Some folks weep when they try the gluten-free fried chicken at Joyland, the new growth concept from famed Southern chef Sean Brock and his business partners.
And not in any sort of exaggerated, metaphorical sense.
“When people who haven’t had fried chicken in a long time because they’re gluten free, they come in and have ours,” Brock says. “At least once a week, someone cries.”
Joyland, which Brock launched in Nashville in the turbulent days of March 2020 and is now readying its second location, is not strictly a gluten-free concept. That’s just one way the whimsical comfort-food fast casual, with a retro, primary-colored palette straight out of a Wonder bread bag, spreads joy.
“That’s a very powerful word and also, I believe, to be a great privilege for somebody to make something as simple as a burger and fries and see how happy it makes people,” he says.
Joyland's fries
The second Joyland is slated for (fingers crossed) this April in Birmingham, Ala., the first of what the team says is several new locations to open around the country in the coming months.
To grow Joyland, Brock partnered with Nick Pihakis of Pihakis Restaurant Group and Paul Mishkin, founder of Southall Farm and Inn.
The concept represents a second act of sorts for James Beard Award-winning chef Brock, who was known for more than a decade for his work with Neighborhood Dining Group and its Husk and McCrady’s restaurants. He left that group in 2018, opting to focus on solo projects in Nashville.
Not long before that decision, Brock went through rehab and became an outspoken advocate for sobriety and mental health.
“There was a moment where I was boarding a plane to the eighth restaurant and I was just like, “This is the opposite of what I’m supposed to be doing,” Brock told Food & Wine magazine in February 2020, just before opening Joyland. “Normally those villains would've shamed me or guilted me into staying in that place of suffering for the rest of my life, but luckily I have new super-human powers and I was able to make that decision.”
Chef Sean Brock at Joyland
Those Nashville efforts have included Joyland; the listening lounge Bar Continental; intimate, experimental June; and flagship restaurant Audrey, a celebration of Appalachian cuisine named after Brock’s maternal grandmother.
Mishkin has been an investor in all of Brock’s Nashville restaurant projects, and Pihakis is well known to lovers of Southern food, partnering with Rodney Scott in 2017 to expand his famed Rodney Scott’s BBQ concept.
Brock’s menu at Joyland is not expansive, with a compact offering of biscuits, burgers, fried chicken sandwiches, fried chicken on a stick and fries. But he elevates the dishes with an almost molecular gastronomic-level of attention to detail.
“Joyland is a result of a lifelong obsession with cheeseburgers and fried chicken and those things that just make people really happy, things that people really crave,” Brock says. “And, the idea was, to be able to do it using the same farms that we use in our fine-dining restaurants. So, we use the same, exact cattle for our burgers that we do for our steaks at Audrey. It all comes from the same farms, same with our chicken.”
When the pandemic hit, Joyland reformulated all of its systems and processes to ensure the food would thrive through carryout and delivery. Though off-premise business has moderated since those quarantine days, the recipes and practices remain.
“We focus on the execution,” Brock says. “That was a really fun journey, with thousands of experiments, making sure that no matter who was eating it, where they were, who cooked it, it can be exactly the same every single time.”
Joyland locations will be about 3,000 square feet, with about 60 to 80 seats inside as well as outdoor seating.
The restaurant relies on a steam-powered grill to cook Joyland’s CrustBurger at a super-high temperature, he says. It’s a piece of equipment that allows virtually anyone to cook the patties to perfection.
Joyland's CrustBurger
Birmingham will be a prime spot for Joyland’s first expansion, Pihakis says.
“It’s really become a very food-centric city,” he says. “Just a lot of really good restaurants here. There’s not one like Joyland. And that’s an opportunity to take the techniques that Sean has developed and putting in the good systems so we can try and be able to replicate that.
“When you grow any business, you face the possibility of dilution. We’re very intense and very focused, the same what that Sean’s focused on how to cook the food, is for us to produce it the same way and [have] the service the same way … and the joy is just flowing throughout the whole building is very, very important. So, there won’t be any dilution.”