Best Food Writing 2017

by Holly Hughes

  Guy Fieri’s on the ground, eating with locals like locals, never giving a thought to Yelp but rather turning to somebody’s grandpa and asking about the counter stool they’ve occupied for 30 years. The shades he wears don’t shield his eyes from the sun; they’re there because his star shines fucking bright. The spikey hair, the flames on his collared shirts, the over-accessorizing? That’s all part of his plan, but also part of a diversion from the reality of his empire: that despite everything, Guy Fieri might actually be a genius.

  The Chef Loses It

  BY BRETT MARTIN

  From GQ

  Award-winning writer Brett Martin (you’ll find his work in GQ, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Bon Appetit, and many other publications) has a gift for going deep with his subjects, revealing their character as well as their achievements. In this profile of Charleston chef Sean Brock, that gift yields touching insights.

  Every morning this week, Sean Brock has woken up and vomited. This is not, in and of itself, that unusual. Brock inherited a tricky gag reflex from his father, and the smallest thing can sometimes set him off: picking up after his dog, for instance, or the toothbrush scraping too far back on his tongue.

  This week, though, the throwing up has been from nerves. In ten days, he’s scheduled to complete the re-invention of his flagship Charleston restaurant, McCrady’s. The first stage, which opened a few weeks ago, was McCrady’s Tavern, a bustling, meat-heavy canteen with a menu inspired by Brock’s collection of 19th-century cookbooks. The second will be housed in this small, rectangular space: 18 seats, 12 of them around a U-shaped counter, and a tasting menu that aspires to compete with the imaginative culinary standards of the best restaurants in the world. Brock says it’s everything he’s ever wanted as a chef. Which is enough to make him barf.

  What the future looks like, at this moment, is four men staring silently at a white plate. Brock and three of his top chefs are gathered in the gleaming open kitchen of the new McCrady’s. Strewn about are crates of crystal wineglasses, boxes of flatware, a small forest of bonsai trees to be used in the presentation of the restaurant’s first course. “I’ve wanted these ever since I saw The Karate Kid,” Brock says.

  The men are regarding a dish that, on closer examination, contains an arrangement of food as white as the china it’s plated on: an ivory rectangle of poached cobia, a tumble of brunoised matsutake mushrooms, and a pool of white sauce made from green, or uncooked, peanuts. It is the consistency of tahini but tastes loamy and raw.

  “We peel each peanut by hand. It’s a fairly fast process,” deadpans John Sleasman, McCrady’s chef de cuisine. Like the others, he’s wearing a look best described as “pursued by werewolf.”

  “Nobody’s been doing a lot of sleeping around here,” Brock says.

  He peers at the dish from beneath the flat brim of his black baseball hat. If there is a template for southern chef these days—burly, bearded, bespectacled, baseball-capped, and bedraped in tattoos—it is in large part a look based on Brock’s. Tonight he’s wearing sneakers, a chef’s jacket over a Slayer T-shirt, and a cap reading Mc, for McCrady’s. He can almost seem to have two faces: at times, boyishly mischievous, quick to break into a barking laugh. At others, blank as an Easter Island statue and older than his 38 years.

  This is already the tenth iteration of the cobia-and-matsutake dish. At about the 12th or 13th, the chefs hit on the idea of mixing the peanut sauce with a shot of liquefied lovage; at the 16th, of pouring out the combined sauce in front of the diner, creating a spidery puddle of green and white.

  Brock takes a bite and goes for a little walk away from the plate, as he often does while tasting. “That’s really delicious,” he says finally, smiling for the first time. The cooks imperceptibly relax, like the unwitting subjects of a Columbo interrogation, before Brock turns back with just one more thing: “Should it really be just one piece of fish?” And the whole process starts again.

  Several more versions down the line, Brock removes his hat and runs his hands through his hair and across his face. “I’m about to boot this whole dish out onto East Bay Street,” he mutters. Sensing a break, the other chefs depart. Brock sits down heavily on a stool, traces a finger along the line of solder that runs the length of the black-walnut counter. “This is the restaurant I’ve always wanted to have. This is the place I’ve dreamed about and never thought I’d be able to open,” he says. “Every person in this building and every person in the public is expecting something big, something important, something impressive,” he says.

