The star LA chef who doubles as one of America's best pool players

Certain qualities make for a good chef: passion, precision and focus, to name a few. Turns out, they're also the qualities of a pretty sick  pool player .

Just ask Brian Dunsmoor. The head chef, owner and namesake of lauded live-fire Los Angeles restaurant Dunsmoor moonlights as a 9-ball fanatic, preferring the fast-paced pocket billiards game when he plays with friends or at home (which is often). Dunsmoor has gotten so good that, last month, he competed in the Billiards Club of America's massive, mettle-testing Pool League World Championships in Las Vegas - and nearly won the damn thing.

"My therapist said I have clinical FOMO," Dunsmoor, who's also been a hypercompetitive cyclist for years, says with a laugh. "My biggest fear is wasting time. I've had this dream about pulling my teeth out my whole life. It's specifically about the fear of losing time you can never get back."

He adds: "Whether it's cooking or doing wine stuff or playing pool, I just go, go, go. I never stop." 

Dunsmoor started playing pool as a senior in high school in Snellville, Georgia, wearing out the felt on his family's new billiards table in the six months before he went off to college. It wasn't until his birthday in April of 2021, months after a vicious cycling accident where he was hit by a student driver, that the seasoned chef (who's also been at the helm of local favorites like Hatchet Hall) picked up a pool cue again.

"I'd just had the last operation on my right hand, one of many, and I still had the cast on," Dunsmoor says. "I started playing again for physical therapy."

Pool continued as a way to blow off steam , as Dunsmoor readied to open his eponymous restaurant in Glassell Park in the summer of 2022. Despite his acclaim as a chef, the restaurant was met with some pushback from the neighborhood over gentrification concerns, resulting in a protest on the first night .

"Opening this restaurant was incredibly difficult and heart-wrenching at times," Dunsmoor says. "I would come home at 2 in the morning and force myself to play pool for at least half an hour. It can be therapeutic."

The rhythms and flow of those early routines pushed Dunsmoor through to where he is today, in early 2026. Though he remains a smiling, energetic presence at the restaurant, the truth is that Dunsmoor hasn't been cooking meaningfully inside the space that bears his name for several months.. His hands, he says, are still "all f-ked up;" from the crash, yes, but more so just from being a chef. Dunsmoor has always used a 12-inch knife, and all of the cookware in his restaurant (which centers on a wood-fired hearth and doesn't use tools that require electricity) is cast iron.

"I have really bad carpal tunnel in both my wrists," Dunsmoor says. "This type of cooking is similar to operating heavy machinery."

There were problems before the crash and the beloved new restaurant, too. Years of riding a suspensionless bike on mountain trails - wrist punishment that Dunsmoor says is akin to the pressure felt from "a jackhammer" - have also taken their toll, though the chef has never been one to shy away from a challenge or a setback. In May 2020, Dunsmoor spent 19 straight hours " Everesting ," meaning he climbed the same Santa Monica hill in a continuous loop until he gained the total elevation of the world's tallest mountain - all on a stripped-down bicycle with just a single gear, and all for charity. 

With the aches and pains adding up, Dunsmoor's billiards cue became a comfort. He now has a 9-foot table in his Pasadena garage that he bought from a shuttered Santa Monica billiards hall. He's also part of leagues like the Billiard Congress of America and the American Poolplayers Association.

"I forced myself to play to see if I could qualify for Vegas," Dunsmoor says, noting that he practiced two to three hours a day with no guarantees of making it. "I've gone every year, but I've never qualified to play until this year. You have to play a certain amount of weeks of organized play."

The BCA Pool League World Championships are a behemoth. More than 13,000 players spread out across 435 top-quality tables over the span of 11 days, knocking off one another in a seemingly endless series of brackets and mini-tournaments. Players are broken down into categories endlessly: There are 8-ball, 9-ball and 10-ball games, separate divisions, age and experience qualifiers, and on and on and on.

But unlike similarly scaled events (say, the annual World Series of Poker in Las Vegas), the financial prize pool is a relative pittance. At the WSOP, the best card shark on the planet can win a gold bracelet and millions in earnings. For the Pool League World Championships, the wallets are lighter, but the competition is just as cutthroat.

At the February tournament, Dunsmoor came out firing. The Southern California home garage player rolled off win after win in the 9-ball singles category against stiff competition, showing off his score sheets on Instagram. He'd breeze past one player before barely outlasting another, and for a while there, Dunsmoor just kept coming out on top. In the end, the chef turned shark won seven straight before losing his eighth match, coming up a few shots short of the finals. Dunsmoor placed fifth overall in his category, out of thousands of competitors. He won about $2,000 and immediately spent most of it at an off-Strip restaurant.

"I wasn't expecting to make it that far," Dunsmoor says. "It was awesome. I'm definitely better than I've ever been."

With his garage billiards table and regular stops at LA-area pool halls like Jerry's Family Billiards and the Green Room, Dunsmoor doesn't show any signs of slowing down.

"The more I play, the better my wrists feel," he says.

Dunsmoor adds: "It's such a precision game. If you're off by a millimeter, it changes your whole game. If I'm feeling stagnant at work, I just need these other outlets. I like the rigor. It makes you better at everything you do."

More LA Food Coverage

- 'I have to do this': The LA restaurant run entirely by one man
- OC's $10M-per-year restaurant is a gorgeous disappointment
- LA almost took SF's Fernet crown last year - from a Los Feliz dive bar
- Meet the 'scam' influencer at the heart of LA's recent restaurant drama

For more SFGATE LA stories, subscribe to our new weekly newsletter The Southland here .

This article originally published at The star LA chef who doubles as one of America's best pool players .