Hey thanks, Chef Sean Brock. While your obsessive culinary exploits — which delve into your favorite fast-food at Joyland, midcentury cuisine at The Continental and your Appalachian roots at Audrey and June — may be polarizing to some folks who don’t particularly cotton to food created in an R&D lab and plated with tweezers, there is one other obsession we really appreciate: your dedication to your employees.
During the two years of the pandemic when the only major restaurant investment in town took place on the ground floors of hotel projects that weren’t going to let some little virus stop them, you actually opened four restaurants — including three that could definitely be called “neighborhood-centric” investments in the community. You made the difficult choice to delay the opening of Audrey for months, leaving the place settings on the table ready to greet guests until you felt it was safe and responsible. You hired local staff and offered them safe places in your restaurant to practice mindfulness and concentrate on mental health, dedicating valuable restaurant square footage to areas that customers will never see. You built a culinary laboratory to explore the native ingredients of Appalachia in ways that no one had ever considered, building a new library of flavors, textures and recipes that are truly innovative. You granted access to your voluminous cookbook library so others could take advantage of your decades of research.
Despite reservation books that filled up weeks in advance, you intentionally limited your hours and encouraged staff to take time off to mitigate burnout. You also kept many Nashvillians employed when layoffs and furloughs were the norm, so that you could cook and distribute more than 100,000 meals to residents of your adopted hometown who were affected by the pandemic.
Considering all you’ve done, chef, it seems silly for anyone to argue that your food is too fancy to be approachable. We’ll tolerate a little extra molecular gastronomy in return for your extreme civic magnanimity.
—Chris Chamberlain
Contributor, Nashville Scene
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