Credit: Ron De Angelis

The Trees, the Fire, and the Flow: Sean Brock’s Philosophy of Flavor

12 Minute read

22 Oct 2025

Hillary Eaton

Journalist

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In Los Angeles, the chef behind darling pursues calm and creativity through live fire, analog sound, and a philosophy of presence.

For Sean Brock, the true flavor of a place is found in its trees. “The bacon, the smoked country hams, the barbecue, the backyard grilling of a place taste and smell like the trees they have the most of—whatever is most abundant,” he says. Breathe in a sky, dyed heavily with white oak smoke, and you’re in North Carolina. Pull a piece of hog from the bone to a deep note of warm, hickory-scented fat and it’s Tennessee. “So when you grow up in the South, or anywhere that has a history with live-fire cooking, you just associate these certain smells and flavors with different places.”

At his new Los Angeles restaurant, darling, Brock saps the flavor of Southern California from the arms of orange and walnut trees. “I’d never really used any of these woods, so there were all these brand-new flavors and aromas for me. I saw that as an opportunity to explore this theory: it’s like food-and-wine pairing, but it’s food-and-wood pairing. It’s so nerdy. So if I’m cooking a New York strip, I’m not just obsessed with the breed of the animal, how it was aged, processed, and handled; I’m also obsessing over which of these 20 types of wood taste the best for this particular thing that I’m cooking. And that, to me, just helps feed my curiosity and my obsession with understanding why places taste the way they taste.”

At darling, curiosity and obsession are Brock’s familiar throughlines. It’s not a Southern restaurant, despite two decades of Brock becoming synonymous with Southern food—first as its preservationist, then as its interpreter, and eventually as the restless mind trying to transcend it. “My cooking has gone through so many different phases, and I hope that never ends,” he says. Darling marks the latest turn in that evolution, and at a glance, it may seem like a departure from everything Brock has built as a chef, one who is, for better or worse, an arbiter of Southern cooking.

You won’t find any hoppin’ john, heirloom cornbread, or smoky pink ribbons of country ham at darling. Instead, you’ll find dishes bright with tomatoes and stone fruit or rich with celtuce and abalone—all composed in a minimalistic offering designed to be just a tiny bit better than it is, unadorned, in nature. “Every dish that I’ve created over the past 20 years has come from a simple formula that I keep in my head and that I teach to those that I’m working with. It’s called the PIE Theory. P stands for Products, I for Ideas, and E stands for Execution,” Brock explains. “If I follow these three stages it doesn’t matter if I'm cooking in Los Angeles, Australia, or Charleston, South Carolina. The food should be the same. That’s the formula I created Husk around. That’s what I used at McCrady's, Audrey, and June. It’s just kind of my perspective of putting food on a plate and it’s fun and neat and fascinating to follow it around and see how that formula turns up on the plate in different places all over the world.”

In Los Angeles, that formula takes form on the plate as a marriage of several types of tomatoes and stone fruit. “You get one piece of each on the plate, dressed with tomato water that’s been infused with local seaweeds and flowering, electric-tasting herbs on top,” he says. “These flavors are what I think of when I think of being in Los Angeles. It’s something that’s unique to this place.”

If we’re seeing this new iteration of Brock as a departure, maybe we can’t see the forest through the trees. A creative who moves fluidly between photography, DJing, and cooking was never going to stay still for long, and California is simply his newest instrument. The Appalachian-born chef is no stranger to reinvention, both on and off the plate, by choice and by circumstance. In 2016, Brock received a life-altering diagnosis of myasthenia gravis after losing his vision and the ability to properly use his hands. Coming to terms with his health and an intervention from those closest to him eventually led him down a path of sobriety. Learning to approach cooking differently, to live antithetically to the hard-hitting, whiskey-drinking Southern chef archetype that once defined him, has shaped the last nine years of his life.

That shift, both physical and emotional, has given his work new purpose. “Creativity and the art of creating experiences need to come from someone who is very happy and very healthy. It needs to come from a place where those great thoughts and ideas flow naturally,” he says. “A lot of people call it a flow state. And it really is a thing—it’s keeping your nervous system centered and regulated.”

While some chefs talk about excellence in terms of technique, Brock talks about it in terms of the prefrontal cortex. It’s the part of the brain responsible for calm, focus, empathy, and good judgment—the control tower of creativity, the part that produces novel thoughts and tries new combinations of information on for size. Unfortunately, it’s also the first thing to go when you’re exhausted, overstimulated, or running on fear—which is to say, in many kitchens. “When our nervous system is dysregulated, we don’t have access to our prefrontal cortex,” Brock says. “And in my mind, that’s terrifying. I need to have as much access as possible to my prefrontal cortex. If we can stay regulated, we can stay kind, open, and creative, and that’s what hospitality actually is.”

Not all types of stress are created equal in the kitchen. Brock has learned to tell the difference between the kinds of pressure that sharpen you and the kinds that destroy you. “There are two kinds of stress,” he says. “Distress and eustress. We sum this whole idea up with a question: Is the suffering worth the contribution?”

It’s a differentiation first termed by endocrinologist Hans Selye in 1976, the Hungarian Canadian responsible for modern stress theory—the idea that one can manage the negative aspects of stress while harnessing the beneficial aspects of eustress through perception and coping strategies.

“It’s okay to have a little bit of suffering if you’re making something extraordinary that’s going to provide someone with a wonderful memory,” Brock says. “I think we all choose that path when we want to get into the restaurant world. We know it isn’t going to be easy, but the reward is worth it. So if I find myself feeling tension, I ask: Is it good stress or bad stress? Am I creating something for somebody else and giving it to them, or am I doing something I don’t want to do? That’s suffering that isn’t contributing to anything.”

At darling, the consciousness of stress versus eustress reveals itself in rhythm. Equal parts restaurant and listening bar, there’s the hum of the record player spinning through a playlist of guest DJs—and sometimes Brock himself—shifting with the time of night from vintage jazz to soul and beyond. Darling is home to hundreds of records from Brock’s personal collection, and the music isn’t background noise; it’s treated with as much reverence as a dish dropped at the table. “We pay as much attention to the music that’s being played and how it’s being played as we do to the cocktail list or the food menu,” Brock says. “It’s not just about eating great food and having great drinks. It’s about slowing down and appreciating the craft of everything and experiencing the analog.”

That analog ethos pulses through the restaurant: wood smoke instead of gas flame, vinyl instead of digital, and a pace that encourages lingering and focusing on what’s important. “It’s not a matter of removing tension,” Brock says of service. “It’s about being in the middle of it and realizing there can be peace there.”

Darling, then, isn’t a departure so much as a distillation—not Southern, not Californian, but human. “[Darling is about] just being me,” Brock says simply. “A person and a chef, not just a Southern person or a Southern chef. I’m fascinated with the foods of every place, and it’s such an honor and a privilege to be exploring this theory in a place like Los Angeles. That’s what creativity means to me: to create something that I haven’t done before, something I haven’t created before, something new.”

22 Oct 2025