I'm 39 years old,
and it's crazy to think that for this long,
all I've done is work in a kitchen.
All I've done is focus on being a great chef.
That's a long road.
And that's... a lot of damage along the way.
And to be the chef that I am today wouldn't have happened
if I hadn't immersed myself in that level of workaholism.
But...
it nearly killed me.
It literally... almost killed me.
The South has long been a beleaguered place, an insecure place.
It's a place wracked by guilt.
And those insecurities are informed by our peculiar and tragic-ass history.
And so, for the longest time,
Southerners didn't recognize the import of our food culture.
We swept the knowledge under the rug. We swept the people under the rug.
What Sean Brock did was say,
"The products and people of this place are of deep value,"
and that, "this is the most important American cuisine one might interpret."
That was bold.
Sean is one of the most obsessive people I've ever met.
He's obsessive about cars, music, folk art. He's all in.
Sean is 100%. 150%.
If he's into it, it's an obsession.
So much of Sean's food is story.
Whether it's his grandmother and her cornbread,
or seeking the origin of okra in Africa...
it all has roads that lead back to cooking.
He's retracing the roots of Southern food:
the Native American influence,
the French influence and the West African influence,
because he wants to tell the true story of Southern food.
Sean has two flagship restaurants in Charleston:
one, McCrady's, which is this kind of elegant salon,
this place of luxury,
where you trust the chef to go on this magic carpet ride.
His second restaurant,
Husk, is resolutely, unimpeachably, unapologetically Southern.
It's fried pig ears. It's shucky beans. And it is not fussy.
It is a place that harkens back to his grandma's table.
Sean can devote himself to doing ballotines of quail in one moment,
and devote himself to making the best damn chicken and dumplings in another moment.
And that's one definition of genius,
to hold two seemingly opposing ideas in your head at the same time.
That's what his cooking shows.
But to understand Sean, you have to go back to his grandmother's kitchen.
You've gotta go back to the coalfields of Virginia.
Most people have this idea of what Southern food is:
being unhealthy, and greasy and calorie-heavy.
But it's so much more than that.
It's amazing ingredients.
Unique ingredients.
It's specific varietals of plants and beans,
the preserves and the old traditions.
Taking humble ingredients and turning them into something truly extraordinary.
That's what I see Southern food as.
But, in the South, we've lost the seeds, the plants,
the stories.
And when we lose these plants, when we lose these breeds,
we lose multiple generations of wisdom.
We lose that connection to a culture, to a region and to a place.
Once you realize that, you understand what a tragedy that is.
And if you have an opportunity to possibly help change that...
that becomes your path. That becomes your journey,
and, ultimately, you can make a small contribution to something that you love.
The mother of vinegar looks like a jellyfish.
Kind of looks like liver.
Enter Sean's liver joke here.
I still have a jar of vinegar I made at McCrady's, at my house.
Yup. So that started with my grandma's mother,
which was probably 40 years old when I got it.
It was always under the sink.
That was floating in there and it used to scare me to death.
That was the first thing I grabbed after her funeral.
So, all those base vinegars that are at McCrady's are all my grandma's.
So, we'll be able to keep that going and going.
I was born and raised in the Appalachian Mountains of Virginia,
deep in the coalfields.
I just remember, as a kid, playing in piles of coal all the time.
My father grew up very, very, very poor.
When he was 11, he had to start working in the coalfields,
and that just shaped him into someone
who never wanted his kids to grow up poor, so he made sure of that.
He never stopped working.
But he loved life. He really, really loved life.
He ate steaks probably four nights a week.
He was always playing pranks and driving muscle cars really fast.
And we had an unbelievable childhood.
But when I was 11 years old, uh, my father passed away of a heart attack.
He was 39 years old.
At that point, we didn't really have a choice.
We moved in with my grandmother.
My grandmother was constantly handling food.
Huge, huge garden that was for survival.
If we ate something, we grew it or preserved it.
I grew up in that garden in the sun, in the dirt,
picking things and eating them while they're still alive and still vibrant.
Food was this incredible source of pride.
My grandmother was constantly teaching me
the things that her grandparents taught her about food:
how to know when potatoes are ready to pull out of the ground,
how to pick beans when they're ready,
how to snap a bean and string it at lightning speed.
That was just how I grew up.
My vault of deliciousness will always be there,
and it was formed during that period of my life.
I remember bein' a kid and, uh...
All of the neighbors around, everybody had a different greasy bean.
And there would be this competition every year, who...
how many bushels you grew.
It was a matter of pride.
