July Reservations Are Finally Open for Sean Brock's June

After years of anticipation, June — Sean Brock’s innovative tasting experience on the floor above its sister restaurant Audrey — is finally ready to start booking paying customers after an official opening in mid-July. June is located in the meticulously decorated building at 809 Meridian St. near Folk and Redheaded Stranger, completing Brock’s vision for a home to explore the ingredients of his native Appalachia to create vibrant, modern cuisine.

Throughout the month of June, Brock has been opening June for smaller tasting experiences that he calls The Nashville Sessions, and he has spent the past few months inviting chefs he admires to join him in the kitchen to prepare intimate meals. Now, the kitchen staff at June is ready to step into the spotlight for meals that should be unlike anything experienced before in Nashville.

The 32-seat restaurant is divided into nine tables of various sizes, so it’s not the traditional chef’s bar that other tasting experiences revolve around. Every diner should have a great view of the open kitchen where Brock will work alongside his talented cooks and beverage director Jon Howard to create roughly 20-course experiences.

Lest you think that 20 courses sounds like a long night (erstwhile Scene food writer Kay West described Brock’s 30-course menu at the Capitol Grille in 2005 as “a culinary moonwalk”), Brock feels your pain. He doesn’t like eating for four hours either. To combat this, he has divided the tasting into multiple acts, an opening salvo of canapes followed by acts inspired by water and earth, finishing up with a trio of desserts and some final sweet bites.

Brock measures plate size by the actual number of bites, and most of these courses will be no more than three bites. Interspersed between courses will be tiny flavor explorations meant to act as flavorings for the next course, like setting a playlist up for continuous play with no gaps between songs. Some of these entr'actes may be single bites, or they may be a shot of consommé, tea or another liquid, but each is intended to make the experience more seamless. Brock estimates the entire service should take between two and three hours, give or take.

Many of the more innovative elements of these dishes come courtesy of the Research and Development lab that adjoins June’s dining area. For the past year, Brock and his team have been dehydrating, smoking, sonically vibrating and trying any number of other culinary scientific techniques to isolate specific flavors from a variety of traditional Appalachian ingredients. Searching for elements of sweet, salty, umami, sour and bitter tastes from products where you wouldn’t necessarily expect them has armed Brock with an arsenal of tools to create the next generation of Southern food.

Brock intends to change up the menu twice a season for eight menus a year, examining each potential ingredient in the lab at the peak of quality. Unlike at Husk, where he intentionally limited his palette to ingredients produced in the southern part of the U.S., at June he has freed himself to source whatever he wants from wherever it is the best. The connection to Appalachia will be the secret weapon in his back pocket.

So yeah, it’s gonna be a wild ride. Don’t go in with preconceived expectations, and prepare to be wowed! Reservations for the second half of July and beyond are now open at the restaurant’s Resy page.