Rising Star Chef Brian Dunsmoor of The Ladies' Gunboat Society - Biography

If Brian Dunsmoor brings serious Southern soul to his cooking, it’s due (in part) to his childhood. Raised outside of Atlanta, Dusnmoor spent summers with his family: Colorado ranchers and corn farmers, with more relatives, and bountiful seafood boils, in Pensacola, Florida.

Dunsmoor attended culinary school in Charleston and then “regular” college in Athens, Georgia. A teacher asked him why he quit cooking, and he had no answer. So Dunsmoor dropped out and landed a job at Hugh Acheson’s 5&10. Next came a pivotal move to L.A. at Michael Cimarusti’s Providence, followed by Joe’s Restaurant in Venice. There he met Kris Tominaga, with whom he’d partner a couple years later to open California-Southern hybrid pop-up Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing.

That project morphed into The Hart and The Hunter, where the duo earned a 2014 StarChefs.com Rising Star Chef Award. Dunsmoor’s latest project, the newly opened Ladies’ Gunboat Society, has firmly established him as L.A.’s passageway to the South.