Brian Dunsmoor. Credit: Darin Bresnitz

Brian Dunsmoor and the Practice of Precision

10 Minute read

21 Jan 2026

Darin Bresnitz

Journalist

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After an accident forced him to rethink craft and control, Brian Dunsmoor found clarity through limits—at the pool table, in the kitchen, and beyond.

As the sun sat low on a typically warm winter afternoon in Los Angeles, I was in Brian Dunsmoor’s garage getting schooled by him at pool. It was one week after his eponymous restaurant, Dunsmoor, had been named Number Four on the Los Angeles Times 101 List, and despite being fully booked every night for the holiday season, his biggest concern was showing me how to leave the cue ball on the right side of the ball after he sank the four.

“Once you get out of line, once you get on the wrong side of the ball,” Brian demonstrated, “you have to pull a fucking huge shot to get back in line. And it has to be precise, too, because you have to get proper position, or you’ve already lost.”

He showed me how to hit with top spin and back spin, how to put hard left English on the ball, and the legal way to make a jump shot. As a pool player who had only ever thought to hit the cue ball dead center, these were things I had never even considered. Despite not completely embarrassing myself, it was clear he was being generous with his time, knowledge, and skill. He had only started playing in earnest five years earlier, as a form of physical therapy after getting hit by a car that resulted in a spinal fusion and life-changing hand surgery. Even so, I could tell he was holding back from outright running the table.

Brian Dunsmoor. Credit: Darin Bresnitz

From Pop-Ups to Permanence

I first heard about Brian in 2013, as whispers of innovative restaurants in Los Angeles began circulating in hushed tones within New York’s food scene. Continuing in the punk rock vein of Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing, a Venice-based pop-up he started with Kris Tominaga and Jonathan Strader, he convinced the carb-conscious culinary community to embrace his ethereally flaky biscuits at his new spot, The Hart and the Hunter.

“Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing is an Aesop fable,” Brian explained, “so we kept with the fable names, calling our new space The Hart and the Hunter, another Aesop fable. We pulled over some of the classics from there and just kept on rolling with it. Then we got a couple of reviews that really let us know what we were, which apparently was a Southern restaurant.”

Together, they converted a coffee shop into one of the city’s most celebrated restaurants, serving up holy trinity–sauced shrimp and grits, spiced buttermilk fried chicken with honey butter, and crisped-up pork hash topped with a sunny-side-up egg. While the restaurant put him and his partners on the map, after a year and a half the limitations of the space proved too suffocating, and the hunt for the next project began.

“Einstein says life is like a bicycle,” Brian mused. “In order to keep your balance, you have to keep moving forward.”

After a few pop-ups and projects, Brian and Strader opened their next permanent spot, Hatchet Hall, in 2015, which marked the first time we crossed paths. Brian continued his deep dive into American food history, offering a distinct take on Southern food and service.

“People think it’s a Southern restaurant because that’s what we were coined as, and we definitely had a lot of Southern influences, since we’re both from the South,” Brian explained. “We cooked the majority of the food out of a big brick hearth, built with custom inserts, so you could hang stuff, which was really cool.”

His refined Lowcountry cuisine paired perfectly with Strader’s top-notch Southern hospitality. Combined with a whiskey collection rare for Los Angeles, they created a destination for anyone seeking classic American cooking washed down with some of the world’s finest brown liquor (shoutout to Old Man Bar). I was no exception, and I swung in many times during their first year, which coincided with my move to the city.

Anyone who tucked into Brian’s rich game hen with lemon and king oyster mushrooms, or the maple-spiked Peads & Barnett’s pork chop, knew that behind the seeming simplicity on the plate there was a mastery of technique. It was also at that time that his fire-only, hand-tools cooking obsession began to reach new heights.

