Wednesday, February 29, 2012
Cooking the Books The Notebooks and Obsessions of Chef Sean Brock
Posted by Dana Kopp Franklin on Wed, Feb 29, 2012 at 5:32 AM
Former Nashville chef Sean Brock, whose restaurant Husk opened in Charleston, S.C., in 2010 to national acclaim, appears in this short film describing the importance of his notebooks, wherein he records his ideas, his dishes, his musings and his inspiration. "It's all dreams until it's on paper," he says.
Artist and filmmaker Jeff Scott and chef Blake Beshore have re-created Brock's notebooks, which Brock describes as "almost like a diary," in a new cookbook called Notes from a Kitchen: A Journey Inside Culinary Obsession. Nine other chefs are also included.
"It's a great way to reflect back and see the process of opening the restaurant," Brock says in the film. "You can almost see the stress in my handwriting." I haven't seen the book, but I'm sure his notebooks also reveal stone-cold creativity (as in frozen-nitrogen cold) and persistence.
The book's website calls Notes from a Kitchen "the first book of its kind to accurately portray the daily creative life of a world-renowned chef in a visceral, cinematic format."
"Never before has a cookbook focused more intently on who a chef is as a person and why they place their culinary passion and obsessions before almost everything else in their lives," the site says.
Chefs featured in the book: Sean Brock (Husk and McCrady's, Charleston, S.C.), George Mendes (Aldea, New York), Johnny Iuzzini (Jean Georges, New York), Jason Neroni (Osteria La Buca, Los Angeles), Emma Hearst (Sorella, New York), Joel Harrington (Stephen Pyles, Dallas), Neal Fraser (Grace, Los Angeles), Matt Gaudet (Aquitaine, Boston), Michael Laiskonis (Le Bernardin, New York), and Zak Pelaccio (Fatty Cue and Fatty Crab, New York).
- Jeff Scott, notesfromakitchen.com
