North Robertson Boulevard, in the stretch West Hollywood calls its design district, is a street of showrooms and clipped hedges where people come to look at sofas in afternoon light. A short walk north is the Troubadour, the old folk and rock club. When Sean Brock scouted the former Soulmate space at 631 North Robertson on Google Maps, the first word he noticed nearby was Troubadour, and he decided on the spot. Darling opened there on 31 August 2025.
From Husk to Robertson
Brock was raised in the Virginia mountains of Appalachia and became nationally known as the executive chef at Husk in Charleston, after McCrady's. He won the Best Chef: Southeast category at the James Beard Awards, appeared in Chef's Table and The Mind of a Chef, and moved to Nashville, where Audrey made Appalachian cooking the subject. Darling is his first West Coast restaurant, and he says he wants it to feel like cooking dinner at home and then putting on records for guests. He has also said he is not trying to cook Southern food in California, and the opening menu leant experimental.
“A wood grill, an olive tree and a wall of records: Brock has built a room around what he loves.”
The room
The designer Sean Leffers translated Brock's interest in Americana and Japanese design into yellow booths, paper lanterns and an olive tree at front and centre. The room is breezy and open-air in the Californian way, with folk art, some from Brock's own collection, and larder shelves of pickles and vinegars. Along one wall runs Legal Tender, Narsiso Martinez's mural of flattened produce boxes, shaped like a banknote and dedicated to the immigrant farmworkers who pick the state's food.
What to eat
Nearly everything touches the custom wood grill, including a few salads and cocktails. Start with the burger if you can get it: dry-aged steak ground in-house, cooked over live fire, and made in limited numbers each night. The bar is the best seat for it, and it goes quickly, so book early or claim a stool. The finishing sauce of beef fat and tomato concentrate is what Brock calls liquid cheeseburger.
Around it the menu moves every month. Dishes reported so far include a Baja kanpachi crudo with cucumber and horseradish, grilled artichokes with yuzu creamed corn and Santa Barbara uni, pork belly served ssam-style with figs and nasturtium, and local abalone with celtuce in a loose rice stew. Deer tartare comes with nori. Dessert has run to profiteroles with candy cap mushroom ice cream in pine-cone chocolate syrup, and a plum sorbet. Two dishes settled in as regulars on the restaurant's account, skillet cornbread with cultured butter and deviled eggs topped with tuna tartare and togarashi, and Sunday is brunch.
The hedge is the constant change. Not every dish succeeds, though the ambition is clear, and it still needs to pull together more as a whole. A menu that rewrites itself monthly also makes a favourite hard to repeat.
Drinks and the listening lounge
Jason Lee, formerly of Baroo and Bar Benjamin, writes the monthly cocktail list in a vegetable-forward key: an eggplant and coconut rum drink, a blistered Jimmy Nardello vodka, a sourdough cordial. Next door the lounge works like a Japanese listening bar. The DJ booth is built from blonde birch, the floorstanding speakers were designed by music director MaxV, and Brock keeps a deep collection of 45s. It suits a drop-in better than a full dinner. Guest DJs rotate, and Brock sometimes plays before service or after he finishes cooking.
Arrive as the showrooms pull down their blinds, the light turns amber along the boulevard and somebody lowers the needle under the olive tree.
- The vibe
- Open-air Californian room, olive tree, folk art, birch DJ booth next door.
- The food
- Monthly menu over a wood grill; the dry-aged burger leads.
- The drink
- Vegetable-forward cocktails by Jason Lee; vinyl-only listening lounge beside the bar.
- A tip
- Book early for the burger or take a bar stool; the lounge suits a drop-in.
