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Brian Dunsmoor pulls a stack of 13 worn-in, well-maintained cookbooks from a shelf in the open kitchen of his eponymous Los Angeles restaurant. It’s 11am on a Wednesday, the restaurant is closed, and the chef is clad in worn-in black jeans, leather clogs, a Wu-Tang Clan flame t-shirt and a yellow beanie. As I follow him to the backroom wine bar to dig in, I notice an orange pencil crutched behind his ear. The titles range from Evan Jones’ American Food: The Gastronomic Story (1975) to Randi Danforth’s Culinaria, to The United States: a Culinary Discovery (1998), and they only represent a small fraction of the chef’s 400+ collection. Dunsmoor’s impressive stockpile has fed his obsession with the history of American cuisine over the course of his career, which began with an influential stint working for the James Beard Award-winning chef Hugh Acheson, at Five & Ten in Athens, Georgia.
“[Acheson] did Southern food meets Chez Panisse,” Dunsmoor tells me. “And I was obsessed with Southern food, growing up in the South.” He was raised nearby in Snellville, GA, and attended culinary school in Charleston, South Carolina. When he was ready to open his own place in LA, Hatchet Hall, after years spent cooking in restaurants across the city, Dunsmoor began to research Southern food history, going down a rabbit hole that he’s still in, albeit even deeper, today.
Brigitte Neman
Southern food is “the starting point for the whole national cuisine,” Dunsmoor says. Last year, he opened Dunsmoor as an effort to showcase pre-Gilded Age American cuisine from the South and beyond “with the knowledge that we have now, but the technology that they had then,” he explains. The kitchen at Dunsmoor doesn’t rely on any electric machines, with the exception of a dehydrator and a two-eye bridge cooktop for making stocks. Otherwise, everything is powered by fire or hand. The restaurant’s cooking takes “lots of finesse and technique rather than just pushing play,” Dunsmoor says. “There are a lot of opportunities to make smart decisions when you’re not just throwing [things] in a machine.”
The sour milk cornbread (below) that you’ll find on most of the restaurant’s dining room tables on any given night combines the renowned Southern chef Edna Lewis’ recipe with Dunsmoor’s mom’s cornbread (which incorporates white cheddar cheese and hatch chillies from her Colorado upbringing) – and is cooked off in a wood oven. Pork and green chilli stew and whole rainbow trout – served with grits and grilled chicories – are cooked in pots and on flattops on the hearth, over coals and almond wood. They have no blenders or food processors. Dunsmoor’s pastry chef, Erika Chan, uses a hand crank ice cream machine to churn scoops like malted rye fudge and peach pit.
Antonio Diaz
“These are the books that really set me off,” Dunsmoor says, pulling out two cookbooks by the author Joseph E. Dabney: The Food, Folklore, and the Art of Lowcountry Cooking, and Smokehouse Ham, Spoon Bread & Scuppernong Wine. “They have little titbits and recipes and stories and lore and histories and all kinds of interesting details rather than the broad picture,” he adds. From there, he started buying more books at thrift stores, slowly starting to branch out to read about the history of American cuisine as a whole. Better Homes and Gardens’ Heritage Cook Book, published in 1974, was a particularly rich resource. Dunsmoor tells me that he rarely references recipes from these old books, unless they’re from someone that he really trusts, such as Edna Lewis or Bill Neal. Instead, he uses them for inspiration and to inform some of the dishes that he and his team, including his Chef de Cuisine Manuel Mendoza, turn out at Dunsmoor.
For example, he pulled the idea for Dunsmoor’s Pennsylvania Dutch slippery dumplings, which stem from Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, from one of his cookbooks (although he can’t remember which one). The dish is comprised of rectangular-shaped, rolled noodles in thick chicken stock with shredded chicken and bits of ham and is accompanied by a beet-pickled egg.
Chris Mottalini
It’s a dish that’s stirred a lot of reaction, both from Pennsylvania natives who’ve never seen it outside of their home region and from guests who don't understand why the dish is called dumplings. The former, Dunsmoor says, makes him really happy, while the latter he finds fascinating as a matter of food history and culture.
“I love the word dumpling because there are so many definitions,” he says, ranging from the chicken and dumplings made with drop biscuit dough that he grew up with to the pinched-off ropes of dough that his grandmother threw into potato soup during the Great Depression, to the endless variety of filled Asian dumplings. “There’s a lot going on [in American foodways]. Not many people know much about it, but that’s because everything is tied to a lot of unsavoury events,” says Dunsmoor. “It’s impossible to talk about our foodways without talking about all these different groups of people who’ve had a lot to do with it, who have definitely made it better.”
Slippery dumplings at Dunsmoor. Photo: Wonho Frank Lee
He notes that much of the information in his old cookbooks is either missing or outdated, especially regarding to negative historical forces, like slavery and colonialism. He points out Sean Sherman’s The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen, published more recently in 2017, as an example of a cookbook that has helped make the particulars about America’s difficult food history more widely available.
Of myriad American regions, each with its own culinary history, Dunsmoor says he’s most interested in those around the borders. His current favourite book is American Regional Cuisines: Food Culture and Cooking by David Haynes and Lou Sackett, which was originally published in 2011 and examines the cuisines and micro-cuisines of 15 culinary regions across the country, including New York City, Southern Florida, and Chesapeake Bay. He geeks out on how, in order to consider a regional cuisine, you have to start with its topography, weather, animals and plants, followed by the food habits and practices of the indigenous people, what the settlers brought with them (thus creating a colonial cuisine), and finally, the impact from further immigrant groups arriving in the area. He uses his own ancestors, ranchers from Colorado, as a case in point. Dunsmoor says his family hails from the western ranch region of Colorado, but since they’re also close to the Mexican border region and the Four Corners region, their cooking is “fused by Chuckwagon cooking, Mexican border cuisine, and lots of Native American influences.”
At Dunsmoor, this complex network of historical and cultural influences in American cuisine since before the Gilded Age is on display. “American Heritage” is how the restaurant has tended to describe its food, but another way to think of it is as an authentic sort of fusion. “It’s funny because I used to talk shit about fusion, but then I realised I’m an expert in fusion cuisine,” Dunsmoor says. “It takes a long time for these things to click.”
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