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, often 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.
"I'm tired of making burgers," he says. "I'm tired of making fried chicken, I'm tired of making corn bread. I've been doing that every day for six years and I'm sick of it. I love eating it, but I'm tired of making it. Because I know these other dishes are swimming around in my head, and they're being wasted."
The restaurant he envisioned was a chef's dream of total control: 36 prepaid covers per night, a set menu. It would move quickly, send diners out the door stimulated instead of staggering. "I want you to leave like you just went to a spa. I want you to feel like you just had a massage, like you just meditated, like you did yoga. I want you to feel like you're nude," he says.
For a model, Brock looked to Japan, both in the kitchen—where he adopted ingredients like miso, kombu, and koji—and spiritually. He's hardly the only chef for whom Japanese culture presents a seductive fantasy of simultaneous intense control and Zen serenity. Never mind that the evidence suggests such intensity has its own price: a Japanese suicide rate one and a half times that of the U.S., for starters.
Never mind that there's a price for everything.
In late August, still reeling from the grueling process of opening the Tavern and beginning work on the new McCrady's, Brock and Noe were driving on the Ravenel Bridge, between Charleston and Mount Pleasant. Brock was behind the wheel. Suddenly, the road split and lurched into two. For the first time since he started treatment, Brock's double vision was back.
"I just punched the steering wheel as hard as I could," he says. "I thought, 'I can't. I can't be back here again.' "
In the passenger seat, Noe felt her heart drop. It was true that as the novelty and relief of Brock's treatment had subsided, he had grown less careful about his health. They had both allowed themselves to believe that the sickness might be in the past. But in the coming weeks, as the symptoms started appearing at night, and then earlier and earlier each day, the cruel irony became clear: The very thing that the miracle treatment was allowing Brock to do was the thing that would inevitably bring the disease roaring back.
Is there another way?
That is the question that lurks in the margins of Brock's story. Chefs' health—mental and physical—has become much discussed lately. As cooking has made the transition from blue-collar work to professional, it's only natural that chefs would begin to challenge the often brutal conditions previous generations took for granted. On the face of it, the need for change is self-evident, but the knotty problem is that those same conditions mimic the kitchen culture's agreed-upon virtues: perfectionism, intensity, stamina, toughness, drive. And it is often these very things—not, say, love of food or cooking; those come later—that made the kitchen attractive in the first place.
He grew up in deep rural Virginia. His father, the owner of a fleet of coal trucks, was a generous and successful man who died when Brock was 11, plunging the family into poverty. Such is the stuff that chefs are made of: Dead fathers, cruel fathers, physically or emotionally absent fathers—all are so common behind the stove as to be axiomatic. One of the reasons professional kitchens have remained so stubbornly resistant to gender equality is that their bonds are so deeply patrilineal, so downright Freudian.
Brock's first kitchens were a twisted hybrid of boot camp and surrogate family, and he loved it. To be 16 years old, on the line for the first time, Metallica blaring from the boom box, surrounded by rough men bragging about their overnight binges and conquests… Who cared if half the steaks you sent out to the dining room got sent back? "It was the greatest feeling I'd ever had," he says.
Later, he thrived in the hotbox of kitchens run on screaming. Like many young chefs, when he took over his own kitchen, he assumed it was the only way: "I was just yelling and screaming all day. I was the most miserable, angry person you can imagine." After one early bad review at the Hermitage, he pledged to his staff that he wouldn't take a day off until they were reviewed again. It took ten months, during which Brock slept at the restaurant most nights.
"We're insane. We shouldn't be doing this to our bodies and to our brains. That's sick. That's an illness," he says, though not without a touch of pride. "But, look, somebody's gotta feed everybody."
So is there another way?
There's no way of knowing whether the chef's lifestyle caused Brock's myasthenia gravis. What is clear is that it does exacerbate it. It is a one-to-one equation: When Brock gets upset, his eyesight blurs. When he loses sleep or drinks a little bit, he pays in the days after. It falls to Noe to remind him of these things. "She's the only one who can keep me in line," he says.
Still, there are limits to what even love can do. "Look, this feeling in my chest is temporary," Brock says on the eve of the McCrady's opening. "In two or three weeks, I'll be standing at that counter enjoying myself eating, and then I'll go back to Nashville, get some nice furniture, build a fence for my dog, and chill out."
