’s 24 max.”

And he means it. After hitting Chicago sans Townsend as the lone Chicago GG ambassador for monthly dinners in Bridgeport, Chinatown, Pilsen and Wicker Park, Cuevas recently decided to pack up his knives and notebooks and call Chicago home. To kick off his fresh start, he’s branching out from Ghetto Gourmet to launch 24Below Supper Club—“Twenty-four people, I’m the host, there’s a guest chef, location’s always different, performance art and visual art…I’m calling it the Roving Art Gallery and you’ll see all this art as soon as you walk in the door,” he says.

Cuevas charges into talk of alternating these 24Below dinners with singles-only meals in conjunction with Meetup.com. He talks of starting his “dream job” in the fall teaching cooking skills to high schoolers at the South Side’s Simeon Career Academy through the after-school Center for Community Arts Partnerships program. And of course, he muses on what to cook that isn’t just duplicating dinners he’s done in the past. There was the Argentine night, with tango dancers and a menu of ceviche, lamb chimichurri and tropical fruit cheesecakes. For Cinco de Mayo, he pulled off family recipes of Mexican staples and marked the backs of ten menus with Xs to designate guests who would get a whack at a candy-stuffed piñata. And as a nod to pheromone-packed spring, Cuevas created an “aphrodisiac menu” that included oysters, scallops and escargot, with nude models standing in for tabletops. 

The only distraction at the dinner Cuevas is gearing up for now is the opinions of Hillary Clinton. The Democratic senator is the set topic for the third Deep Dish Politics dinner, a supper club of a dozen people who meet, eat and talk about a designated presidential candidate’s stance on major issues. Cuevas organized the group as a here’s-how-it’s-done for the website he launched, CookTheVote.net. “It’s trying to encourage people to start supper clubs, wherever they are, to talk about politics, specifically related to the election. I have poli-sci interns who do the research, who established the candidates and the eight main issues, set up resources, links to sites with info on candidates’ views. You want to start your own supper club? Print out our handouts with the issues spelled out, get some menu ideas I put up on there—we made blackened salmon for the Obama dinner because it’s supposedly his favorite dish—have the dinner and then come back to the site to blog about what went down. Democracy is served.” 

The next Deep Dish Politics dinner is Sunday 5 and the inaugural 24Below Supper Club will be September 15. Check cookthevote.net for details.