  Part of the quiet mood tonight, he explains, has to do with the fact that he exploded at his team earlier. The specifics are already fading, but the effects haven’t. “I feel sick. I feel like I got beat up,” he says. He holds up a hand, swollen and weirdly crooked, to show the knuckle still bleeding from when he punched a wall.

  “These dishes we’re working on, I could taste them in my head as soon as I came up with them,” he says. “It’s just not coming out onto the plate.”

  And there’s something else. Brock sighs and rubs his eyes: “I haven’t been able to see a fucking thing all day.”

  There are approximately 16,000 photos on Brock’s iPhone. By rough estimation, about 10 percent of those are of various iterations of matsutake and cobia. Another 20 percent are of Ruby, his French bulldog. And the rest are of eyes.

  There are bruised eyes. Battered eyes. Eyes leaking actual tears of bright red blood. There are eyes with stitches and eyes with bandages. Eyes drooping as though dragged down by fishhooks and eyes goggling in a grotesque simulation of surprise. Eyes hidden behind patches, shielded by stained gauze, buried beneath great sockfuls of ice.

  All of them are Brock’s eyes.

  For the past three years, Brock has been sick—most of that time mysteriously and secretly so. In March, after countless doctors, blind alleys, and medical red herrings, he finally received a diagnosis of what had been plaguing him: myasthenia gravis (MG), a rare neurological auto-immune disease that inhibits the body’s ability to interact with its own muscles.

  If, as Susan Sontag wrote, “everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick,” Brock passed through customs to the wrong side in January 2014. It was a hard season: He had just completed the arduous opening of Husk Nashville, a version of the Charleston restaurant that had propelled him to new heights of acclaim. He was spending nearly all his time in Nashville now, in the late stages of a difficult, guilt-ridden divorce from the woman who had been his high school sweetheart. Coming home from dinner one frigid night, he slipped on a patch of ice and went down hard on one knee. A driver pumping gas some 50 yards away nevertheless claimed he could hear the crack as Brock’s kneecap smashed into the pavement. He was incapacitated, unable for several weeks to even make it to the bathroom alone. For a while, it seemed that this might be a backward blessing, an enforced vacation from the stress of the kitchen that Brock would never take on his own. “It was the first time I had not worked six or seven days a week since I was 19,” he says. He and his girlfriend, Adi Noe, holed up in their apartment through that unusually cold winter, binge-watching Breaking Bad.

  Then they both ended up with a bad case of food poisoning. Brock spent one night vomiting so violently that he was almost bemused to wake up the next day to find he had double vision. “Man, I must have pulled something throwing up,” he thought. A few days later, though, the symptoms remained. The two consulted the chamber of horrors known as WebMD. “You do not want to Google double vision,” Noe says.

  After a few weeks, the parade of doctors began: ophthalmologists, neurologists, neuro-ophthalmologists, oculoplastics surgeons. And the tests: One consisted of repeatedly placing ice up against his eyes and gauging the response. That was a spa treatment compared with the next test, in which a recording needle was inserted into the junction between the muscles and nerves of his eye and left there for 45 minutes, gathering data.

  MG is a sneaky sickness, of
ten called the snowflake disease because it seems to manifest in as many unique ways as there are people who have it. Why it strikes is a mystery, but as with all auto-immune diseases, the body mistakenly attacks itself, in this case disabling receptors for a substance called acetylcholine, which acts as the crucial connection between one’s nerves and one’s muscles. This short-circuits both voluntary movements, like raising and lowering your eyelids, and involuntary ones, like breathing.

  All of Brock’s symptoms were in line with an MG diagnosis, but, perplexingly, he tested negative for the disease’s telltale rogue antibodies. Meanwhile, his condition worsened. The double vision made it difficult to walk, much less drive. One morning, he stepped outside to walk Ruby and tried to squint in the bright sunlight. His eyes refused to obey. Back inside, he looked in a mirror to discover that one eye had drooped to nearly closed while the other was stuck wide open.