And you think every single holler, every single family had unique beans,
corn, tomatoes, squash, everything.
That's a pretty color that you get on that pod there.
So many of these things, as you've noticed over the years, I'm sure,
take on different names. The most common is the family name.
This one came from Washington Parish, Louisiana,
grown for years by the Jones family, so they refer to it as the Jones pea.
It's actually gray crowder.
I've told guests many times, who've come down to the shed...
We're talkin' about peas, beans, butter beans, you name it.
After a while, you'd, uh, look at that and you'd say,
"Yeah, I see that. What else you got to offer?"
It's not till you put that living history with it, the story with it.
You've got a chain this long, with no links missing, all...
passed down to today and all that history that went in between.
Remind me what this is.
It's, uh, Jimson weed.
One of my friends, uh, ate it and then ate a whole bag of dog food.
Ate a whole...
Ate a whole bag of dog...
I gotta remember that.
- Oh, man... - Ate a whole bag of dog food?
Living in the country, you gotta find some way to have fun.
At the age of 15, we moved
to a larger town in Virginia, called Abingdon,
and that's when I got my first restaurant job.
First day I walked into that kitchen, it was not what I was expecting.
It was the scariest, craziest thing I'd ever seen.
Heavy metal playing so loud...
Tickets waving in the wind...
There was a smoking table in the kitchen.
And all of these people moving so quickly, and screaming and yelling,
and talking about how much whisky they drank the night before.
It was like a pirate ship.
And I remember, the first few nights, being splashed with hot oil,
and just burns everywhere.
And people seeing my arms and thinking I'd been abused.
And I would say with pride, "Oh, I'm a chef. I'm a cook."
I was hooked immediately.
After high school, I knew that I wanted to be a chef,
and so I started looking into the best culinary cities in America.
Charleston was the closest, so I packed up and moved to Charleston.
If you think about restaurant cities in the American South,
the most storied cuisine emanates from Charleston.
And Sean arrives like a tourist, almost.
This kind of wild-eyed kid, who was so excited, just curious.
It was such a culture shock for me.
It might as well have been Japanese food to an Appalachian guy.
I had never ever stepped foot
in any restaurant as nice as the ones are here.
To see a kitchen full of professional chefs,
turning out these gorgeous plates of food...
it was exhilarating.
At that time, the chefs doing fine dining in Charleston
were taking these iconic and classic dishes,
like Hoppin' John, and shrimp and grits,
and cleaning them up, making them beautiful.
I wanted to learn how to do that.
So, I threw myself into the craft of cooking.
Want to eat a palmetto tree?
It smells pretty good.
Cook something directly on here?
Ah! We cook rice in this!
Yeah, and it'll seal.
So, we could put rice in this, seal it off and throw it in the fire.
It definitely gets super fibrous at the end...
That's edible.
- It's delicious! - It is. It's delicious.
That's so good.
Sean and I met in 1997 at Peninsula Grill in Charleston, South Carolina.
First impression of Sean was how serious he was about being a chef.
Sean worked at Peninsula Grill, went to school,
and, on his days off, he worked at another restaurant.
I remember asking him, "Don't you need a day off?"
He's like, "No, all I wanna do is work."
I was insane about learning, about trying to master my craft,
trying to make the knife cuts perfect, the sauces perfect.
That was my source of pride.
But when I discovered modern cooking, that changed everything.
Yeah, it's translucent, it's beautiful...
The idea that I could manipulate ingredients
into this magical experience. That was incredible to me.
No one was cooking Southern food that way.
And so modern cooking became my new obsession.
I remember the first time I heard about Sean.
He was a molecular wunderkind,
this kind of experimental chef, doing ham-fat cotton candy.
Playful, inventive food that surprised.
I saw him one time with some barbeque sandwiches
and liquid nitrogen.
And he had been steeping the sandwiches in milk,
and then slowly began to make, on the back of his pickup truck,
while drinking whisky from a bottle...
He began to plunk out little pellets of barbecue ice cream.
And I saw, in that moment, kind of the beginnings of Sean.
He was the guy on a path to figure out who he is and what he wants to cook.
Grab the nicest one.
Yes.
Will you grab a flower?
Whoo!
The first time I was hired as the head chef of a restaurant
was at the Hermitage Hotel, Nashville, Tennessee.
And I was 24, and it was the first time I'd really had the freedom
to create my own plate of food.
My own menu. My own vision.
I could do whatever I wanted.
I was so excited to show off.
And so, when we opened the restaurant, our tasting menu was 30 courses.
