Southern ingredients also take center stage at Sean Brock’s low-country fine-dining establishment, located in an 18th-century historic building that once was one of the city’s more famous bordellos. Order à la carte or from a multicourse tasting menu—both celebrate regional farms, local purveyors and heirloom produce, while the bar specializes in pre-Prohibition cocktails.

McCrady’s is the oldest restaurant in Charleston, S.C., which in a pre-colonial coastal city means this establishment, on the National Register of Historic Places, can trace its lineage back more than 200 years and count George Washington as a past customer.

Itching to get away this winter? I’ve got ten unusual ideas for you that are a good value for your dollar from now through March. Some of the offers below are available only through destination specialists on my annually updated list of top travel specialists revealed today in Condé Nast Traveler’s December issue. Some are actually available even during the peak Christmas/New Year’s period. Happy travels!

I’d been on the road for a day or two, taking to and fro among the nouveau food snob destinations of backwoods Tennessee, before I met the man gourmet chefs in tony Yankee-style restaurants call the Rock Star of Country Ham. During the course of my travels, I’d already tasted “hand-wrapped” artisanal chocolates touched with barrel-aged bourbon and discussed the merits of the corn bread madeleine with several loquacious self-proclaimed food snobs from Nashville. I’d stood in line for a taste of that city’s famously addictive Prince’s “hot” fried chicken and paid one hundred dollars for an elaborate eleven-course tasting menu that included a strange, intoxicating substance called Wonder Bread Purée. I’d visited with an artisanal “seed saver” who travels the mountain valleys looking for ancient beans and strains of corn, and sat at the bar of a little barbecue joint in Nolensville, Tennessee, contemplating the Big Momma Sampler, an impressive local specialty that includes a pile of barbecued pork products roughly the size of my head.

Food people, chefs leading the way, toss the terms “local” and “seasonal” around like so much loose change. And, indeed, the definitions can sometimes be conveniently flexible. But Sean Brock’s devotion to the local/seasonal principle is fierce. He makes his own salt from South Carolina seawater, for Pete’s sake. What truly sets him apart is his extraordinary crusade to restore the glory of Southern food by reintroducing local ingredients not widely used since the 19th century: Carolina Gold rice, palmetto asparagus, and James Island red corn, just to name a few. “I believe I was put on this earth to create this Restoration Era,” Brock says. “That’s what my passion is.”

This week, we’re looking at the resurgence of cooking with lard with Charleston, S.C., chef Sean Brock. Chef Susan Feniger joins us with her new book Street Food, and The New York Times wine columnist Eric Asimov joins us with his observations from the wine world. His new book is How To Love Wine.

Today we are live from the Food Republic Test Kitchen & Interview Lounge at Little Owl The Venue in New York’s West Village. A lot of our friends from the culinary world are stopping by for interviews and fun in the kitchen.

Restaurant Name: McCrady’s • Husk
Location: Charleston, SC
Cuisine Type: Southern

This coming October, chef Magnus Nilsson will make six stops across North America to promote the release of the Phaidon book for his remotely located, fiercely local restaurant in Sweden, Fäviken (ranked #34 in the world). The tour begins with an October 11th stop in Toronto, before entering the U.S. for visits to New York City during the NYC Wine and Food Festival, Charleston for some signings and a guest dinner at McCrady’s with Sean Brock, Chicago for a dinner at Paul Kahan’s Publican, and Seattle for a book dinner at The Old Chaser Farm. The last city Nilsson will hit is San Francisco, where he’ll do a book signing, give a masterclass, and cook a dinner with Daniel Patterson at Coi.

What’s the future of Southern cooking? For Sean Brock, it’s already written, published in books that are more than a century old (and in some cases, two).

The James-Beard Award winning Chef at Charleston’s Husk and McCrady’s, lauded for his preservation and reinvention of Southern foods, says he is “obsessed” with vintage cookbooks. The limited-edition, letterpress-printed, crumbling tomes have been used by generations of Southerners but remain largely forgotten — except by culinary bibliophiles like Sean.

HUSK

Charleston, S.C. 843-577-2500
Specialty: Pig’s-Ear Lettuce Wraps

“Chef Sean Brock cooks with such a distinctive point of view that you can’t help but fall in love with the flavors of the Low Country.”

—Michael Anthony, Gramercy Tavern, New York

While food production and preparation have been aided by advancing technology, iPads, Androids and ever-evolving social media are now connecting food and foodies in all sorts of interesting ways. America still loves farm-to-table menus and the comfort of burgers and Italian food including pizza. But Peru is bursting onto the cuisine scene with the rise in popularity of ceviche and pisco (grape brandy). While we are thinking about drinking, beer pairings and cocktails are reinventing everything we thought we knew about the brew. And move over molecular gastronomy, America’s most creative chefs are evolving a new Progressive American Cuisine.

