How Sean Brock Helped Me Find My Culinary Identity
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Chris Jung is the executive chef of Maxwells Trading in Chicago and a 2025 James Beard Foundation “Best Chef: Great Lakes” award finalist.
On Tuesday, May 13, 2025, Jung, along with Maxwells Trading chef-partner Erling Wu-Bower, will collaborate with Sean Brock on a four-course dinner at Maxwells Trading as part of The Resy Dream Team Dinners series. Get tickets here (terms apply).
For the young millennial chef, the golden age of food television was from 2005 to 2018, when the late Anthony Bourdain shepherded many of us into the world of professional kitchens. Bourdain’s shows put a spotlight on culinary greats both old and new, turning chefs across the world into celebrities, and into heroes for those of us who cooked professionally.
Bourdain himself was a hero to many of us in the kitchen, but for me, his most impactful work of food television was producing PBS’s “Mind of a Chef” — a show that went into the mind and processes of a new generation of culinary talents, like David Chang, Edward Lee, and April Bloomfield. It was a formative show for many of my cohort. And it was through it that I first heard about Sean Brock, a young chef in Charleston that was shaping the way a future generation would come to think about food.
“Perfect in the field, perfect on the plate.” In 2018, I had an opportunity to cook in Tokyo and Kyoto to study kaiseki cuisine. There, I learned the term “shun,” which signals when an ingredient is at its peak flavor and freshness — the apex of its seasonality.
In his episode of “Mind of a Chef,” Sean describes “catching food at the moment where it’s perfect,” echoing the shun philosophy in Japan — it was something that I latched onto right away. He spoke about the synergy between the chef and the farmer, between the kitchen and the land, but most importantly, of proudly cooking from the land you are from. In an era when it was in vogue to cook hyper regional Italian, he proudly represented the Lowcountry and his own, uniquely Southern heritage. When my generation of cooks were searching for a culinary identity, he defined what it meant to cook as an American.
Culinary identity is something that I struggled with most of my career. As an immigrant Korean kid raised in the United States in the shadows of New York City and Washington D.C., I lived in the space between being Korean and a white American. Through food, I grasped what I believed was American. It was the crossroads of cultures and the home of immigrants from across the world, alongside the offspring of immigrants from centuries past. It was a vast landscape that was diverse in geography, people, and culture. And watching Sean’s episodes really shaped the way I discovered my own cultural identity as a Korean American chef.
He proudly represented the Lowcountry and his own, uniquely Southern heritage. When my generation of cooks were searching for a culinary identity, he defined what it meant to cook as an American.— Chris Jung on Sean Brock
At Maxwells Trading, this discovery comes full circle. Just as Sean defined the culinary identity of a country kid from Appalachia, Va., chef-partner Erling Wu-Bower and I hope to define the culinary identity of city kids raised by immigrant parents. We were raised in Chicago, New York, and D.C., and what we lacked in farms and fresh air, we gained in the cultural diversity of the American city. For us, pulling and cooking from the American city diaspora is the heritage we inherit. The diversity of US immigration and the celebration of the melting pot is how we cook.
But none of it would’ve been possible had I not seen a young chef so proudly represent the overlooked American South. None of it would’ve been possible had I not seen this young chef work tirelessly to break the preconceived notions of Southern food. And none of it would’ve been possible had Sean not paved a way for that next generation of chefs that I am a part of.
