21. LOUISVILLE CUISINE

Louisville, Kentucky

9/25/2009

Discovering that my school would be closed on the last Friday of September, Laura and I decided to take advantage of the holiday to take a quick daytrip to Pittsburgh (a three-hour drive) and knock off a few places on the list. Luckily, the night before we were about to leave I checked to make sure everything would still be open – only to discover that due to the G20 summit being held in Pittsburgh that day, practically the whole city was being shut down. Undeterred, but with very little time to plan, we switched destination to Louisville – still three-hours away, but just in a different direction.

Patricia Schultz raves about Louisville cuisine, so we made that somewhat the focus of the trip. In particular, she talks about something called a “Hot Brown” – which neither of us had heard of, but is supposedly a Louisville specialty. Invented at the Brown Hotel (hence the name), we made the acquisition of one our first goal. I sang “Hot Brown” to the tune of “My Girl” all the way there. Laura was happy when the drive was over.

Let me just say that the Brown Hotel is so fancy I was afraid they were going to kick us out for being too poor. Like somehow they could tell. Apparently, there’s a dress code for dinner at the main restaurant. Lunch is a little more casual, thankfully. We ate in the J. Graham Café – the hotel’s lunch restaurant and birthplace of the Hot Brown. I had the Hot Brown, while Laura took advantage of the lunch buffet they were having. The food was extremely excellent. The Hot Brown is basically an open-faced turkey sandwich, but that description doesn’t really make it sound very good. Trust me. It’s a memorable meal. Absolutely deserving of its reputation.

The service was really good, although we did have one slight complaint. It seemed most of the wait staff were French, and although they were very polite to the customers while speaking English, they fought very loudly amongst themselves in their native language. It seems as though because they realized that none of us could understand what they were saying, they had become oblivious to the fact that we could still HEAR them.

After visiting the Slugger Museum and Old Louisville, we ended our trip at the “say it like it is”-named Homemade Ice Cream and Pie Kitchen. This place was on the opposite end of fancy compared to the Brown Hotel, but the food was just as delicious – just in a different way. For $5 we got a half-sandwich, a salad and a piece of their world-famous homemade pie. Consider that a grade-d meal at McDonald’s will cost you more than that. I had derby pie and Laura had chess pie – for the authentic Kentucky experience, of course. Laura doesn’t have much of a sweet tooth, but she wanted another piece. That’s high praise from her.