John T. and I were discussing Sean Brock’s arm, the one pictured above. “Five years ago it seemed like every chef in the South was getting a pig tattoo,” John T. recalled. “Now they’re getting collard-patch half-sleeves and cornfield full-sleeves. The vegetables depicted are heirloom varietals, of course.” I have examined Sean’s arm in person without touching it in any way, and you can clearly identify pink-striped beets, nicely trimmed baby leeks, little radishes, what look to me to be potato flowers (though I’m no expert on potato flowers), and an ear of corn that may just be purple. Insisting on anatomical accuracy, he took seed catalogs to the tattoo artist he had engaged for his full-sleeve job.

Today, the leading restaurant website Eater.com announces its Eater Young Guns Class of 2012, a group of 16 of the most distinguished young chefs, restaurateurs, sommeliers and hospitality industry professionals in the country. All honorees are under 30 years of age or have worked in their chosen field for less than five years and are currently employed in the hospitality industry in the United States.

Lots of chefs today sport food tattoos: inked-on images of sunny-side-up eggs or pigs diagrammed into butcher’s cuts. Sean Brock, head chef at the celebrated restaurants Husk and McCrady’s in Charleston, S.C., has an ear of corn. It’s actually part of a full sleeve of botanical tattoos on Brock’s left arm that includes pea shoots, candy-striped beets and black radishes, but the corn — the brick-colored, nearly extinct Jimmy red corn — gets special prominence, as well it should. It helped make him what he is.

Growing up, Sean Brock was part of a family that grew and harvested everything on its table. When his family wasn’t cooking, it was preserving food for the future. Chef Brock has carried over this connection to ingredients at his Charleston, South Carolina, restaurants McCrady’s and Husk, where he’s known for his fresh, seasonal southern cooking.

When you’re planning to spend a weekend in Charleston, a destination on the fast track to becoming the new culinary mecca of the South, you’ll realize that there just aren’t enough meals on the docket — let alone room in your stomach — to sample every delectable dish that the destination has to offer. That’s when its time to plan an appetizer crawl: a progressive tasting that allows time-sensitive foodies to experience the atmosphere and flavors of several different dining establishments, rather than eating a multi-course meal at just one.

What do you call a restaurant that is set in an old public house that dates from the early 1800’s, and which mixes progressive culinary technique with terrific bio-dynamic ingredients that are raised on a two-and-a-half acre patch of land on nearby Wadmalaw Island.

IF YOU HAVEN’T yet made the acquaintance of Lowcountry cuisine—the cookery associated with the coastal regions of South Carolina and neighboring Georgia—now is the time. Scrappy and soulful, it involves coaxing maximum flavor out of local ingredients such as okra and black-eyed peas. In this Lowcountry dish, deep-fried soft-shell crabs sit atop buttery greens and get dressed with bacon bits, drippings and a fried egg.

We’ve voyaged across America to discover this year’s hottest young talent riding a wave of gastronomic creativity from coast to coast.

“I think that art is about evoking emotion,” says Jeff Scott, creator of the new two-volume book Notes From a Kitchen, which almost exhaustively documents the work and lives of some of the best chefs in this country.

In my mind, the most appealing aspect of Jeff Scott’s two-volume culinary art book series, Notes From a Kitchen: A Journey Inside Culinary Obsession, is the series’ focus on a generation of chefs avidly pursuing their culinary passions with seeming disregard for the trappings of the cult of culinary celebrity.

The local food movement trend is carrying over from 2011 because chefs argue that locally-grown food tastes better. Sean Brock, executive chef of McCrady’s in Charleston, S.C., said that his restaurant appreciates local farming and now only uses ingredients from these farms.

The local food movement trend is carrying over from 2011 because chefs argue that locally-grown food tastes better.

Sean Brock, executive chef of McCrady’s in Charleston, S.C., said that his restaurant appreciates local farming and now only uses ingredients from these farms.

These heirloom-crazy days, a perfectly fresh baby beet can elicit as much excitement as a gorgeous lobe of foie gras. Beets are available throughout the year but their flesh is particularly flavorful when the weather warms.

This third annual street party offers food, music and fun, all while celebrating the Gibbes Museum’s renovation plans. With some of the top restaurants participating, among them…

THESE HEIRLOOM-CRAZY DAYS, a perfectly fresh baby beet can elicit as much excitement as a gorgeous lobe of foie gras. Beets are available throughout the year but their flesh is particularly flavorful when the weather warms. The best beets have enough sugar and water content to be served raw, thinly sliced and tenderized with just a sprinkling of citrus and salt. Add plump strawberries, crisp sorrel leaves and rhubarb purée to the mix, and you have a completely simple yet surprising spring salad.

