Nashville chef Sean Brock brings his unbridled culinary joy to Birmingham this Thursday, when he opens the second location of his retro-styled fast-food concept Joyland.

Brock, a two-time James Beard Award winner, opened the original Joyland in East Nashville four years ago, and he has partnered with Nick Pihakis, CEO of the Birmingham-based Pihakis Restaurant Group, and Paul Mishkin, founder of the Southall Farm & Inn resort in Franklin, Tenn., to bring Joyland to Birmingham.

The Birmingham location is at 3719 Third Ave. South in Avondale and was previously home to Rodney Scott’s BBQ.

The fast food-inspired menu features Brock’s twists on cheeseburgers, buttermilk biscuits, fried chicken, hand pies, milkshakes and soft-serve ice cream, and it highlights his commitment to sourcing his meats and dairy products from small, family-owned farms that raise their animals responsibly and humanely.

“It’s fast food through the lens of an obsessive Southern chef,” Brock tells AL.com. “What Joyland has turned into is a place where you can eat things like fried chicken and cheeseburgers, but they’re from the same farms that I’ve been using my entire career, farms that I’m really proud of, farms that are kind of like family.”

Birmingham artist Marcus Fetch captures Joyland’s joyful spirit with three brightly colored murals that catch the eye from any direction, and Pihakis Restaurant Group creative director Angie Mosier carries out that playful and nostalgic theme in the dining room, which pops with red, yellow and blue diner-style chairs.

“These colors, they make you feel good,” Brock says. “That’s why we chose them. When you drive up from either direction and see this building, if you’re not smiling, there’s something wrong with you.”

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, and June, a modern, intimate, tasting-menu restaurant.

Joyland, Brock says, is like his refuge from the world of fine dining, a chance for him to have fun re-creating some of his favorite foods that he’s loved since he was a kid.

“My history is fine dining,” he says. “Every job I’ve ever had, except for my very first one, has been kind of five-star, five-diamonds fine dining. But in the back of my head, I’ve always wanted to have a burger place.

“Cheeseburgers and fried chicken are my two favorite things,” he adds. “You ask a lot of chefs that, and it’s usually cheeseburgers, fried chicken, those kinds of things. And there’s a reason for that. They tap into nostalgia. They’re comforting. They’re familiar.”

Please continue reading below for a sneak peek at a few of Brock’s favorite things on the Joyland menu, and the inspiration behind them.

The Joystick and the Dipstick

Joyland’s popular chicken on a stick – the Joystick – was inspired by Brock’s visits to “two of my favorite places — Japan and Oxford, Miss.,” he says.

“I’ve eaten many chicken on a sticks with Nick (Pihakis) at that Chevron in Oxford,” Brock says. “It’s a core memory — just hanging out with all my friends late at night at a gas station eating fried chicken on a stick. It was the most novel, fun thing.

“And then I go to Japan for the first time and everybody there is eating fried chicken on a stick,” he adds. “I fell head over heels in love with Japan.”

The Joyland menu also includes the Dipstick, a Joystick dipped into a North Carolina-style barbecue sauce after it comes out of the fryer.

“A long time ago, I ran across this old tradition in North Carolina called dipped chicken, where you take fried chicken and dunk it very quickly into a vinegar-based barbecue sauce,” Brock says. “I had to try that right away and fell in love with it. That’s how the Dipstick was born.”

The organic chicken, which is also featured on a sandwich, is from family-owned Springer Mountain Farms in the hills of Georgia’s Blue Ridge Mountains.

The old-fashioned Joyburger

The Joyburger — a “hybrid between an old-fashioned griddled burger and a smashburger,” Brock calls it — evolved from the burger he created for his four Husk restaurants, which he left in 2019.

Available with either a single or a double Bear Creek Farm beef patty, the Joyburger is served on a potato roll with raw onion, seasoned pickles, Kraft American cheese and a special sauce.

The secret weapon, Brock says, is the AccuTemp griddle, which uses a steam chamber to maintain an even temperature throughout the cooking process.

“It’s probably the most expensive thing here,” he says, “but it is the heart and soul of getting that proper crust without overcooking the burger.”

The thin-and-crispy CrustBurger

The star of the Joyland menu is the CrustBurger, a thin-and-crispy griddled burger served with melted American cheese on a potato bun that’s smashed as flat as a pancake.

