Inside the Kitchen: Seven Questions with Sean Brock of Darling

I go through phases, and every couple of years it changes. Right now, if I had to choose, it would be steak frites au poivre with a side of béarnaise. I love Ludo’s cooking, so I think he’s the guy I would call if I needed my final steak frites au poivre.

I think back over the years to revelatory moments, and it was probably 1999 when I had the opportunity to help the chef I was working for with a dinner at Blackberry Farm. The chef at the time was John Fleer, and I’ll never forget sitting in that grand dining room—it’s still one of the nicest places I’ve been in my life—and seeing the chef come out in stark, beautiful whites, speaking intelligently and passionately about washday peas.

This humble pea was treasured in that region. At that point in my life, I had just discovered The French Laundry Cookbook, foie gras, and truffles, all those things that held my attention. But going there and hearing John Fleer speak the same way about the ingredients I grew up with in Appalachia changed me. I immediately applied to work there, and I can always look back on that moment as a big shift in my perspective.

I’ve been in fine dining my entire life. I was in culinary school right out of high school, and I worked at the finest dining place I could find in Charleston. I got addicted to the attention-to-detail aspect of fine dining.

When you start talking about fine dining—why we need it and why it’s important—I think if you step back and take a look, the greatest privilege we have as restaurant people is to create a memory that someone can call back to ten years down the road and feel a rush of pleasure chemicals in their brain because it was such a special experience for them. Fine dining is about going the extra mile, pushing harder, and doing more than you really need to in order to ensure that the memory lasts for a long time and becomes something people carry with them.

My goals for darling, what I’m shooting for, is a combination of all my favorite things: looking for extraordinary ingredients and stories, cooking them over fire while listening to amazing music on an extraordinary sound system. I want it to be a place where people come to taste Southern California at that moment, on that very day. That’s why we’re changing the menu so often.

I want to have a true understanding of a seasonal rhythm and also of the city from a musical perspective. We put just as much focus on the music—what’s playing and how it’s being played—as we do on the food and cocktail menu. It’s about slowing down and living through an analog lens, appreciating craft and extraordinary natural products.

It’s gone through a million different phases, and I hope that never ends. Right now, at this stage in my career and life, my focus is: How can I merge soulful cooking with minimalism and still have it be artful, beautiful, and inspiring?

“That’s a hard thing to do. If you’re putting fewer things on the plate, there are fewer opportunities to show more, and it’s an internal struggle every time. What I try to focus my energy on is: Can we make this product a little bit better than it is in nature, without altering it too much, but still make it soulful and beautiful? It sounds simple, but it’s not.