Chef Sean Brock’s Passionate Pursuit of Pizza Perfection at Sho

Pizza shouldn’t be a revelation. Growing up in America, pizza is omnipresent, a faint buzz humming away in the background so consistently that eventually, if you want, you can just tune it out. So when acclaimed chef Sean Brock sat down at the Tokyo pizza place Savoy back in 2016, he wasn’t prepared for what was about to hit him.

“For the first time, pizza blew my mind, just knocked me back—I was like ‘Wait a second, this is extraordinary,’” Brock tells Robb Report. “I had a visceral response when I ate it—it was just the most shocking thing I’d eaten in a long time, so elegant, and I just started looking at pizza in a different way. This is the most extraordinary version of this ordinary thing I’ve ever had. And that really inspired me.”

That inspiration eventually turned into an obsession and has now become a physical destination. Brock opened his first pizzeria, Sho Pizza Bar, in his adopted hometown of Nashville in April. But to get to the point where he wanted to sell his own pies, he had to dive deep into a food most people take for granted, focusing on the minute details so much so that his maniacal journey became practically Zen.

In Tokyo he found fellow travelers in the city’s pizzaiolos. Their single-minded commitment to the humble pizza has made them shokunin, a Japanese term that translates to “master craftsmen” and involves a total immersion into the daily, repetitive tasks of making pie. The Tokyo pizzaiolos hew closely to Neapolitan tradition, but in their deep, deep study of pizza’s intricacies, they’ve introduced tiny changes, such as using a “salt punch”— throwing salt right into the oven so it will bake into the crust—or moving the pizza closer to the fire to promote a more charred crust and a smokier Japanese-wood flavor.

Similarly, Brock is a chef who doesn’t really do things halfway. “When I try to tackle something, I really tackle it and if I can’t get in there deep, I don’t get in at all,” he says. He will search out the heirloom grains and work with farmers to bring them back to life, rediscovering flavors commodity agricultural production has long filtered out. He will film an entire season of television to explore the mind of a chef. And he will travel to West Africa to find the true roots of the Southern cooking. So it was no surprise he eventually found himself calibrating the ideal setting for his car A/C so it would keep his dough at the right temperature while he made pizza at a Nashville farmers market.

Before he’d dialed in his car’s A/C, Brock had done some serious R&D on his dough. The pandemic offered him an opportunity to devote himself in a way he might not have been able to otherwise. “So I started a notebook, bought every pizza book I could find, and just started doing trials to try to get as close as I could to how I felt in Tokyo,” Brock says. That meant testing flour types (milled to ‘0’ and between 12 and 13 percent protein), fermentation times (72 hours), hydration levels (68 percent), oven temperatures (830 degrees), stretching techniques (a crimped crust), different salts for his salt punch (a Jurassic-period salt with more than 60 minerals), and more. And Brock was considering everything. “We worked really hard on how many chews it takes eat the whole pizza slice,” he says. “We want to keep that around, like four or five chews. So we’re constantly saying, ‘Oh no, that one we had to chew too much.’”

Ultimately, he says his style falls in the neo-Neapolitan category. “What separates it from the traditional Neapolitan world is this really puffy, airy, cornicione crust,” Brock says. “And oftentimes neo-Neapolitan pizzas won’t be as soggy in the center—won’t have as much flop. It’s a cool way of looking at a tradition in way where you just want to improve it a little bit but not forget about that tradition or dismiss it. I love that.”

With his trials going well, Brock started popping up inside his Nashville burger spot, Joyland, and then it became a weekly tradition for him to sling pies at the farmer’s market nearby. “I started seeing how much joy in brought people and how excited they got about it that I just started jotting out a business plan,” Brock says. That’s when he connected with entrepreneurs Mary Carlisle and Ben Gambill, who also loved the pizza they ate in Tokyo. Together, they built the restaurant that would become Sho Pizza Bar.

Brock is joined in the kitchen by chefs Trey Tench and Johnny Woodward to craft the restaurant’s seasonal pies—and what goes on top of them is no small matter, either. Brock had the help of chef William Joo of the outstanding Pizzeria Sei in Los Angeles, who coordinated getting some special cheese flown in from Italy. “We want to do the classics, but from our brains,” Brock says. “So for a mushroom pizza, we’re going to take more of a fine-dining approach. We’ll take amazing local mushrooms, wood fire them, pour cream on it, put it back in the wood-fire oven, and let that cook down to create puree that goes as the base of the mushroom pie. It’s an ingredient-obsessed perspective, but it’s still a mushroom pizza.”

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The selection of pizzas on offer is similarly classic with a twist, like the white pie featuring meyer lemon and a puttannesca pizza with artichokes. There’s a rotating pie where they get most adventurous, relying on local, in-season ingredients to determine what will top it. As Sho gets on its feet, you’re likely to see Brock behind the 12-seat chef’s counter—iPad nearby so he can DJ the restaurant’s music—just devoting himself to the craft of pizza. “Every pizza I make I’m getting better, and lately I’ve been making 250 a day,” Brock says. “I literally stand in the same spot from 11 am to 10 pm and stretch the dough and it’s the most zenned out I’ve ever been in the kitchen.”

See more photos from Sho Pizza Bar here.