Darling opened in late August 2025 with a bang and a twist — and eventually a vital turnaround.
The bang: Sean Brock, a chef synonymous with Southern cooking in the 21st century, was making his West Coast debut. He had been courted by an investment group to helm a vast space on North Robertson Boulevard in West Hollywood, previously occupied by a Spanish-leaning restaurant called Soulmate. In the changeover, local DJ and sound designer Max Ville helped customize a hi-fi lounge adjacent to the dining room, embodying Brock’s zeal for collectible vinyl.
The twist: Brock would not be serving the food that made him famous.
“In order to fully understand the taste of this place [L.A.], and that’s my goal, I can’t cook Southern,” he told my colleague Stephanie Breijo last year.
So rather than rehash past hits — buttermilk cornbread, fried chicken skins, pig’s ears lettuce wraps, pork chop with hoppin’ John (rice and red peas) with mustard greens — he laid out his vision for the ever-permeable genre of “California cuisine.” Plates looked gorgeous and veered cerebral. A play on crudo with kanpachi and cucumber, cut into equal-sized hunks, swirled with sauces and stung with horseradish. Grilled, sliced pork belly involved a setup of avocado, nasturtium and figs. Yuzu-scented creamed corn and artichoke hearts were nearly consumed by frothing uni-cream foam.
It was off-kilter. Technical precision overshadowed pleasure. The flavor equations often felt forced. Too few diners came. Darling felt doomed.
Then, a gradual shift that reached its definitive turning point this summer: Brock relented. He would bare his Southern soul for L.A. after all.
Now, we have crackly-custardy cornbread, and spicy-garlicky barbecued chicken, and grits and succotash and, for dessert, Virginia peanut tart. We have cooking that sparks with Brock’s stereotype-defying complexities while brimming with warmth and deliciousness. Darling has been righted.
That declaration comes ripe with context: I’ve been tasting and witnessing Brock’s constant evolutions for the nearly 25 years I’ve been writing about food, much of that time based in Atlanta.
Brock, who grew up in Virginia and West Virginia, was 24 when he was given his first executive chef position, at a restaurant inside the Hermitage Hotel in Nashville. It was 2003, and he’d been gripped by the moment’s molecular-gastronomy brain fever. He tossed around words like “hydrocolloids” and employed thermo-gelation to produce hot ice cream. In 2006 he brought his sense of modernism to McCrady’s Tavern in Charleston, S.C., a 1700s building in which George Washington once entertained. You can imagine how liquid-nitrogen-powdered shrimp and grits initially played in a town adherent to its colonial roots.
The opening of Husk in Charleston in 2010 blasted Brock to national fame. This was his era as preservationist: raising heritage pig breeds, seed-saving and restoring Low Country crops like benne, a West African strain of sesame that arrived in the South via the transatlantic slave trade. (For a primer on the profound influence of Black hands and minds on our national foodways, I highly recommend “High on the Hog” streaming on Netflix.) The resurrection of ingredients was in service of flavor, not some false antebellum idealization. Brock, like other great chefs of his generation, understand that the cuisines of the South are neither monoliths nor shibboleths. Traditions can be honored; change and innovation are intrinsic to every human culture.
The restaurant group behind Husk opened a second location in Nashville in 2013, and though Brock left its fold officially in 2019, Music City has been his home for 13 years. Once famed for his collection of vintage midcentury bourbons, he embraced sobriety in 2017. He married and began a family. For a few years in Nashville he ran Audrey, a fine-dining exploration of his Appalachian heritage, and also a throwback to grand hotel dining called the Continental. They’ve closed. He still operates a neo-Neapolitan pizzeria in Nashville and spends half his week in L.A.
Brock’s professional history is relevant to Darling. His recipes, no matter where he cooks, will never hew to Southern clichés, and his interests reach far beyond one region. He is, by his own admission, relentlessly obsessive. When he latches onto a subject or an idea, he wants to internalize the pursuit to its deepest possibilities. I thought at first someone had given Brock bad advice about how upscale-ish Southern food would perform in Los Angeles. (See: Dunsmoor, one of the phenoms of the decade.)
Now I get it: He really did want to synthesize this place through cooking. But he’s grown wise enough to accept that for L.A. to really welcome him, we needed the same kind of personal-narrative touchstones that define the cooking of so many of our finest chefs.
Slice off a wedge of cornbread, then, and inhale the toasty steam that rises up. Buttermilk, egg, salt, no wheat flour or sugar: It’s a variation on his grandmother’s version, and he’ll never stop tinkering. Pork cracklings have shot through previous iterations; smoked clarified butter enriches this one. Slather on more butter and, if you like a little sweet with your cornbread, the cherry-red smoked tomato jam alongside.
Barbecued chicken epitomizes the approach of Brock and chef de cuisine Ben Norton, who worked previously at McCrady’s and Husk Nashville. They brine the bird, coat it in a peppery spice rub and grill it above almond and citrus woods. It’s finished with a swab of barely sweetened barbecue sauce with top notes of lime and Japanese wine vinegar and a bass line of smoky guajillo chiles.
Soft herbs over top add a rustling texture, and a prominent burst of dill. On the side recently was maque choux, a fresh, simple Louisiana corn and fresh pepper sauté, dotted with thimble-size nubs of fried okra. It’s the expression of summer that remains most alive in my mind as we finally settle into fall.
Whichever cuisine a chef chooses to articulate in Los Angeles — Mexican, Italian, Cantonese, Lebanese — there remains no more generous act in the kitchen than to marry its essence to the fruits of our farmers markets. Which is to say: The vegetables at Darling have been amazing lately. Beefy tomato slices splashed with buttermilk dressing and earthy, concentrated tomato vine vinegar. Grilled squash and Romano beans over a gritty-milky cornbread puree, pure Brock. Tiny, meltingly tender lady peas, creamed and seasoned with tomato and Jimmy Nardellos. Such grounded imaginings make me excited for every season to come at Darling.
Stellar from day one: The dry-aged cheeseburger, 24 available each night, lacquered with a gleefully insane mix of liquid beef fat, tomato concentrate and the collected pan drippings of previously cooked cheeseburgers. It’s fantastic for a solo dinner at the bar, and also at a group brunch alongside his other reigning lunacy: a boneless riff on Nashville-style hot chicken (but not fiery hot) fried in smoked butter, country ham trimmings, schmaltz, lard and bacon fat.
The same impulses that drive a man to seek perfection in a mix of five frying fats — and, previously, to stockpile bourbons distilled during a pre-1990s, golden era of bourbon — also compel him to comb vintage record stores across the country, amassing hundreds of obscure R&B and funk albums from the ‘70s and ‘80s. Shazam can’t keep up.
At 9:31 p.m., when the DJ manning the lounge turntable goes off duty, Brock steps out from the kitchen to take over. He wears his Billy Reid cap that reads “Make Cornbread Not War.” He likes to keep his eyes down, on the vinyl, smiling to himself. In the restaurant’s earliest day, trying to find pleasure in profiteroles built around candy cap mushroom ice cream and pine-cone chocolate syrup, I was jealous that he could retreat to a happy place in plain sight. Lately I’m shattering the shell of a Virginia peanut tart, caramel-nutty with sorghum, and I look over at Brock lost in the music and think, “Yeah. Same.”
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