Roadfood_ Revised Edition - Jane Stern [67]
Bon-Ton Mini Mart
2036 Madison St.
270–826–1207
Henderson, KY
L | $
West of Louisville is fried chicken country. Nearly every restaurant, plain or fancy, has its own special version. One of the most humble—and the very best—is to be found at the Bon-Ton Mini Mart. In this former convenience store snack shop, white and dark meat are marinated before being fried, resulting in pieces that are wickedly crunchy outside, dripping moist inside, and fairly exploding with flavor. With the chicken come savory biscuits, French fries, and coleslaw.
The chicken is so incredibly good that it is all too tempting to eat until you can’t eat another thing. But the Bon-Ton demands you save room for dessert. Banana pudding is a big bowl of comfort, coconut cream and chocolate pie are deeply satisfying, and the chess pie just may be the best one we have ever tasted. It is sweet, but has a buttery richness that goes beyond sweetness. What a brilliant dessert!
George’s
1346 E. 4th St.
502–926–9276
Owensboro, KY
LD | $
Of all the burgoo we have eaten in western Kentucky, we like George’s best. It is thick with vegetables and resonant with the gamy flavor of mutton, and has just enough pepper kick to make every spoonful a thrill. Technically speaking it is a soup, but you could eat it with a fork.
Good as the burgoo is, the main reason to come to George’s is for a full barbecue meal. Mutton is the foremost meat in these parts: dark, full-flavored, with a tang that is nothing like pork or beef. Whether you choose a plate of mutton “off the pit” (sauceless) or regular mutton sopped with the natural gravy that is unique to this region or mutton ribs or more familiar items such as pork ribs, chopped pork, chicken, ham, or beef, the smoky meat is accompanied by very good side dishes: sweet coleslaw, creamy potato salad, or goopy baked beans. If you’re not quite so hungry, you can have any of the barbecued items on a tray, which includes only pickles, onion, and bread. Bread, by the way, is available white or rye, the rye looking like Wonder Bread with a slight tan, bearing no resemblance whatsoever to tough-crusted deli rye. All the barbecues in this part of Kentucky serve it.
George’s is an inconspicuous café with booths and tables and a sweet-as-honey waitress named Trish who confided to us that although born and raised in western Kentucky, she had spent ten years in Memphis where she was not happy: Memphis barbecue is legendary, but nobody there serves mutton.
Homemade Ice Cream and Pie Kitchen
2525 Bardstown Rd.
502–459–8184
Louisville, KY
LD | $
We arrived at the Louisville airport in the company of three sophisticated palates from New York, and before heading into Kentucky on a barbecue-eating expedition, we took them to one of America’s great places to sate a sweet tooth, this modest-looking ice cream and pie kitchen. Our friends were flabbergasted by the variety of pies and cakes available, many of which are virtually unknown outside the South: chocolaty red velvet cake encased in thick white cream cheese frosting, chess pie that is purity itself, hummingbird cake that we guess was named because it would please a nectar-crazed avian. In addition to regular chess, which is little more than cream, sugar, and eggs, there are lemon chess and chocolate chess. And of course there are literally dozens of more universally known pies and cakes, including key lime, lemon meringue, banana cream, apple, apple crunch, and Dutch apple with caramel.
Many of the handsome layer cakes come swirled with sweet-smelling buttercream frosting. A few of our favorite varieties include banana-pecan cake, coconut cake, mandarin orange cake with pineapple-flavored whipped cream, and jam-spice cake with caramel frosting.
Because we visit Louisville for only short periods of time, coming to this little shop is inevitably frustrating. There is no way two people or even five people can