It’s a two-volume, nearly 1,000-page cookbook with nary a recipe a food photography book chock full of chaotic kitchen shots, double-page spreads of hog farms and vellum pages bearing the scribbled writings found in chefs’ notebooks.

Learn how to prepare antebellum oats with peas and ramps – cooked risotto style – with Kitty Greenwald.

Baa, lamb. Be it braised or grilled, a chop or the whole rack, there’s just something springy about lamb, something that speaks to a certain occasion. But who really needs a special occasion to enjoy a good food in Charleston?

Photographer Jeff Scott describes his new book, ‘Notes From a Kitchen,’ as a time capsule that contains what famous chefs around the world did at a particular moment in history.

Silky hollandaise sauce is the perfect cloak for sweet, crisp asparagus and briny just-cooked shrimp. A balance of tastes and textures, this plate of soft pinks, yellows and greens is a delightful celebration of spring.

When thinking about American food destinations, the cities most likely to come to mind are New York, San Francisco and Chicago with Los Angeles, New Orleans and recently Portland, Oregon in the mix for most people as well.

Phytoplankton, tiny oceanic micro-organisms, feed herring, mussels and giant, phallic-shaped clams known as geoducks. And now humans too. “It’s this crazy, bright green alien-like thing,” says Sean Brock, the executive chef at McCrady’s in Charleston, S.C. 

In a rags-to-riches transformation, old-fashioned oats turn into a buttery, wine-enriched risotto. This easier riff on the elegant—and traditionally persnickety—dish comes with sweet, plump peas and pungent sliced ramps. Black truffle oil completes the metamorphosis.

Today Jeremiah Langhorne may be chef de cuisine at McCrady’s, Charleston’s top spot for post-modern gastronomy, but he wasn’t always so fancy.

Last Tuesday evening the Rivers Green behind the College of Charleston’s Addlestone Library was filled with men and women who were decidedly not undergraduates. That’s not to say, however, that they weren’t students; all in attendance walked away from that evening’s Winthrop Roundtable having learned something thanks to guest speakers Sean Brock and David S. Shields.

Things are coming up BROCK these days — last week Charleston chef Sean Brock was on Charlie Rose, and last night the Charleston episode of Andrew Zimmern’s Bizarre Foods aired on the Travel Channel.

Chef Sean Brock brings Andrew to his restaurant, McCrady’s, where they cook and eat an Ossabaw pig. Andrew samples, fried pig’s ears, Ossabaw terrine,Charleston gold rice and Ossabow jowl.

McCrady’s is an establishment richly steeped in Charleston history, residing in a structure, built in 1778, that’s listed on the National Register of Historic Places and Landmarks.

There are a number of things you can do with a can of PBR (that’s Pabst Blue Ribbon). Stick it in a chicken; dump it in your pot of chili; heck, you might even drink it.

Sean Brock is listening to a chicken. he’s in the prep kitchen of Husk, the Charleston, S.C., phenomenon Bon Appétit recently named the best new restaurant in America.

The restaurant industry is a wild arena. With high turnover rates, high-risk investments, and in an ultra competitive market, owners need to go above and beyond to make themselves standout among the rest.

At McCrady’s and Husk, the two restaurants in Charleston, South Carolina, where Homer Sean Brock is the executive chef, every spare shelf has been commandeered for pork.

Andrew Zimmern, host of the Travel Channel’s Bizarre Foods America with Andrew Zimmern, is in town this week filming a segment for his upcoming season.

While the move to embrace local products is in its infancy in Boston, it seems almost natural and ingrained in Charleston; most of the city’s top chefs have signed on wholeheartedly.

McCrady’s, in Charleston, S.C. The chef, Sean Brock, received bushels of praise this year for opening Husk, a homey, ambitious restaurant devoted to Southern ingredients.

HuffPost’s Game Changers series celebrates 100 innovators, visionaries, and leaders in 12 categories who, whether working in the spotlight or under the radar, are changing how we look at the world and the way we live in it. We salute them for their willingness to take risks and question the status quo.

Four circles—two sweet, two savory—of autumnal heaven…

Garden & Gun magazine takes a look at three Southern farmers who specialize in heritage livestock.

Mc Crady’s Restaurant, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and Landmarks, represents the best of the amalgam that is new Southern fine dining, concomitantly serving as a canvas for postmodern gastronomy.

Like many of his peers, Clint Sloan got a job waiting tables after becoming a student at the College of Charleston. He worked first at Portside Cafe, then at Sticky Fingers, finally graduating into the world of fine dining at McCrady’s in 1999.

Whether championing biodynamic producers or letting customers buy half a bottle of wine for half the price, F&W’s top sommeliers of the year are inspiring wine pros around the country.

