By the time the opening-day lunch rush ebbed this past Monday at Sho Pizza Bar, Sean Brock’s newest Nashville eatery, he’d pulled a hundred pies from a blazing, wood-fired oven—and was itching to beat that number for dinner.
“Every single pizza is an opportunity to do it the right way,” says Brock, the celebrated chef better known for farm-to-table Southern fare—first at McCrady’s and Husk in Charleston and more recently in Nashville at his own Audrey—than for slinging pies. “Pizza is a million tiny little details and a million tiny little choices. Honestly, I wish I would have opened a pizza place a long time ago.”
That itch didn’t start while sampling slices in New York or Chicago or even Italy, but in Japan. On a food-focused trip a decade ago, Brock sat at the counter of Savoy, a Tokyo pizza place, and was wowed. “I watched this guy make a pizza and had never seen somebody be so intense about something so ordinary,” Brock says. “Then I ate the pizza and it still haunts my dreams.”
If you know Brock, it’s no surprise that seemingly simple food made with focused intensity appeals to him. At his other restaurants, he constantly calibrates fermentation and dehydration techniques to enhance flavor (and reduce food waste) while staying true to his Appalachian roots. Now he’s brought that restless creativity to Sho, where “neo-Neapolitan” pizza starts with the classic wood-fired style but breaks with tradition to create a lighter, airer crust. In true Brock fashion, that requires the dough rounds to undergo three days of fermentation in Sho’s temperature-controlled “dough room,” then a regimen of pulls and pinches while being flattened. “We’re chasing an eggshell-crunchy, pillowy dough, and at the same time there’s nice chew,” he says.
Another twist, borrowed directly from the Japanese pizza scene, is tossing salt on the deck of the hot oven before the pizza goes in. “Then the first thing your tongue hits is the caramelized salt,” Brock explains. “We know what salt can do—it makes the other ingredients taste more intense.”
There’s still some South in that mouthful, though, with local hickory and oak imbuing the crusts with smoky char. The signature “Country Boy” pie comes loaded with country ham, while the “Sho-Stopper” features ramps and poached eggs.
“What’s common to all my projects is the question of how can we push something, how can we go deep to create something unique,” Brock says. “But it’s also kind of a selfish thing I’m doing, so I can eat the pizza.”
