McCrady’s Teases Voluptuous Updated Dining Room on Social Media

When the fire emoji dominates your Instagram comments, then you know you’re on to something. McCrady’s released a first look of the updated interior yesterday, and followers went crazy. The photo, from local photographer Andrew Cebulka, shows the counter seating facing the open kitchen.

When asked about having a kitchen in the dining room, chef Sean Brock responded,

I love that we have an open kitchen. We get to interact with the guests and see their reactions. We're not stuck back in a windowless room with no clue as to what's going on. While I'm cooking, I can look and see how many bites you have left, so I know when I can start peeling that live shrimp and cutting it for the next course. It allows us to do things with food we normally wouldn't be able to do. I feel that every ingredient has a moment where it's the brightest and most awake and most vibrant. We're chasing that with everything.

If you prep too far ahead of time, you're just reheating food. If we're serving you shrimp, that shrimp is going to be alive. We're going to peel it and cut it. We want to push it that far. We wait to see how long we can wait to handle that food, because I think the more you touch and handle food, you have to be very careful.

When you're doing minimalist cooking like this with two things on the plate, you have to chase that. For example, we're garnishing a duck dish with basil, so we pick it off the plant at the moment, so they are alive at the moment. We can do that in here, because I can see where you are in your meal and say, "Start cutting basil." It's all a guessing game when you're in a room with no windows.

Read more about the updated McCrady’s, in Brock’s words, here, and brace for impact of the opening tomorrow.

• All McCrady’s Coverage [ECHS]
• Everything You Need to Know About the New McCrady’s, According to Sean Brock [ECHS]
• Andrew Cebulka [Official]