I had this idea that modern Southern food could be this amazing thing.
We opened on Valentine's Day.
We booked 275 guests,
and I think we fed about 50 people.
To be standing in the middle of that kitchen,
watching food just be overcooked and thrown in the garbage,
and food coming back, and...
the people who hired me to do that job standing there just like...
"We made a mistake."
That feeling was terrible. I mean, it was just terrible.
A few days later, the review comes out.
I felt such guilt and shame.
I've never ever wanted to quit something so bad in my entire life.
But instead, I walked in the next day and I apologized,
and I said,
"I'm not gonna take another day off until we get a good review."
I was determined to figure out how to execute my vision
to prove myself worthy of that job.
I worked for ten months straight, every day.
I didn't leave the kitchen.
I slept under tables with mops as pillows, and I was living in the kitchen.
Perfectionism was all I cared about.
Every single aspect of every single thing had to be done my way,
and I wasn't very nice about it.
I would get so mad when people wanted to take days off.
I couldn't understand why no one else cared as much as I cared.
It's important to watch the color of the smoke.
Pretty much the entire kitchen staff quit.
But I couldn't fail.
I couldn't fail.
Ten months later, the paper in Nashville came back to the restaurant.
And so, I sat outside of the place where the papers were being printed,
until 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning.
That ten months of extreme workaholism...
It worked.
And so that was the way I worked.
That was the way I thought.
That was the way I expected everyone else to feel.
What's up, Mother hog?
Can't believe there's still greenage.
Right?
I got this pig from John Foltz.
Alabama is her name. She's an iron-age pig.
It's, uh... basically an Ossabaw crossed with a Meishan
and some other mixes. Carl Blake, out of...
out of, uh, Iowa, was doin 'em.
What an amazing creature.
- Four hundred years, it's been here. - Right?
What'll you do with the Hereford?
I'm just using it to cross with our Ossabaws.
People are so used to pink, white pork. Big, fat portions.
No fat.
No inner muscular fat.
You can't take a grocery store pork chop
and cook it in a skillet now without burning the shit out of it.
Whereas, you took a heritage-breed hog pork chop, uh...
throw it in there and just add salt and pepper,
its own fat.
I worked on this breed for years
and we ended up calling it "Berkawata-Derokaball"
Everybody that raises pigs thinks they're gonna create a "super pig."
Yeah, I was trying to do that.
Yeah, I've met ten pig friend farmers on Facebook and all the social medias,
and they've all got the "super pig." You know?
So, it's really... That is pretty comical.
This brings back a lot of memory
of running through all this, chasing pigs for the hell of it.
Right? Time flies.
After three years at the Hermitage Hotel,
I started wondering about the next step.
When an opportunity came up to be the chef at McCrady's,
the best restaurant in Charleston,
I was so excited to show off my vision of modern Southern food to this city.
But when I arrived, I was frustrated with the produce that was available.
The varietals that I wanted.
The quality that I wanted.
I was trying to push this cuisine into the future.
And that can't happen if the ingredients don't exist.
And that's when I met Glenn Roberts,
the seedsman who was restoring the pantry of the Lowcountry.
Here, we have 4,000-year-old different rices from Africa.
They're salt-tolerant, water-tolerant, disease-tolerant and they're fast.
Wicked fast.
- See the milk? - Wow. Did you see that?
Yeah. Try that one.
- It, like, exploded milk. - Yeah.
- It's awesome, isn't it? - Wow!
And you can take the leaves, juice them, and then dye the rice kernels.
That's really cool.
Glenn knew that in order to revive the cuisine of the Lowcountry,
you have to start with the specific varietals of the Carolina rice kitchen.
To understand Charleston cuisine,
you have to understand its roots, which is based in West Africa.
It's a very layered cuisine, heavily influenced by rice,
because obviously rice made a lot of people in the city rich
through the knowledge of enslaved West Africans.
Those who were enslaved brought their knowledge of rice culture,
the okra, the greens,
these different vegetables that we see on that Southern table.
All these crops of West African origin
or West African expertise
are what made dishes that are dependent upon rice for their backbone,
like Hoppin' John, like Limpin' Susan, so specific to Charleston.
But we lost these ingredients after the Civil War,
when people of West African descent quit the rice fields for jobs in the city,
or moved the hell out of South Carolina and went to Philadelphia and New York.
And that's justice.
Right? That's progress.
And yet...
if you value the agricultural knowledge that West African peoples brought,
and then nurtured in the American South, in the Lowcountry...
you do lament that loss of knowledge.
You do lament that loss of beauty in those rice kitchen dishes.
