Dining out doesn’t just happen at restaurants anymore. ‘Underground dinners’ offer amazing food, an intimate atmosphere— and the thrill of adventure.

When we spotted the flickering candles we figured we’d found the right house, so we parked our car, climbed the steps, stepped around a tangle of bicycles and squeezed past a tree to make our way into the backyard. Our eyes were adjusting to the darkness when Heidi Gustafson, a friendly blond-haired 20-something who is a nursery school teacher and artist in her regular life, and the maitre d’ and head waitress for Sometimes Dining in her other life, warmly welcomed us to her home.

“There are two spots left at a table in the back,” she said and ushered us past two long tables to one set for six in the rear corner of the yard. There we joined four other diners already sipping wine and nibbling from a plate of pickled canary melon and salted cucumbers. At our seats we found the night’s menu hand-drawn on a little card tucked into our napkins.

The flickering candlelight, the warm welcome from Gustafson and the lovely hand-drawn menu foretold that the next few hours would be special— and I felt lucky to be there. My tablemates—a pair of artists who teach, a chemistry teacher and a filmmaker—soon let me know they felt lucky to be there, as well. Since Phil Kerrigan, Ben Turner and Matt Papich started Sometimes Dining in June 2009, it’s garnered a cult following that outnumbers the 32 people they can accommodate at each bi-weekly dinner. Once the trio posts news of an upcoming dinner on the Web site, all the spaces are snatched up within a few hours.

As Gustafson and her two fellow servers, who were all dressed in white shirts and black pants, brought one course after another to the table— fried goat cheese with a miniature grilled egg-plant and a slice of daikon radish nestled onto a green tomato puree; a light chicken broth soup with a surprise of starfruit; an entrée of braised oxtail and fresh bean salad with roasted carrots and kale— it became clear why people are desperate to attend Sometimes Dinners. The food was thoughtful but not too clever. The servers were seriously hospitable but didn’t take themselves too seriously. The vibe was homey and cutting-edge at the same time. And all of it was mine for a suggested donation of $12 (though many people give more, and rightly so).

While the diners relaxed in the yard, Kerrigan, Turner and Papich labored in the kitchen. Though far from a gourmet cooking setup— no Viking range, no convection oven or double set of dishwashers— the space was large enough to embrace the chaos of the preparations. Turner and Gustafson had knocked out the wall between the kitchen and dining room when they bought the corner rowhouse, making plenty of room for the three friends to work in tandem, one placing home-baked gingerbread onto plates, one stirring plums in a scotch sauce, one pulling from the refrigerator the molds containing homemade chocolates, each stamped with an “S” for Sometimes.

A few days earlier, when the three met to create the menu for tonight’s dinner, each purposely showed up without any ideas except the knowledge of what was in season. After a couple of hours brainstorming and riffing off each other, the menu was set. Early this morning they’d descended upon the Baltimore Farmers Market to buy the beans, vegetables and herbs for the night’s meal. Then it was back to Turner’s house to cook the day away.

Kerrigan is stocky and bearded, a furniture restorer by day. Turner is tall and dark-haired, and works as a cake decorator at Charm City Cakes (you can see him on “Ace of Cakes”). And Papich is a slight redhead who waits tables at a hotel restaurant, and works at the Baltimore Museum of Art. All in their mid-20s, they met as students at Maryland Institute College of Art. None is formally trained as a chef but all have been cooking for friends for years. Turner has hosted Christmas dinners for 30 and Papich used to organize dinners for 70 at the H & H Warehouse as part of the monthly dining event Weed Snake. These events predate the “underground dining” trend that has popped up in cities all over the nation in the past few years, in which temporary restaurants are created in a private home or empty warehouse or gallery— operating under varying degrees of secrecy.

Last spring, Baltimore Foodies organizer Lars Rusins helped put together a dinner in the Madison Street warehouse that houses Baltimore Gallery 321. Working in the gallery’s tiny kitchen with a few helpers (including pastry chef Trudee Wooden and Joe Edwardsen from Joe Squared), Jill Snyder, formerly the executive chef at Red Maple, a Top Chef contestant and now of the wood-fired oven at Woodberry Kitchen, created a multi-course meal for 20 people. It began with a purple potato and leek soup, climaxed with a whole roasted snapper served head- and tail-on and finished with a pomegranate cheesecake with a chocolate-covered pretzel crust. It was Snyder’s day off so you’d think the last place she’d want to be was the kitchen. But she, like the fellows behind Sometimes, was happy to have the creative license to cook whatever she wanted for a crowd of adventurous food-lovers.

BACK IN THE KITCHEN AT TURNER’S house, a question about why the three don’t work in restaurants caused a collective shudder. They want to cook what they want to cook; for them, Sometimes is an art project, a performance even— not a business proposition. They love the thrill of planning and executing a meal start to finish, and they just want to earn enough to buy the supplies for the next dinner. “It’s zero profit,” says Kerrigan, whose love for feeding people shined through as he fussed over a plate he declared “not attractive enough to serve.”

As the three chefs chatted and worked, Gustafson and the other servers bustled in and out of the kitchen, making coffee drinks on the espresso machine. Outside, some of the diners lingered long after dessert was done, drinking wine (it’s BYOB, though Gustafson will be glad to pour a glass for any soul who wants one) and soaking up the atmosphere. The serving mostly done, Gustafson and her colleagues gathered in a corner of the yard over tubs of water to begin washing the mountain of dishes. They seemed cheerful as they attacked the dirty plates, embracing even the mundane chores involved in this unique art project.