James Beard Award-winning Nashville chef Sean Brock is ready to spread a little joy in Birmingham.

Brock and his Nashville investor Paul Mishkin have partnered with Birmingham restaurateur Nick Pihakis and his Pihakis Restaurant Group to open the first Birmingham location of Brock’s retro fast-food restaurant Joyland.

Brock opened the original Joyland in East Nashville in 2020, and the Birmingham location will be the second.

The Birmingham Joyland is expected to open in April in the former home of another Pihakis Restaurant Group property, Rodney Scott’s BBQ, at 3719 Third Ave. South in Avondale, Pihakis told AL.com.

The Joyland menu – which is “inspired by the original fast-food restaurants of yesteryear,” according to a media release — features Brock’s creative takes on such American classics as cheeseburgers, buttermilk biscuits, fried chicken, milkshakes and hand pies.

The star of the menu is Brock’s signature “CrustBurger,” a griddled Bear Creek Farm beef patty served with melted American cheese on a crispy potato bun that is pressed flat as a pancake.

Pihakis — whose Pihakis Restaurant Group portfolio includes not only Rodney Scott’s BBQ but also Hero Doughnuts & Buns, Little Donkey, Tasty Town Greek Restaurant and Lounge and the soon-to-open Italian restaurant Luca Lagotto — got to know Brock through the FatBack Collective, an all-star group of Southern chefs, pitmasters and restaurateurs dedicated to reviving and preserving the dying practice of small, heritage-breed hog farming.

“Sean and I have known each other forever, and we really wanted to partner up and do something,” Pihakis said. “We feel like this is a wonderful concept.

“Sean’s just so creative, and what’s he’s built there (in Nashville) is phenomenal,” Pihakis added. “I’m just happy to be a part of it.”

The Birmingham location is the first of several more Joyland restaurants that the partners plan to eventually open across the country, Pihakis said.

“I like to do this in Birmingham because I’m here every day, and I can understand what we’re doing a lot better,” he said. “We’re going to open the first one here, and then we’re just gonna try to grow because we all feel like it’s got potential.”

A Southern culinary visionary

One of the South’s most innovative chefs, Brock, a Virginia native, won the James Beard Award for Best Chef: Southeast in 2010, when he was the executive chef at the Charleston, S.C., fine-dining restaurant McCrady’s. His first cookbook, “Heritage,” also won a James Beard Award in the American Cooking category in 2015.

He is formerly the founding chef and culinary advisor at Husk, which he started in Charleston in 2010 and subsequently opened locations in Nashville, Savannah and Greenville, S.C.

In addition to Joyland, Brock’s other Nashville restaurants include Audrey, a Southern restaurant inspired by and named after his maternal grandmother; June, a modern, intimate, tasting-menu restaurant; and Bar Continental, a hi-fidelity record bar and cocktail lounge with a small-plate dinner menu.

Mishkin — a former stock options trader who founded the technology-driven, proprietary trading firm Simplex Trading — has helped Brock develop all his Nashville restaurants, and in 2022, Mishkin opened Southall Farm & Inn, a luxury farm resort in Franklin, Tenn.

A much-needed boost for Avondale?

The opening of Joyland in Avondale could provide a much-needed spark to that area’s once-booming restaurant scene, Angie Mosier, the Pihakis Restaurant Group’s creative director, said.

While it continues to operate two other Birmingham-area locations of Rodney Scott’s BBQ in Homewood and Trussville, the Pihakis Restaurant Group closed the Avondale location this past November.

Meanwhile, two other prominent Avondale restaurants — Post Office Pies and Avondale Common House — have also closed or moved in recent months, and another, Melt, closed its original Avondale location in December 2022 and moved to Mountain Brook’s Lane Parke development.

Mosier is hoping Joyland will help reverse that trend.

“We’re super-excited to add to the landscape there in Avondale — especially right now,” she said. “I think it’s going to be an exciting addition to Avondale since so many things have moved on.”