Thirsty drinkers enjoy a modern spin on Roaring Twenties décor and pre-Prohibition cocktails (think Pimm’s Cups and Manhattans), some of which go for as little as $6.

Back in January, New York Times restaurant critic Sam Sifton tweeted ”In the land of sunnies and signet rings, history and ducks unlimited,” which immediately alerted us to the fact that he might just be in Charleston.

Sean Brock is a Virginia boy who attended the Johnson & Wales cooking school on this beautiful, historic peninsula where the Civil War began, moved around the South in apprenticeship, and in 2006 returned as the executive chef at McCrady’s, the city’s oldest restaurant.

Sean Brock’s obsession with the South’s culinary heritage grew out of frustration. When he took over McCrady’s in 2006, he was unable to get the variety and quality of local food he wanted, so he decided to see what he could do himself.

On Friday, without an intern to rely on, I spent the afternoon contacting chefs around town to find out what was on the specials menu for our weekly Eat This Tonight feature. It’s really a bad idea for me to do such a thing. I’m far too easily swayed.

Sean Brock cheffed the hell out of pork fat in Sunday night’s episode, but ultimately, Iron Chef Michael Symon won over the judges.

Last Thursday, Adam Kopels walked into Torrisi Italian Specialties in NoLIta, opened his messenger bag and pulled out Ziploc bags filled with wild greens he had gathered on the North Fork of Long Island, near where he lives.

McCrady’s Chef Sean Brock taped his Kitchen Stadium battle more than a year ago and has been keeping mum ever since. Over the course of that long year, when confronted with the swirling rumors, he’d simply smile impishly and shrug it off, refusing to give up any details. Well, now we know.

Innovation does not stop. It surges forward, through oil spills and volcanoes, war zones and elections. The people in our ninth annual roster of dreamers and renegades are the ones behind it.

For bringing tech tricks to farm-to-table cuisine. High-end chefs often fall into one of two camps: the Alice Waters minimalist, ingredient-driven, “I worship this tomato” approach, or the flashy, high-tech Ferran Adrià type.

After five days of intense lectures and examinations, and months, if not years, of study, eleven sommeliers successfully passed the Court of Master Sommeliers’ Advanced Exam on Friday, August 13.

Chef Sean Brock of McCrady’s in Charleston is a Carolina-barbecue scholar, too. Here, his grill-and-oven method for Carolina pulled pork, plus three key sauces.

Sean Brock is the executive chef of the historic McCrady’s Restaurant in Charleston, South Carolina, where his modern farm-to-table cuisine most recently earned him the 2010 James Beard “Best Chef Southeast” award.

Sean Brock daily passed by the decaying brick building and vacant white house on Queen Street on his way to work at McCrady’s. The chef admired them, even in their sad state, and thought it was a shame they were going to waste.

Sean Brock can talk. He can talk all day about seed saving or pig farming or pickling. And on this particular day, a swampy, humid summer afternoon, the Charleston chef was holding forth on the rice pea.

Sean Brock has one foot in the farm-to-table movement and another in the world of molecular gastronomy — he once used liquid nitrogen to pulverize heirloom corn to make grits. But these days the executive chef of McCrady’s in Charleston, S.C., is focusing on the food culture of the South, so much so that the new restaurant he’s planning to open in November, called Husk, will only use ingredients from the South.

Chef Sean Brock loves local farms so much that he has his favorite vegetables tattooed on his arm. And it doesn’t stop with body art: Brock’s adoration for local ingredients has been at the forefront of his menu at McCrady’s, one of Charleston’s oldest restaurants.

Chef Sean Brock of McCrady’s beat out some tough competition in New York City last night to win the Best Chef Southeast James Beard Award, considered the Oscars of the culinary world.

Sean Brock, executive chef at McCrady’s restaurant in downtown Charleston, was named best chef in the Southeast by the prestigious James Beard Foundation.

Winners in the annual competition were announced Monday.

Monday night’s 21st running of the Beard awards, the annual anointing of chefs and restaurateurs by the James Beard Foundation, followed the pattern of most years: restaurants and chefs in New York under the umbrellas of Daniel Boulud, Jean-Georges Vongerichten and Danny Meyer, again took home awards.

Porkaholics, take note! One of Charleston’s most celebrated young chefs—James Beard honoree Sean Brock of  McCrady’s—has turned a small stretch of East Bay Street into an urban nirvana for handmade charcuterie. Brock’s meats start with materials sourced from independent local farmers (indeed, from acorn-finished pigs the chef himself raised) and methods that combine traditional techniques with contemporary ambitions.

When I had the locally caught grouper at McCrady’s in Charleston in December, I knew that it was relatively rare: much of the “local” fish served in the port city is frozen or trucked in from the Gulf of Mexico, even Mexico. But I didn’t know I’d be eating one of the last groupers to be caught in Southeastern waters for some time.