Kind things that people have said:
“The most conspicuously gifted American chef of his generation”
Time Magazine
“Brock uses the ingredients of the South to help redefine the principals of American cooking.”
Sam Sifton, New York Times
“Part purist, part magician, Sean Brock is pushing two culinary extremes”. “The most purely democratic, un-status-conscious cooking to come along in a long time.”
Josh Ozersky
“Sean Brock is one of the most important chefs in America. He is an absolutely transformative figure. His food manages to amaze without ever being pretentious or inaccessible.”
Anthony Bourdain
Esquire calls Sean “the reigning kingpin of the American food scene,” And named him as one of their annual Best and Brightest: a list of “geniuses who give us hope” saying “If his mission seems at all theoretical, that’s only because you haven’t tasted his finely cultured cooking, which may be the first truly American haute cuisine.”
When Husk opened in 2011, The New York Times called it, “The most important restaurant in the history of Southern cooking”.
“Sean Brock has the ability to take a deep understanding of the American South’s culinary history and express it in a way that is unmistakably personal, forward thinking and brilliant”
Rene Redzepi, Noma
“The 10 Coolest Places to Eat in the World in 2017. “The new McCrady’s reaffirms Brock’s status as one of the most talented and soulful chefs cooking in the U.S.”
Matt Goulding, Forbes
“Perhaps no other restaurant — in Charleston or all of the South — has furthered the cause of Southern fare more than Husk.”
Food Network Magazine
“Familiar ingredients are transformed in unexpected ways by celebrated chef Sean Brock at this downtown Charleston icon, pushing the limits of Southern cooking and exploring its potential”
Zagat, 2017
“9 restaurants across America that you have to try in your lifetime” (Husk)
CNBC
“The Southern Culinary Revivalist”
New York Times
“50 People who are changing the South”
Southern Living
“Sean Brock has redefined what Southern cooking is.”
David Chang, Momofuku
“Nobody aims to renew Southern tradition with Sean’s single-mindness and talent. Charleston’s farm-to-table hero is leading a revival in traditional Southern cooking. At Husk, Brock is re-creating what Southern food once was. At McCrady’s, he’s showing what it could be.”
Jeffrey Steingarten, Vogue Magazine
“Brock’s self-imposed restrictions separate him from the pack of pretenders. But noble causes alone don’t make a restaurant great. In this case it’s the fact that Brock is a helluva cook.” “Brock isn’t reinventing Southern food … He’s trying to re-create the food his grandma knew—albeit with the skill and resources of a modern chef.” “As a result, he (and Husk) has become a torchbearer for an honest style of home cooking that many of us never truly tasted until now.”
Andrew Knowlton, Bon Appetit
“Brock has a relentless mind working to preserve the historical foodways of the South. Oh, he also happens to know how to cook. Like nobody else.”
Jim Myers, The Tennessean
“I knew when I first tasted Brock’s work that he was an insanely gifted cook, but I could not have foreseen his trajectory to superstar cultural preservationist.”
Besha Rodell, L.A Weekly
“As someone capable of engaging in a discussion of Southern food, allow me a definitive statement: The dish was about as good as Southern cooking gets, wonderfully soft, sensuous, and homey, filled with tastes we don’t come across where I come from.”
Alan Richman, GQ
“McCrady’s is in rare company as a newly anointed AAA five-diamond restaurant, a designation that only .2 percent of the 31,000 restaurants inspected by AAA receives.”
Post and Courier
Food and Wine Magazine in naming Husk one of “The 40 Most Important Restaurants of the Past 40 Years”: “An outspoken leader in the Southern culinary revivalist movement, Sean Brock’s influence has extended far beyond his Charleston restaurants McCrady’s and Husk, which re-wrote the script on low-country cooking by reviving long-forgotten foodstuffs (think heirloom peanuts) and recipes. Brock forever changed the Charleston food scene, establishing it as a first-rate American dining city.