It's complicated. Like everything about the South, it's complicated.
What do you usually roast it in?
My favorite way is roasted in a cast iron pan with a little lard.
- That's it. - Lard's the best.
That's how you can convert okra haters.
- Smells like roasted okra. - Yeah.
I had to be a part of putting these varietals that were nearly extinct
back into production, back on to the plate.
Yeah. Unbelievable. Shit, that's good.
I was going from farm to farm to farm.
"These are the seeds we have to grow.
Plant. Plant. Plant. I'll buy everything. I'll buy it all."
And, little by little, our pantry was being stocked with ingredients
that were unique and true to this place.
And I was able to push this cuisine forward.
And the food got crazier and crazier, and, for me, more fun.
All of a sudden, the restaurant's gaining a lot of attention.
People were traveling from outside of Charleston
to come see what was happening at McCrady's.
In 2010, I got nominated
for the James Beard Award for, uh, Best Chef: Southeast.
And I won.
I had shown to the world that modern Southern food could be amazing.
At McCrady's, I was so focused
on creativity and being different,
I thought I had to be in the kitchen all the time.
But I kept hearing these romantic stories from farmers about seed saving
and the pride that came along with that.
I had to experience that for myself.
And so, I found a plot of dirt,
begged Glenn for seeds.
He gave me a few ears
of this beautiful, super dark, almost black-red corn
that was almost extinct, called Jimmy Red Corn.
And every day I would wake up at 6:00 and just work on the garden.
Being back in the sun, watching that corn grow,
taking care of it, worrying about it
was a part of the puzzle that'd been missing since I was a kid.
And I fell in love with dirt again.
That first pan of cornbread I made
felt just like eating at my grandmother's table.
And it just came full circle.
I knew what I needed to do and what path I needed to take.
And a few months later, we opened Husk.
At Husk, our mission
was to celebrate simple, soulful Southern recipes and traditions,
just like my grandmother did.
The defining principle at Husk since its inception has been,
"If it's not Southern, it's not walking in the door."
When you can't just pick up the phone
and order balsamic vinegar from Italy and olive oil from Spain,
you make your own.
You study the traditions.
And so we started making our own vinegars and oils and salts
and grinding our own flours.
And it was so much better than anything we ever cooked with.
We became collectors, scouting the South for ingredients.
It felt we were doing something that had meaning.
It felt like it needed to be done.
And I ate it up. I couldn't get enough of it.
There's this rediscovery of Southern food that's pinned to Sean.
He helped revive.
He helped to re-frame.
He helped us see again the value of these foods.
Wow!
That vote of confidence for the South meant a lot
when Sean shouted it through his megaphone.
And not long after we opened Husk in Charleston,
Bon Appétit named us the best new restaurant in America.
That's when everything took off.
Life was moving a thousand miles an hour.
I was running back and forth between Husk and McCrady's,
cooking for 500 people a day.
People were paying attention to Southern food,
becoming interested on a different level. It was exhilarating.
In a two-year period, I opened four restaurants.
At that point of my life was a lot of running around.
Cameras in my face and every word printed.
My role as a chef in the South had grown.
I was representing a cuisine and a culture.
That's an enormous amount of pressure.
And so, I just worked harder.
One day, I woke up and stood up out of bed,
and it felt like the room was spinning.
I'd lost my balance. I had to sit back down.
And when I opened my eyes again, uh, I couldn't focus my vision.
I was seeing double.
I couldn't do anything.
The first time in my entire career, I didn't wake up and go straight to work.
I was helpless.
But all the doctors I saw were just stumped.
They couldn't understand what was going on.
That's when the surgeries began.
A spoon popped into my eyeballs while I'm awake,
hearing and smelling and feeling them cutting away at my eyelids,
lying on the couch with ice pads on my eyes
and blood dripping down my face.
I had six surgeries total,
and the double vision and droopy eyelids just kept coming back.
It was like a horror movie.
And this is keeping me from working.
And that was making me crazy.
I just became so angry at the world.
I was so frustrated and scared to death,
just thinking, "Am I never gonna be able to cook again?"
And the only coping mechanism I had to equalize or to numb
was a garage full of bourbon.
I didn't know what to do. What am I supposed to do?
- Hey, Sean, how are you? - Hey. Great.
Come on back.
Good, good, good. Take a look at my nose.
Almost two years passed, not working,
just miserable, until I finally flew to the Mayo Clinic.
We did a number of tests,
and the neurologist says,
"This...
sounds and seems like myasthenia gravis,
the really rare disease that affects neuro-muscular communication."
