Sean Brock’s biggest concern, he said, is that people will want cornbread.
One of the most influential Southern chefs in the country recently opened his first restaurant on the West Coast, and it isn’t the cuisine that helped make his name in South Carolina, Georgia and Tennessee.
Darling might serve cornbread someday — but Brock says he hopes his sprawling new West Hollywood restaurant and hi-fi lounge will lean more experimental. Every city, he says, has a different rhythm. He intends to play to L.A.’s.
Instead of the cornbread, grits, hoppin’ John and other specialties he’d brought to life in kitchens such as Husk, McCrady’s and Audrey, Brock‘s menu is more esoteric, covering profiteroles filled with candy cap mushroom ice cream in a pine-cone chocolate syrup. He’s centering California rice in an abalone-and-celtuce stew. Ssam-like pork belly is served with figs, nasturtium and avocado purée.
Brock spent much of his career weaving his Appalachian upbringing with broader Southern specialties. At Darling — which he pronounces “Darlin’,” without fail — Brock’s steadfast love of fermentation features prominently, and it’s seen in both the dishes and a larder stocked with pickled produce and vinegars.
“In order to fully understand the taste of this place [L.A.], and that’s my goal, I can’t cook Southern,” he said.
As Brock attempts to feel out L.A.’s rhythm in the kitchen, he’s feeling it from behind the DJ booth.
Darling’s layout is split in two: one side a dining room surrounded by folk art — some from Brock’s personal collection — and the restaurant’s larder shelves, and the other a lounge and bar with a direct view of that custom-built music booth, where a rotation of DJs including Brock plays 45-rpm records well into the night.
The chef began collecting records in high school, then roughly 15 years ago fell in love with listening bars in Japan. The primary reason he relocated from Charleston to Nashville, he said, was to be closer to the Music City’s scene. In the last three years he’s become even more obsessed with music than with food — especially building speakers, understanding the mechanics of mixers, taking apart hi-fi audio systems just to reassemble them again.
On a semi-recent trip to Japan he discovered Tannoy speakers and fell down the rabbit hole from there; by the time he landed back in the U.S., he’d found a set of his own — originally customized for a producer of legendary supergroup the Highwaymen.
Brock reconfigured his house to accommodate them, then decided to share that love with the public and flipped his steakhouse, the Continental in Nashville, into a now-closed listening bar. He purchased a collection of 3,500 45-rpm records, organized them by decade, and listened through every single one.
The monthly rotating menu from Brock and his chef de cuisine, Ben Norton, feels a little like music. The quick-disappearing cheeseburger — of which only 24 are made each night — gets painted with what the kitchen calls “liquid cheeseburger”: beef fat infused with two-week-made tomato concentrate and the pan drippings from cooked cheeseburgers. It feels akin to layering the same instrument over itself in a track.
“I’m learning at a rate that is just exhilarating, and I’m learning so much,” said Brock, a former James Beard Foundation Award winner for best chef in the Southeast who has been spotlighted in shows such as “Chef’s Table” and Anthony Bourdain’s “The Mind of a Chef.” “To be able to be at this stage in my career, three decades later, and to feel like a student again? I’m addicted to it.”
A carjack is used to press two pans together to squeeze out the essence from certain ingredients, but the gem of the kitchen is the custom-built wood-fired grill. Nearly everything at Darling gets touched by some element of fire — even the salads and some of the cocktails.
The bar program, led by Baroo and Bar Benjamin alum Jason Lee, is also set to change monthly. The drinks might include a cocktail of vodka, sourdough cordial and charred Jimmy Nardello peppers, or rum with allspice, roasted eggplant and coconut cream.
“It’s pretty modern without drawing attention to itself,” Lee said.
The expansion to L.A. isn’t just about Brock’s need to experiment and reinvent. He says it’s also helped him physically.
Brock suffers from neuromuscular condition myasthenia gravis, resulting in muscle pain so intense it can be debilitating. Heat and humidity, he said, exacerbate it. In L.A. he’s somewhat freer from the effects and can focus more clearly on creating.
The Southern chef is living about 15 minutes from the restaurant, and commutes back to Nashville for half of the week to spend time with his wife and two daughters — ages 4 and 6 — as well as his new pizzeria there.
He says the back and forth doesn’t faze him. He also knows he’s drawn a lot of eyes with his expansion to L.A. He won’t let that faze him, either.
“I spring out of bed in the morning when I’m challenged and when I’m scared … and now everybody’s watching,” Brock said. “It has to be great, and I love that. That’s why I’m here: because of the pressure.”
Darling is located at 631 N. Robertson Blvd. in West Hollywood, (323) 203-0236, and is open Wednesday to Sunday from 5:30 to 10 p.m.
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