McCrady’s: A Modern Approach to Tradition
By Jillian McLaurin
The Charleston Review, January/February 2008

While walking down bustling East Bay Street, you would never think that just by turning the corner to Unity Alley you would suddenly enter another world. Here a quieter, more intimate setting leads you down a romantic stone path to McCrady’s Restaurant, where walking through the doors feels like stepping into a different time. Amber lighting, brick arches, and soft music welcome you to this timeless setting, where you can slow down, engage your companions with conversation, and enjoy delicious food.

Just as the décor and ambience of the restaurant is a blend of the traditional with the contemporary, Chef Brock creates his classic dishes with a modern touch. McCrady’s has it all: rich history, inviting ambiance and scrumptious, traditional fare presented with a tempting twist. › read the complete article

 

Food & Wine Review: McCrady’s
By Patricia Agnew
Charleston Magazine, November 2007

Science never tasted better than at Charleston’s landmark McCrady’s, where you’ll find chef Sean Brock taking his passion for molecular gastronomy to delicious new levels. Every night, this talented young chef celebrates fresh food in all its splendid dimensions to deliver intensely flavored, elegant, yet still playful cuisine in accordance with his philosophic commitment to “the science of deliciousness.”

Tucked into its quiet, understated setting at Two Unity Alley, this handsome restaurant began its historic journey in 1788 as McCrady’s Tavern. Following a number of subsequent redesigns throughout the years, the most recent transformation by New York design firm Bentel & Bentel resulted in its stylishly sophisticated brick-and-beam main dining room warmed by colorful art and a flickering fireplace. The bar is a comfortable venue for pairing extensive wine options with small plates and conversation, as are the three lovely adjacent private dining rooms and expansive second-floor Long Room. › read the complete article

 

Sean Brock's cuisine morphs into a local harvest
By Jeff Allen
Charleston City Paper, November 14, 2007

If you didn't make the first Guerrilla Cuisine outing a couple weekends ago, you missed a mighty fine demonstration of Charleston culinary cutting edge. Just the suggestion that the space-chef extraordinaires from McCrady's would be headlining an event advertised with a fork and sickle logo in the Soviet style was enough to pique our interest — for $65 a pop? It was a done deal and turned out nothing like one might expect.

After all, Sean Brock, Charleston's own all-star molecular chef, might be expected to turn a crisp autumn evening into an explosion of pumpkin and spice twisted through a culinary lens full of liquid nitrogen. Instead, guests were treated to an evening centered on the seasonal bounty of the Wadmalaw fields surrounding the venue. He started the evening with the simple admonition that "95 percent of what you will eat tonight was harvested within walking distance of this place since yesterday morning." › read the complete article

 

McCrady's is the Best Restaurant Nobody Knows About
By Steve Plotnicki
Opinionated About Dining (oad.typepad.com), October 30, 2007

If I told you that in the unsuspecting city of Charleston, South Carolina, you could find a chef with talent that is on par with the Grant Achatz's and Wylie Dufresne's of the world, you would probably tell me I am making that up. But I assure you that it's true. Sean Brock, all of 29 years old, is not only one of America's great chefs, but surely the least well known considering the size of his talent. Working out of a historic tavern that has been located on this site since 1788, Brock and a kitchen staff of 5 turn out 17 course extravaganzas involving every contemporary and cutting edge culinary technique known to mankind.

The tavern that houses McCrady's is the most unlikely setting for contemporary cuisine Mrs. P and I have come across yet. Based on the look and feel of the place, it would be more in keeping for the kitchen to send out dishes like turtle soup and roasted racks of lamb with stuffed potatoes rather than a soup of local corn that is laced with vaudovan and lamb served with sous vide broccoli stems. But much to our astonishment, Chef Brock kept pounding our table with one unique creation after another until we were ready to bust. › read the complete article

 

McCrady’s Ambitious New Kitchen Garden
By Sean Brock
Charleston City Paper, August 8, 2007

I was lucky enough to grow up in Wise County, in the southwestern corner of Virginia. Life is still quite rural there, and the family garden is a very important part of life for most everyone. The food we ate came from those gardens — we never went to restaurants for dinner, not even for special occasions.

As a boy, I could often be found wandering through my grandmother's garden, eating anything that I could get my hands on — so much so that my mother likes to tell people that I "teethed on a stalk of rhubarb." Growing up in an atmosphere so rooted to the earth gave me a deep appreciation for vegetables. Perhaps more than anything else, that's why I'm a chef today. › read the complete article

 

Tasteful Frontiers
By Marion Sullivan
Charleston Magazine, March 2007

Sean Brock is a very happy chef. And why shouldn’t he be? Ensconced in the kitchen at McCrady’s, the newly renovated, luxury restaurant that once fêted George Washington, Brock is pursuing his passion: culinary creativity and discovery. And though his tools—Cryovacs, immersion circulators, cellulose ethers, and dehydrators— evoke images of a scientist’s laboratory, Brock, a wunderkind who, by age 28, had already served as executive chef of Nashville’s five-diamond, five-star Hermitage Hotel, has brought a high degree of technical skill and a real dedication to his art form. › read the complete article

 

Video killed the radio star
By Jeff Allen
Charleston City Paper, February 7, 2007

The new culinary guard has arrived in Charleston and they cook with lasers and liquid nitrogen, incinerating old traditions and ideas in the process. Their radical new style has spurred a critical re-examination of anything and everything associated with the preparation and serving of food, including its history and provenance. As revolutionary aesthetic and philosophic movements so often do, it even entertains the notion that such culinary legacies may not be worth saving.