It is, of course, the Junkie's Creed: "Tomorrow everything's going to be different. Tomorrow I'm going to be fine. I'm just waiting for everything to line up perfectly and then it's all going to be smooth sailing.…" Meanwhile, plans are moving forward for a Husk in Greenville, South Carolina, to open this coming spring, and Husk: Savannah after that. His dog, one starts to fear, may have to learn to live without a fence a little longer.
But is there another way?
Brock sighs, slightly lubricated now, at The Griffon, a dive bar nestled among the hotels and manicured facades of downtown Charleston. He's allowing himself a drink, or several, tonight, in part because Noe won't be back from Nashville until later; in part, one fears, guiltily, because he feels that doing so is part of the Official Sean Brock Experience for visitors; and in part because the McCrady's team has just completed its final dress rehearsal before its official opening tomorrow night. This, too, is a part of the chef's birthright that's hard to let go of: "You work your ass off, you take care of complete strangers, and at the end you give yourself a treat," he says.
The bartender brings over his usual order: a bottle of Budweiser and a shot of Jägermeister. Brock refuses to drink bourbon in most bars because he refuses to drink any bourbon made after 1992, this for arcane reasons that seem like a good warning about the perils of knowing too much.
Earlier in the day, in the midst of a meltdown over the Tavern's much Instagrammed béarnaise-filled burger (the problem being that a small but significant portion of those Instagrams showed hot béarnaise spurted onto diners' clothes), he had sat down in a quiet corner of the restaurant and wondered whether it was all worth it. Then came service.
"It happened to me tonight: The same thing that happens every time I'm doing something I worked really hard towards. I'm in the kitchen, and I just start getting waves of highs. I feel this amazing rush. My arms break out in goose bumps. I imagine it's what heroin is like. I'm so happy. This is me at my happiest: cooking this food in this place. I feel like I just won the football game. Like I won the heavyweight championship of the world. It's the greatest thing you can imagine."
But is there another way?
"Dammit, I don't know that I want to do it any other way."
If Brock's myasthenia gravis begins to progress, the first sign will likely be difficulty swallowing, as the disease moves into his throat. In a worst-case scenario, it could then move to the rest of his body, eventually to his lungs. Noe has found herself watching for signs, catching her breath every time Brock clears his throat. She knows that after the five-year mark of living with the disease with no progression the odds that it will develop into a full-body condition plummet dramatically. What's unclear is exactly how much of the outcome is pre-determined and how much is the result of how you behave for those five years.
"I could live like a nun and the disease could still take off," Brock says.
One prominent neurologist who has not treated Brock but has studied MG for decades points out that there are more and more effective treatments available for the disease than ever before. And he adds, "Nobody has ever shown that the best course of action for this disease is to not do what you want in life."
Opening night, McCrady's is filled for the first time with 18 strangers. The front two-thirds of the rectangular space are bathed in a warm, amber glow that reflects off the black-walnut counter. The kitchen seems to be caught in the flash of a silver strobe light, framing Brock and his chefs as they bend over plates, tweezers at the ready, as though playing a game of Operation. Things move fast and light: There's an oyster secreted in a fog of seawater and dry ice; a square of uni-and-pawpaw ice cream that unfolds in the mouth like a perverse gobstopper; and, of course, the cobia and matsutake, which in its 24th or 25th iteration has emerged as a space-age diorama: equal-size chunks of fish and mushroom arranged, Stonehenge-like, around a green-and-white psychedelic pool. It looks like a Yes album cover, and it tastes of sea and forest and also somehow like an after-school snack of peanut butter spread on celery. Brock seems relaxed, loose. At one point, he peers at the dining room through the tree line of bonsai like a twinkle-eyed giant. Who knows? Maybe he's right. Maybe everything will soon go back to normal. When the last dessert, a tiny lozenge that explodes in the mouth with an invigorating menthol blast, is dropped, the kitchen lights snap off, as though a curtain has fallen, and the chefs silently march out the door. The guests applaud.
Upstairs, in the Long Room, watched over by an unblinking bust of George Washington, Brock and his team sit at a banquet table. Nobody talks. The room is silent except for the sounds of Sam Jett slowly packing away Brock's roll of knives, tweezers, and other tools. There is, strangely, an air of deflation. Everything was flawless, and yet… "It's so weird," Brock says. "There's a disconnect."
Perhaps this is just the crash that follows getting what you've always wanted. Or, Brock has another idea:
"Maybe it wasn't hard enough?"
Brett Martin is GQ's food correspondent.
This story originally ran in the December 2016 issue of GQ with the title "The Chef Loses It."
