7 min read
In our increasingly soulless world of algorithmic playlists and AI-generated art, one of life’s great analog pleasures is listening to records with friends. A dusty old LP pre-breaks the ice for new connections, unlocks stories you haven’t heard from old ones, gives you the chance to get collectively lost in the music.
Vinyl night is such a vital human need, it’s a surprise there aren’t more third spaces built around satisfying it. Characteristically, Japan is miles ahead of America on this front. In the country’s countless kissa bars, bartenders mix drinks and spin records, and—I swear this is true—patrons keep their voices down and listen. My partner and I saw and heard it for ourselves on a trip to Japan last year: every major city has a few joints where the speakers are big, the tables have signs that say NO LOUD LAUGHING, and the customers obey. At a packed and reverently silent bar in Kyoto called PM Sounds, a few whiskeys deep and well into the AM, side one of Jeff Buckley’s Grace hit just right. “Did we really fly halfway around the world to sit and listen to an album we have at home,” I asked Ben on the walk back to the hotel. “Yes,” he replied, and we both agreed it was worth the trip.
Americans are famously not a quiet people, nor are we particularly good with being told what to do. Could kissa culture happen here? A few places in Los Angeles are rising to the challenge: The Gold Line in Highland Park has a hip crowd and shelves swelling with the massive record collection of owner Peanut Butter Wolf. Hollywood’s The Living Room is massive and meticulously acoustically treated, and it’s currently one of the tightest doors in town. But in West Hollywood, across the street from the metastasizing gay club The Abbey and steps away from the log cabin where the hip AA meetings happen, Southern super-chef Sean Brock just might have hit the sweet spot: his first California restaurant, Darling, has an eclectic menu, outstanding cocktails, and speakers that will make you feel like you’re right there in the recording studio. “Music brings people together, just like food,” Brock says. “I’ve been obsessed with listening bars for a while, and I’ve been trying to get people into them since 2023. The thrill of discovery is amazing, and I think the more AI the world gets, the more we’re going to reach for this stuff to balance it out.”
Brock looks every inch both the 21st-century Generation X chef and DJ: horn-rimmed glasses, sleeve tattoos, ADHD energy. He’s the James Beard Award-winning chef behind a string of beloved Nashville restaurants past and present, including modern Southern standby Husk and two-in-one restaurants Audrey and June. He’s respected by foodies and the hoi polloi alike; ask anyone who did time in Nashville this century, and they’ll tell you a snack at the bar of a Sean Brock joint is the reward for a hard day’s work. When we first met, just before Darling opened, we bonded over his massive collection of 45s in the DJ booth that looks over the restaurant’s bar area. As a secular song from New Orleans preacher Bobby Powell faded out, he wanted to play me something. “Have you heard this?” It was a cover of the Mamas and the Papas’ “California Dreamin’” by a Jackson, Tennessee band called The Jacksonians. “This is all they ever did! They teased us with this and then never did another thing!” As it played, we paused, we nodded our heads. “This is the one. When people hear this, they stop talking.”
The DJ booth and its speaker cabinets were made custom for the space. “The key is the wood,” he said. “13-ply Baltic birch, which is impossible to get now.” Within the cabinets, massive Italian speakers, with Altec Lansing drivers upcycled from their first life in movie theaters.
When Brock is at Darling—generally on the weekdays if he’s not traveling—he plays records as the restaurant opens, takes over in the kitchen as the dinner rush starts, then hops back onto the 1s and 2s after the last dish has been served, going as long into the night as the city will let him. “Getting to play music for people after working in the kitchen all night is my reward now. For the longest time, it was getting a beer after work. Now it’s just watching music bring people happiness.”
As a record collector and a chef, Brock is always thinking about the evolution of local flavor. “What I’m chasing is the knowledge of the sound and the rhythm of a city and a time,” he told me. Take Memphis in the early ‘70s, for example. “There was Willie Mitchell at Royal Studios with the Hi label doing Al Green and Anne Peebles, and you had Stax. And then there was this anger building because of the Vietnam War, people are upset, and you feel that in the music.” He grabbed a 7-inch from the pile, the gateway 45 that got him into record collecting: Blackrock’s “Yeah Yeah.” And I did feel it, because the band is a murderers’ row of ‘70s Memphis session musicians, but mostly because of those speakers. At the right volume and in the right seat, the T. Rex from Jurassic Park has nothing on Blackrock.
At its outset, Brock intended Darling to give him a new identity away from the Southern cuisine that made him famous. “I didn’t want to come here and cook a bunch of stuff I’d already cooked,” he said. “And we’d been told LA wasn’t interested in Southern cooking, that it would be too heavy or whatever. So we didn’t cook any Southern dishes when we opened.” The next time I stopped in, once Darling had been up and running for a few months, that whole idea had been 86’d. “About three weeks in, everybody was like: Where are the grits, Sean?”
“Now this has turned into a place where people come to taste the flavors of the South that I’ve been working on for 20 years — all the seed saving, all the research on traditions and recipes and history. I had gotten a little bored with it honestly, but all of a sudden I have a brand new audience for whom it’s completely new, and I’m completely reinvigorated.”
He was describing, almost exactly, the experience Ben and I had hearing Jeff Buckley in Japan. Whether it’s food or music, there’s something revelatory about paying close attention, even to something you think you know.
So that’s the food, and I can tell you from experience that the steak burger is worth the trip (and make that trip early; he only makes 24 a night). As for the music, Brock believes in the power of the listening bar with the zeal of the recent kissa convert. “I had a kind of life-changing moment in a listening bar around 2022,” he says. “I was sitting in the sweet spot — the tip of the triangle, equidistant from two gigantic Tannoys, and the sound became 3D. It floated. I stopped drinking nine years ago, but I thought they’d accidentally given me alcohol.” He got on Nashville Craigslist that very night, searched “Tannoy,” and sent a message to a seller, who wrote back “I ate in your restaurant last night.” It’s good to be the king.
Courtesy Darling
There are only 24 dry-aged steak burgers per night. It’s worth the effort to get one.
Brock has seats in the bar area of Darling situated at the perfect distance and angle from the speakers to give customers an out of body experience if they want it. But like a legendary Southern chef distancing himself from grits, a listening bar in Los Angeles is a risky concept. In Japan, the locals and tourists know to keep quiet and focus on the music, but this is West Hollywood, where everybody wants to be the thing that is focused on. Where if people have a song selector they trust, it’s usually their Peloton instructor. As an Angeleno, I have to worry whether anyone will pipe down long enough to pay attention. “There’s a difference between a night where you come to eat and drink and socialize while music is playing, and a night where we’re saying: what we’re playing is special and rare. I want to test that theory soon,” Brock told me. He’s been promoting more and more listening sessions: tributes to jazz record labels Strata-East and International Anthem, a vinyl party hosted by Sylvan Esso, Dolly Parton’s first twelve albums, in order, on those THX-tested speakers.
Even the untrained ear can hear it coming together. I swing through again to hear local legend and NTS radio host DJ Morse Code spin a set of ‘70s and ‘80s jazz fusion and R&B. The restaurant is busy and buzzing, there’s a nice crowd up front in the good speaker seats, at the top of the triangle. Some of the folks up front are quieting down to hear the music, even as more people streamed in, even as the new arrivals were striking their poses, even as we realize that Anderson.Paak is at the bar, that Malibu cult singer-songwriter Ned Doheny is at a table in front of the DJ booth, that Kate Pierson is in the restaurant.
Darling is heating up, and the flavors, the sound, and the rhythm are continuing to evolve. The chef and the city are both learning to listen.
Dining and Cooking