Joyland expands, June gets more affordable: What's changing at Sean Brock restaurants

Nashville chef Sean Brock knows running restaurants requires a willingness to evolve.

He's added family-style feasts to the menu at his McFerrin Park ode to Appalachia, Audrey. At his experimental restaurant June, he's added the Discovery Menu, an abbreviated tasting menu that clocks in at half the price of the regular tasting menu. Late last year, he turned The Continental into a vinyl listening room and bar.

In a phone call from what's now called Bar Continental, Brock recently said that some of those changes have spurred a shift in his thinking.

"I'm standing here right now in a mound of records and tonight, Monday, is my favorite night of the week," he said.

That's when everyone brings their records from home, and whoever is manning the turntables crafts them into a set. People hang out for hours, eating half-priced burgers and talking about music.

"And that's what we want," Brock said.

Now Brock, who's recently announced he's opening more locations of his casual counter-service Joyland across the country in the coming months, says he's more focused on the idea of hospitality than ever.

"The definition of hospitality is to remove daily stress and take care of someone for a while so they unwind and create positive memories," he said. "My whole career, my obsession has been with cooking. Now it's creating memories."

Memories drive the Joyland concept, with its nostalgically thick malted milkshakes, spice-dusted curly fries, cheeseburgers and fried chicken.

More: 'Willie Nelson rolled a joint on these speakers': Inside Sean Brock's new Nashville listening bar

The first Joyland expansion will come to a former Rodney Scott's BBQ location in Birmingham, Alabama, this spring. Brock is bringing the concept to fruition with the help of Nick Pihakis, who also partnered with pitmaster Rodney Scott to create and expand Rodney Scott’s BBQ.

Brock's PR team said that, at this time, there are no changes planned for the flagship East Nashville Joyland, which opened in 2020.

Also of note in a Sprouthouse announcement of the Joyland expansion is a line about how the deceptively simple food served there was "perfected over countless trials," using "pioneering food technologies" to create flavors and textures that trigger memories of fast food's heyday.

Something similar has been at work in the food lab at June, the McFerrin Park restaurant where Brock and his staff work to create more powerful expressions of Appalachian flavor.

"I love putting a dish in front of someone that appears to be humble and unassuming but it haunts you for the rest of your life," Brock said.

With research and development lab manager Elliot Silber, Brock uses liquid nitrogen to freeze summer basil and then pull forth its flavor without bruising the leaves. He extracts the vibrancy of a tomato without dimming it by freeze-drying it and then crafting it into an umami-filled syrup. The kitchen then paints that syrup over a Mr. Stripey tomato to double down on its tomato-ness.

"The idea behind June is that it's a place set aside for us to push Southern cooking as far as we can while still respecting tradition and history," Brock said. "But the words that come to mind when I think of June are evolution and curiosity."

To this point, the kitchen has steered clear of repeating dishes, an exercise in creativity. Last year the kitchen at June created more than 200 unique dishes, creating a "massive catalog of ideas," Brock said.

"And up until this new iteration of the dining format, those dishes are gone forever."

Nashville photographer Emily Dorio painstakingly documented every one so they've not been forgotten. Some have made it to June's new "Discovery Menu," a collection of the kitchen's greatest hits that goes for $150.

That's half the price and a bit shorter of an experience than what you get with the larger Exploration Menu, which can take 2-3 hours.

Brock said June's team has fielded requests for the shorter option, a more accessible price point and more choices, now an option with several courses of the Discovery Menu.

The Exploration Menu continues as it has since the restaurant's genesis.

"We're obsessed with exploring native ingredients and traditions in a long format," Brock said. "We want to make the price point more accessible because we want as many people to experience these discoveries as possible. These are dishes that are pretty mindblowing and discoveries that are pretty important."

More about June at junenashville.com. More about Bar Continental at www.barcontinentalhifi.com. More about Joyland at www.eatjoyland.com.

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Sean Brock: Joyland expands, June adds affordable bites in Nashville