You couldn't pick a better place to observe the unexpected insurrection than McCrady's, a 229-year-old tavern cobbled together in a mishmash of retooled spaces and transformed into a fine architectural gem, still lorded over by an ornate private dining room that once served dinner to George Washington. It is a masterpiece of tradition, now subsumed with the brilliance of Sean Brock, a madman with food, a savory Willy Wonka, a precise innovator of all things culinary. He prods and plots like a young Leonardo, a baby-faced whirlwind of ideas and notebooks filled with the scrawl of midnight musings and the leading edge of creative food. › read the complete article

 

Best Chef: Sean Brock
Restaurant of the Year Guide
The Post and Courier, October 20, 2006

'Molecular gastronomy' has arrived in Charleston, and one of its top converts is Sean Brock of McCrady's. Mind-bending cooking methods and plate presentations are the norm in this strange new world, but (much to our relief) it's all about taste in the end. Brock is a young man and has most of his career left to develop his already considerable skills, which means he has only just begun to stretch the limits of the kitchen.› read the complete article

 

Best Actor: McCrady’s Halibut
Restaurant of the Year Guide
The Post and Courier, October 20, 2006

Chef Sean Brock at McCrady's makes an ethereal halibut with eggplant and truffles.

Sean Brock's tour-de-force chef's tasting menu showcased a number of truly exceptional dishes, but the one that still resonates in our mind was a utterly excellent treatment of halibut - pan-seared, with sliced eggplant, chanterelles, tomato confit and black truffle foam. The combination of flavors and textures left us speechless. › read the complete article

 

McCrady's new chef upholds standards and then some
By Scott and Molly Goodwin
The Post and Courier, August 3, 2006

Sean Brock has been the "new" executive chef at McCrady's for three months now. We figured he's had enough time to work out the kinks in his kitchen and that it was finally time for us to go see what he's up to (we've been curious).

Brock graduated from Johnson & Wales University in Charleston in 1999, and his work over the next seven years began at Peninsula Grill and took him to the executive chef position at the Capitol Grille in Nashville. It was there that Chef Brock began to explore more innovative ways of preparing food — preparations that earned him a reputation and a devoted following.

At the end of our meal at McCrady's, Brock stopped by our table, and we told him we were mighty impressed. In the minutes that followed, we mentioned restaurants that we figured must be informing his work: The French Laundry, El Bulli, Alinea. He smiled. "My wife and I were the first table ever seated at Alinea," he said. (Alinea, in Chicago, boasts a famous 24-course "tour" menu that is the stuff food geeks dream of.) It came as no surprise to us. The small-plate, multicourse, food-as-science-experiment movement has arrived in downtown Charleston. It will certainly expose Charlestonians to a new approach to food and dining out. › read the complete article

 

Interview with Sean Brock
By Ratha Tep
Food & Wine Magazine, July 2006

What's your favorite new ingredient?
Methylcellulose is the coolest thing. We use it to encapsulate ingredients inside each other. We make a mushroom puree and encapsulate butternut squash juice inside it. When a customer cuts into it, the squash juice oozes out. We use it to make edible candy wrappers, including one made with Sauternes for foie gras caramels. We like to manipulate classic flavors.

What's the most versatile spice?
I'm having fun with different peppercorns, like the Lampong variety, and Thai long peppercorn, which is very floral. We also use smoked peppercorns from Terra Spice Company. › read the complete article

 

The New Sheriff in Town: Sean Brock Returns
By Jeff Allen
Charleston City Paper, May 24, 2006

You couldn't pick a better place to shake the foundations of the Charleston culinary scene. A venerable old bar, steeped in the pedigree and lore of the historic quarter, perennial bridesmaid to the more celebrated establishments in town; a brash young chef, originally trained in local kitchens, blazing back into town with strange, foreign ideas about food. Wake up, Charlestonians, the new style just hit the street — and it sure is tasty.

McCrady's always possessed the right stuff to be a major destination restaurant. It sits smack dab in the middle of a great restaurant city, enjoys generous financial support, and exhibits striking architecture — all the ingredients are in the bowl, but the mixture has never coalesced. The place traditionally offered excellent food, but was not especially creative. It earned a reputation for staid dinners, fancy meat and potatoes with big red wines. Enter Sean Brock and staff. As if headlining the glorious return of The Hermitage Hotel in Nashville were not enough, he now focuses his ambitions on a much larger prize, the wholesale redefinition of cuisine in the Holy City. McCrady's is now ground zero for the next wave of new, innovative food in South Carolina.› read the complete article

 

So Long, Nashville: Chef Sean Brock gets wooed back to Charleston
By Kay West
Charleston City Paper, April 19, 2006

So Charleston, in this tale of two cities, you won, we lost. We thought he was happy here in Nashville, a city that has really gone big time in the last decade. We've gotten professional football and professional hockey. A magnificent art museum that regularly snags important touring exhibitions. A $160 million Symphony Hall will open this fall, catty-corner from our acclaimed Country Music Hall of Fame. The Grand Ole Opry recently celebrated its 80th anniversary, and we've got superstar couples like Tim and Faith and Keith and Nicole regularly sighted all over town.

Not to mention, according to various trade publications, we are the nation's Most Livable City, Best City to Relocate to (just ask Nissan), and Friendliest City.

During the three years he hung his toque here, his restaurant allowed him to set up a virtual laboratory in the kitchen. For God's sake, Sean, what did we do wrong? Why did you leave us?

"It wasn't you, really," assures Chef Sean Brock, speaking by phone from his new place, the kitchen of McCrady's in downtown Charleston. "Nashville was great, the people were really nice. I enjoyed my time there."

In the end, he did it for love. Love of a place, and the love of a woman. Who can compete with that? › read the complete article