  “You can’t go out looking like that,” he says. He took to wearing sunglasses at all times, both because the mildest light was blinding and because he was so keenly self-conscious. The glasses, though, had their own problems: He worried that he looked like the kind of asshole who wears sunglasses in restaurants at night.

  And, still, a definitive diagnosis remained elusive. “Do you know what that’s like?” he says. “The feeling you get when the best doctors in the country look at you and say, ‘We don’t know what’s wrong with you’?”

  Life began to shrink, a series of waiting rooms and doctors’ appointments and torturous surgeries, five in all: Believing the problem was fourth cranial nerve palsy, a surgeon detached his eyeball to tighten its surrounding muscles; attempting to treat the ptosis, or drooping, doctors snipped through his eyelids, inserting stitches to raise and lower them like Levolor blinds while cutting tissue from the undersides.

  “I wasn’t a chef anymore. I was a patient,” Brock says. “It was the most depressed I’d been in my whole life. I was thinking about suicide. I didn’t want to leave my house.”

  He had always had a collecting streak, the acquisitive glee of someone who had grown up poor enough to worry about being able to afford school lunch. Among other things, he has amassed collections of Danelectro guitars, vinyl Mississippi-blues records, and southern folk art. Now he poured his energy into learning everything about bourbon, building a world-class collection of American whiskey. Amply documented on Instagram, the shelves filled with Pappy Van Winkle and Willett seemed like the happy outgrowth of a life well lived. But it was also a beachhead against a terrible possibility: that he would never be able to cook again.

  After each procedure and recovery, the symptoms would abate for a week or two but then come back. Brock began strategically scheduling the procedures for when he needed brief periods of sight, like when he traveled to Modena, Italy, to take over the kitchen of Osteria Francescana and cooked Italian culatello in southern redeye gravy and shrimp and grits in Parmigiano-Reggiano whey.

  He began to privately confront what had begun to seem inevitable: “I may not ever be fixed,” he said. “I may have to deal with this for the rest of my life.”

  It’s tempting to see Brock’s restaurant empire as a manifestation of his own body: The Tavern—where, he says, the menu is “a list of my favorite things to eat”—is his stomach. Husk, with its devotion to showcasing southern ingredients, is his heart. And the new McCrady’s is his brain. (It would be too cynical to say that Minero, Brock’s taqueria, with branches in Charleston and Atlanta, is his wallet, but nobody has ever gone broke selling Americans hot cheese and beans.)

  McCrady’s occupies a brick building that dates from the late 1700s, a block away from the marshy shallows of Charleston Harbor. It’s a sprawling space of hallways, stairways, and kitchens, the kind of place a man could rattle around in forever, like the Phantom of the Opera, barely seeing daylight. Which is more or less how Brock has been operating in the weeks leading up to the McCrady’s opening, emerging only late at night to hop in his beat-up pickup strewn with cassette tapes.

  He navigates the building like… well, like he could do it blind: Out the door of the new McCrady’s; past the brick archways and 18th-century hearths of the Tavern; up the wide staircase, past Minero’s bustling kitchen and into the Long Room, where George Washington once dined and which is now used for private parties. On the roof is a small garden and a locked shed housing a wall of bubbling tubs producing homemade vinegar in flavors like Mountain Dew and Harvey Wallbanger. Great feathery clumps of bacterial mother pulsate inside them like alien jellyfish. There is also a wood barrel of pork fatback curing in salt, and rack after rack of meticulously labeled canned vegetables and fruit, all of it nestled amid $200,000 worth of wine. (Which would Brock save first in a fire? “Probably the wine. I can make more vinegar.”)

  The building has been his home base since 2006, when he first arrived as head chef, a 27-year-old wunderkind recruited from the Hermitage Hotel in Nashville, where he had been making improbable waves with 30-course modernist tasting menus inspired by the likes of The French Laundry and WD-50. All but three members of the staff quit within his first week.

