After a few weeks, the parade of doctors began: ophthalmologists, neurologists, neuro-ophthalmologists, oculoplastics surgeons. And the tests: One consisted of repeatedly placing ice up against his eyes and gauging the response. That was a spa treatment compared with the next test, in which a recording needle was inserted into the junction between the muscles and nerves of his eye and left there for 45 minutes, gathering data.

"It was the most depressed I'd been in my whole life. I was thinking about suicide."

MG is a sneaky sickness, often called the snowﬂake disease because it seems to manifest in as many unique ways as there are people who have it. Why it strikes is a mystery, but as with all auto-immune diseases, the body mistakenly attacks itself, in this case disabling receptors for a substance called acetylcholine, which acts as the crucial connection between one's nerves and one's muscles. This short-circuits both voluntary movements, like raising and lowering your eyelids, and involuntary ones, like breathing.

All of Brock's symptoms were in line with an MG diagnosis, but, perplexingly, he tested negative for the disease's telltale rogue antibodies. Meanwhile, his condition worsened. The double vision made it difﬁcult to walk, much less drive. One morning, he stepped outside to walk Ruby and tried to squint in the bright sunlight. His eyes refused to obey. Back inside, he looked in a mirror to discover that one eye had drooped to nearly closed while the other was stuck wide open.

"You can't go out looking like that," he says. He took to wearing sunglasses at all times, both because the mildest light was blinding and because he was so keenly self-conscious. The glasses, though, had their own problems: He worried that he looked like the kind of asshole who wears sunglasses in restaurants at night.

And, still, a definitive diagnosis remained elusive. "Do you know what that's like?" he says. "The feeling you get when the best doctors in the country look at you and say, 'We don't know what's wrong with you'?"

Life began to shrink, a series of waiting rooms and doctors' appointments and torturous surgeries, ﬁve in all: Believing the problem was fourth cranial nerve palsy, a surgeon detached his eyeball to tighten its surrounding muscles; attempting to treat the ptosis, or drooping, doctors snipped through his eyelids, inserting stitches to raise and lower them like Levolor blinds while cutting tissue from the undersides.

"I wasn't a chef anymore. I was a patient," Brock says. "It was the most depressed I'd been in my whole life. I was thinking about suicide. I didn't want to leave my house."

He had always had a collecting streak, the acquisitive glee of someone who had grown up poor enough to worry about being able to afford school lunch. Among other things, he has amassed collections of Danelectro guitars, vinyl Mississippi-blues records, and southern folk art. Now he poured his energy into learning everything about bourbon, building a world-class collection of American whiskey. Amply documented on Instagram, the shelves ﬁlled with Pappy Van Winkle and Willett seemed like the happy outgrowth of a life well lived. But it was also a beachhead against a terrible possibility: that he would never be able to cook again.

After each procedure and recovery, the symptoms would abate for a week or two but then come back. Brock began strategically scheduling the procedures for when he needed brief periods of sight, like when he traveled to Modena, Italy, to take over the kitchen of Osteria Francescana and cooked Italian culatello in southern redeye gravy and shrimp and grits in Parmigiano-Reggiano whey.

He began to privately confront what had begun to seem inevitable: "I may not ever be ﬁxed," he said. "I may have to deal with this for the rest of my life."

PAMU PAMU

It's tempting to see Brock's restaurant empire as a manifestation of his own body: The Tavern—where, he says, the menu is "a list of my favorite things to eat"—is his stomach. Husk, with its devotion to showcasing southern ingredients, is his heart. And the new McCrady's is his brain. (It would be too cynical to say that Minero, Brock's taqueria, with branches in Charleston and Atlanta, is his wallet, but nobody has ever gone broke selling Americans hot cheese and beans.)

McCrady's occupies a brick building that dates from the late 1700s, a block away from the marshy shallows of Charleston Harbor. It's a sprawling space of hallways, stairways, and kitchens, the kind of place a man could rattle around in forever, like the Phantom of the Opera, barely seeing daylight. Which is more or less how Brock has been operating in the weeks leading up to the McCrady's opening, emerging only late at night to hop in his beat-up pickup strewn with cassette tapes.

He navigates the building like…well, like he could do it blind: Out the door of the new McCrady's; past the brick archways and 18th-century hearths of the Tavern; up the wide staircase, past Minero's bustling kitchen and into the Long Room, where George Washington once dined and which is now used for private parties. On the roof is a small garden and a locked shed housing a wall of bubbling tubs producing homemade vinegar in flavors like Mountain Dew and Harvey Wallbanger. Great feathery clumps of bacterial mother pulsate inside them like alien jellyfish. There is also a wood barrel of pork fatback curing in salt, and rack after rack of meticulously labeled canned vegetables and fruit, all of it nestled amid $200,000 worth of wine. (Which would Brock save first in a fire? "Probably the wine. I can make more vinegar.")