Brock at his rooftop garden in Charleston, S.C.
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For Brock, the two restaurants aren't a contradiction; they define and complete each other. Husk is, in the strictest sense, a restaurant whose menu is its manifesto. Almost everything, even the salt, is made in the South. Husk takes its name from the hard protective coating of seeds. (Brock's devotion to resurrecting vegetable strains is so intense that he has had several tattooed on his arm.) McCrady's, meanwhile, is pure paradox: a supremely technologized, cutting-edge kitchen in a restaurant so old that George Washington once ate there. Brock feels at home in both places. Get him out of South Carolina and in with other meat-centric chefs, as I did this summer when I asked him to cook at the annual barbecue festival I organize in New York City, and his food stands out for its intensity of both flavor and cooking method: he and Carolina pitmaster Rodney Scott won Best Dish for their whole hog roasted over charcoal made of pig bones.
Kind of a Frankenstein
Brock has a scruffy beard and a disinclination to remove his baseball hat (its slogan: MAKE CORNBREAD, NOT WAR). The Virginia native looks more blue collar than white tablecloth; when I went with him to eat oysters at a seafood joint on a marshy stretch outside Charleston, he was greeted warmly by the owner, who mistook him for the guy who did his floors.
He may have received his culinary degree from Johnson and Wales University, but Brock studied fried chicken by watching the way his mother and all the great Southern cooks make it: by smell and by sound, by focusing on how gently the bubbles come to the surface and how the fat smells once it's been strained. He brines his chicken in sweet tea, which makes it juicy, and dips it in buttermilk, flour and cornmeal before he fries it in a mixture of lard, country-ham fat, chicken fat and ground-up bacon fat. Brock is constantly fussing with what he calls his hillbilly chicken, checking under the lid, turning the pieces over at just the right moment. At the very end, he throws a big chunk of butter into the sizzling lard to give extra flavor and color to the crust. Finally, he takes the chicken out to cool on paper bags as his sous-chef, Arienne Casebier, pours out most of the fat and makes a pan gravy with the burned bits and some flour and milk. "Goddamn! This makes me so f---ing happy," Brock shouts. "You can't get fried chicken like that anywhere."