“When you get a properly cooked burger, your first bite, which is your first impression, is that lacy, crunchy outer edge,” Brock says. “So I started thinking a lot about that: How can we create a burger that every bite is that lacy, crunchy first bite? And that was the birth of the CrustBurger,”

Brock started serving the CrustBurger on a potato roll, but the burger-to-bun ratio was way off, so that’s when he decided to smash the buns, too.

“Then once we put it together on the griddle, it came together into this thing that I’d never really seen before but was still familiar,” he says. “All of a sudden, I was eating a grilled cheese, a patty melt and a cheeseburger all at the same time.”

Nostalgic hand pies

The hand pies at Joyland are inspired by the simple handheld pies Brock remembers from the gas stations in his native Virginia and the more artistic creations he and pastry chef Lisa Donavan developed when they were both at Husk.

“There’s a huge hand pie tradition where I grew up, and you’ll see it all over the South,” he says. “So it was kind of easy to stick with the gas station inspiration and work on creating unique hand pies.”

Seasonal favorites include a sweet peach hand pie filled with locally grown peaches braised in Nehi peach soda and a savory tomato hand pie that’s a mini version of the traditional Southern tomato pie, with tomatoes, mayo and cheddar cheese.

“Anything you can imagine, we’ll put a playful spin on it,” Brock says. “So that’s really fun to play around with as one of our main desserts.”

Luxurious soft serve

Nothing brings out the kid in Brock like a soft-serve ice cream cone. So he had to have it at Joyland.

“I have two kids, and we eat a lot of ice cream — almost every day,” he says. “I love ice cream as much as I love burgers and fried chicken. And it lights me up the same way. It has nostalgia. It makes you happy. Nothing else matters when you’re eating ice cream – especially soft serve.”

Finding the right soft serve recipe – and learning how to perfect it — became an obsession, Brock says.

“Without a doubt, in my 30-plus years in the kitchen, soft serve is the hardest recipe I’ve ever tried to master,” he says. “The machines are finicky. Temperature is a big variable. …

“We wanted to push it even further and make it a little more luxurious, a little more dense, a little more of a custard.”

Brock taste-tests the soft serve every day to make sure they get it right.

“The first thing I do when I walk into Joyland is go straight to the soft serve machine — every time,” he says. “It’s one of my favorite things to eat, and I think our recipe is really, really good.

“We only do chocolate and vanilla now,” he adds, “but we have lots of ideas to expand those flavors.”

Lucious milkshakes

Think of the Joyland milkshake as soft serve ice cream in a cup with a straw.

“We wanted to focus on grab-and-go, travel kind of things on the menu,” Brock says. “So, our milkshake is soft serve that’s just aerated. . . .

“It’s just like the soft serve you would get in a cone, but we aerate it and hand it to you. So, it’s a whole different milkshake experience.”

Flavors include vanilla, chocolate, coffee-vanilla and coffee-chocolate.

The Joyland beverage program includes a selection of local draft beers and boozy milkshakes, as well as mimosas, Bloody Marys and other brunch cocktails on Saturdays and Sundays.

Buttermilk biscuits

The Joyland breakfast menu features Brock’s riffs on the biscuit sandwich, including chicken, bacon-egg-and-cheese and sausage-egg-and-cheese biscuits, among others.

“We take a lot of time and pride in making biscuits properly,” Brock says. “The biscuits that we make here are the way my grandmother taught me, and that was the first thing she ever taught me. So, it’s a very fond memory for me and a very cherished recipe.”

He also takes great pride in the ingredients he puts into those biscuits, using Our Best self-rising flour from Boonville Flour & Feed Mill in Boonville, N.C., and churned buttermilk from Cruze Farm Dairy in Knoxville, Tenn.

“Just like anything we do,” Brock explains, “we look at a biscuit as a formula, and then ask ourselves, ‘Who are the people that are producing these products in a way that needs to be celebrated and appreciated and shared?’”

Joyland will open on Thursday, Aug, 15, at 3719 Third Ave. South in Birmingham, Ala. Hours will be 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. Sundays through Thursdays and 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays. For more information, go here.

From 6 to 9 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 17, Sean Brock and the Joyland team will host a Grand Opening Vinyl Party with Seasick Records. Brock and the Seasick crew will spin records and serve bites from the Joyland menu. The event is open to the public.