“If we could have run the kitchen with no machines whatsoever at Hatchet Hall, we would have,” Brian explained. “We couldn’t at first, because we did three hundred and fifty covers a night on a good night. This was the starting point, and we pretty much eliminated all the machines by the end of it, except for a stand mixer. I still wanted to do a restaurant that was totally history-based cuisine with the limitations of early America. Cooking with only fire, no exceptions, knives and hand tools only.”

That restaurant became Dunsmoor.

A Broader American Vision

Striking out on his own, Brian fully embraced heritage cooking, expanding from a concentration on the South to a broader immersion in American culinary traditions.

“The more that you learn about Southern food,” Brian mused, “the more that you see it tied to everything else. I feel like it’s the first cuisine in America. Southern food is one of the oldest cuisines in the country; it’s what a lot of things are built on.”

Beyond the food itself, he put together a team, both front and back of house, that followed his lead and shared his dedication to the culinary purity he was chasing. Much like his patience in teaching me the finer points of pool, his generosity in sharing knowledge with anyone willing to take the time to learn went beyond that of most established chefs.

“Everybody that you bring in has their own individual skill set and you just have to place them appropriately,” Brian shared. “I think that’s your job as a leader, and then let them run with it. You guide them a little bit to make it awesome.”

As his time at Hatchet Hall entered its final days, more and more of the details of Dunsmoor came into focus, and things began to shape up for the next chapter of his life.

Then the accident happened.

What happens when the skills you’ve built your career on are no longer at your disposal, but your brain and drive still search for the sustenance to operate at that level? What happens when a hobby becomes salvation and gives you a new way to look at life?

“The hardest thing for me was going basically straight out of a year of operations and bedrest directly into opening a restaurant. It was really difficult,” Brian reflected. “I needed to do something for physical therapy. So the first time I played pool as an adult was on my birthday, April 11, 2021, five months after getting hit.”

The accident had relegated his mastery of knife skills to a lower production level than what was needed to prep food for a restaurant booked solid every night. At the same time, it gave him a reason to refine his pool skills as a form of rehab, an irony not lost on him. When Dunsmoor opened in 2022, he knew he needed to lean on the team he had assembled to make the restaurant thrive and grow.

“I’m a hype man,” Brian enthused as he lined up the eight ball. “I’m literally a cheerleader. My hands are still fucked up, and I know we have to do things way better just to maintain our spot on the 101 List. If we only do things a little bit better, we’re actually falling back. We have to go way harder. Honestly, we have to do that anyway, because we’re so fucking busy now. It’s insane. We don’t have fewer than 165 covers on the books for the foreseeable future.”

Beyond helping him regain some of his dexterity, playing pool revealed parallels in how he approached working in the kitchen.

“When I’m playing nine-ball, I think three shots ahead. It’s like when I’m prepping, I make a list. I’ll circle a couple of items at a time because I’m like, ‘Oh, I can cut all this. I can get it in the pan, and then while that’s doing this, I can start working on this.’”

As Brian racked the last set of nine-balls for our final game, he reflected on what had led him to this point in his life, career, and obsession with pool.

“I have zero regrets about anything I’ve ever done in my life, because one thing always leads to another very organically. When I’m playing well, I don’t think about making balls, ever. I don’t think about aiming at all. I’m only thinking about the cue ball. And that’s when I play well. It’s my therapy. For my next project, there will be a full table in the lounge, so guests can come an hour early to play and have a drink before dinner. Food can only be so good, so hospitality and value are the two words I’m thinking about the most right now.”

As we played our last game, the pace picked up. With one final attempt, I tried to put something together but wound up leaving him on the right side of the four ball. Without saying another word to me, I watched a change wash over him, a stilling calm, as he ran through the rest of his shots, easily sinking each one through the nine ball, his hands flowing in clean lines of mastery and precise execution.

The Chef

Brian Dunsmoor is the Los Angeles–based chef behind Dunsmoor, a fire-driven restaurant rooted in American cooking, known for restraint, precision, and reverence for tradition.

21 Jan 2026