  He won a James Beard Award making brainy, overtly modern food at the original McCrady’s. But it was Husk, which opened down the street in 2010, that made him famous. Husk was the culmination of Brock’s emergence from the kitchen as one of the action-intellectuals of the food revolution. Not content to just cook with southern ingredients, he decided to grow his own, persuading his investors to lease land for a farm on nearby Wadmalaw Island. He began breeding his own hogs. He became a seed evangelist, obsessed with the mission of reviving crops long lost to the rise of industrial agriculture. At Husk, the steadfast rule was that no ingredients could be used from north of the Mason-Dixon Line. Brock became both a local hero and an international one, the hard-drinking, Waffle House–loving Southern Delegate to the international conversation about where food was going.

  “I’m getting pretty tired of looking around for salt.”

  Brock woke up this morning still vexed by the cobia and matsutake dish. Maybe a few drops of fish sauce would bring out the flavor? Just a few extra grains of salt? Within moments, dishes of the stuff bloom like mushrooms on nearly every surface of the kitchen in which the McCrady’s R&D team is ensconced. One cook is at work at the arduous task of peeling the rubbery jackets from a bin of muscadine grapes and then digging seeds out of the squishy orbs that remain with a marrow fork, a process that, in context, is inescapably reminiscent of eye surgery. Nearby, two women are engaged in a shadow version of kitchen drudgery, rolling and pressing endless balls of masa into tortillas for Minero. They tolerantly roll their eyes when a wave of dry-ice fog Brock is using to chill some dishes comes billowing across their station.

  Sam Jett hovers nearby. The 33-year-old cook’s title is Culinary Coordinator, but his portfolio can be summed up as monitoring Brock’s mental and physical status and taking anything off the chef’s plate that he can be persuaded to relinquish. These days, he projects the air of managed panic you’d expect from Santa’s head elf around December 23.

  “He’s gotten really good at hiding when his eyes are bothering him,” he says, watching closely as Brock tastes a dab of peanut sauce. Indeed, you’d need to pay close attention to note the slightly drunken lean Brock adopts as he moves downstairs, the way he needs to place things he’s looking at closely in front of one eye instead of both. Brock pauses every four hours in response to an unheard alarm, reaches into his pocket, and discreetly swallows a pill, one of a seeming pharmacy he consumes daily.

  In March, having hit a diagnostic dead end, Brock’s doctors decided to start him on the treatment for myasthenia gravis—a combination of the steroid prednisone and a drug called Mestinon—in the hopes that he was among the sliver of MG patients who test negative but nevertheless respond to medication. The morning after he began treatment, Noe woke early to find him already downstairs in the kitchen, whistling and cooking breakfast. “It was like magic,” Brock says. “One
of the greatest days of my life. I was reborn.”

  On the one hand, this was the confirmation he and Noe had feared for nearly two years: There is no cure for MG, and at its worst it can be fatal. On the other, there was finally something to do, action to be taken. Brock quit drinking. He cut gluten out of his diet, and most sugar. “All of a sudden, I was springing out of bed at 6:30 in the morning. Everything started pouring out,” he says. He was filling notebooks with ideas, dreaming of dishes and then waking up in the middle of the night to scribble them down. “I couldn’t stop cooking. I couldn’t stop creating. It was like I had superpowers.”

  Waiting to absorb this burst of creativity was McCrady’s. As the tenth anniversary of Brock’s arrival there approached, discussions about a revamp were already under way. McCrady’s had always been a somewhat awkward chimera: part avant-garde modernist, part traditional restaurant, a mix that reflected its clientele. For every diner willing to commit to one of Brock’s tasting menus, there were at least two or three who wanted a steak and a salad—often at the same table. It was impossible to serve both masters as well as Brock wanted.

  Now the Tavern would handle Brockian versions of classic dishes—an aged New York strip steak goosed by a crust of shio koji; caviar service with tater tots—while at the new McCrady’s, he would be free to create the kind of rarefied place he had seen and fallen in love with while traveling far beyond South Carolina’s borders. It was, he felt, an overdue return. Husk had made him famous, but life as an Orthodox Southerner could also be a straitjacket.