This disease is exacerbated by stress and fatigue.
There's no cure for this
other than controlling stress, controlling anxiety.
But to treat the symptoms, the doctor gave me a bunch of pills,
and I immediately started feeling better.
My vision was perfect.
My eyelids were perfect. I felt like Superman.
To be able to use a knife again was such an amazing feeling.
I had a year and a half of ideas pent up,
a year and a half of dishes swimming around in my head.
So, I just started cooking like crazy
and being back in the kitchen was incredible.
He basically dove back in full force and beyond full force,
in, just, this desperation to make up for lost time.
But he was on something like 16 mg of prednisone,
and that can make anyone feel like Superman.
I thought I had everything under control,
and then, one day, I was driving to work,
and my vision just snapped and went straight into double vision.
The pills had stopped working,
and, the next day, my doctor told me
the myasthenia was graduating from my eyes into full-body myasthenia.
And that was really bad news,
because, when that happens, the future is living with tubes down your throat.
And, uh...
I, um, just hit a level of depression
that, uh, I'd never experienced before,
and I drowned my pain in bourbon.
I was in the depths of misery at that point.
I stopped caring. I just gave up.
He wasn't himself. He had a vacant look in his eye.
He was beyond just needing to see a therapist.
There was a darkness about him.
He was grappling with stuff I didn't understand.
There was something missing there, like... He needed help.
That was, uh... He was crying out for help.
I remember I was upstairs and my doorbell rang.
I opened the door and there were three people standing there
that weren't supposed to be standing there...
three people standing there that I respect.
They were trembling, full-body trembles.
I knew exactly what was happening.
And I...
felt this amazing, uh, relief, to be quite honest.
It was almost like... like the, the help had arrived.
And, uh...
we all sit down at a table to have an intervention,
and I remember saying, "You can do whatever you want.
You can read whatever you want, but I am going.
I will go right now."
Thirty-nine, I am. Thirty-nine years old.
The same age my father was when he passed away.
I nearly broke myself, trying to save Southern food,
but you can't save anything when you're dead.
When I got to rehab, I didn't have work and whisky to hide behind.
I had to face the person in the mirror.
I realized that my desire to always be at work is exactly how my father was.
The moment that I knew it didn't have to be that way anymore was unbelievable.
I was standing in the grass,
admiring the sky, and how green the grass was,
and I could hear the birds again, and I was like,
"Whoa.
I'm awake."
I saw that connection between taking care of myself,
and how that affects my disease, which affects my happiness.
My vision was fine.
My muscles were fine.
It was such an amazing feeling.
But the new perspective that I have takes...
an enormous amount of work every day.
To slow down...
That's difficult for me.
Dakota, refill.
And if I skip self-care,
I feel the old Sean creeping back in.
He'll be there for a long time,
in the parking lot, doing push-ups, waiting for that moment.
Smells like Willett Distillery.
- How long you gonna let this one go? - Two months.
- Yeah, that's alcohol. Whoo! - Yeah.
Hello, old friend.
Now the trick is to keep that edge,
to keep that passion, to keep that intensity
while taking care of myself.
Now my goal is happiness,
and the food that is created now is the best food I've ever cooked.
When I was a kid, the triggerfish was actually shack money.
If they only knew now what they were missing.
Carolina Gold Rice was here prior to 1863.
- It's like a time vault. - It's like a time capsule.
Exactly.
Nice.
That'll be delicious with a little butter.
This corn is just like me.
It started in Appalachia and ended up in the Lowcountry.
Audrey Morgan's bean.
I know these.
I'll never forget that time I brought my mom here.
- We were doin' a talk. - We were doin' that talk, and then, uh...
- That brought her to tears... - I looked over, and my mom was crying.
I was like, "Uh, what just happened?" And then I saw...
What did I say?
...my grandma's name sittin' there.
- That's the power of it all. - I know it. It is.
Someday, I hope to see these on menus all over the South.
Wouldn't that be something?
The thought of these being served in restaurants all over the South
and my grandma's name being mentioned every time...
That's legacy. That's her life.
That was her passion, these things.
That's better than a monument in the middle of the town square.
Yeah, it is. I appreciate what you do.
Well, I love it. That's the whole purpose.
Oh, wow.
That's it. See that? You recognize that?
Man, look at that.
I'll be able to spend the rest of my life
on this crazy journey of rediscovering Southern food
and what it can be.
And there's no way to know what's gonna happen a year from now.
There's just no way, but...
today is today.
And...
today is a good day.