by John T. Edge
2804 TAYLORSVILLE ROAD / 502-451-4436
SUBURBAN SOCIAL CLUB
Louisville is a city of clubs. Perhaps it is attributable to the city’s long status as an industrial center, where unions held sway and men banded together for the common good. Maybe it’s a vestige of the day when newly arrived immigrants gathered on weekends to sing songs of their homeland and savor the foods of their youth. No matter, Louisville is a city of joiners.
In addition to the inevitable Jaycee and Civitan, Kiwanis and Optimist, Elk and Moose clubs, many men of the Germantown neighborhood claim membership in the All Wool and a Yard Wide Democratic Club, a fraternity united by an unwavering allegiance to the party of FDR and a tradition of Friday afternoon fish fries held throughout the spring and summer. Though their tradition is strong, their fish flaky and fine, the good Democrats can’t hold a candle to the men of the Suburban Masonic Lodge, who since the early 1920s have been holding a Saturday afternoon fish fry that draws devotees from throughout the city.
Situated on Louisville’s South End in a neighborhood once popular with the families of railroad men who worked on the L&N, or Louisville and Nashville line, the Suburban Lodge has been part and parcel of the fabric of working-class Louisville since its founding in 1902. What began as a way to raise funds for lodge expenses has become a one-day feast that has generated hundreds of thousands of dollars for local children’s charities.
I arrive midafternoon, during the slight lull between lunch and dinner. No matter, there is still a line stretching back from the counter along the concrete-block wall. Thirty-odd tables are scattered about the meeting hall, but there’s hardly a seat to be had. Up front, a man with a floppy fish hat on his head and a smile on his face is making change and handing out brown paper bags stuffed full of fish sandwiches. By the time customers make the door, a grease stain blooms from the bottom of the bags.
I watch the men skeining the fish from monstrous deep fryers with nets that look like they were made for oversized goldfish. The choices are simple: fish by the pound, fish by the plate, fish by the sandwich. And, though bream and spot, channel cats and pan flounder, may be more often thought of as favorite Southern fishes, here things are different. “It’s all cod, it’s all fried, it’s all good,” says a fellow in line beside me.
In short order I retrieve my prize and rather than beat a path to the car, I settle at a table, rip open the bag, peel back the rye bread that has begun to melt into the surface of the sandwich, and sprinkle on a bit of the chopped, marinated onions that come with each order. Taking the lead of everyone around me, I forgo a spritz of cocktail or tartar sauce. The fish is as toothsome and sweet as I have ever tasted, a convincing argument that what makes for good fried fish is hot oil and an experienced hand, not fancy batter mixes or proximity to the sea.
A few days later I talk with John Rupley, a retired railroad switchman who has been a member of the lodge since the 1950s. He sets me straight on why their fish is so good, their weekly gathering so popular: “We’ve been doing this for a long time. We buy only the best, premium grade Icelandic cod from the coldest waters. And we fry it hard in hot oil. It’s that simple. I don’t like to talk figures but we go through about a ton of it each Saturday. It takes thirty men to run the operation but we’re happy to do it. In many ways it’s a social activity for us; it’s part of being a Mason.”
3901 SOUTH THIRD STREET / 502-368-3161
Owensboro
MOONLITE BAR-B-QUE INN
Throughout much of the South, the preferred barbecue meat is pork. Sure there may be a few closeted beef lovers in Arkansas, perhaps there’s a scattering of possum aficionados in southern Alabama, but for the most part the pig reigns supreme—except along the Ohio River in northwestern Kentucky, where in cities like Owensboro and Henderson, mutton—mature lamb—is the meat of choice.
In the late summer and early fall, parish picnics sponsored by local Catholic churches have been a draw since the early 1800s when Welsh and Dutch settlers made their way into the region, sheep in tow. One of the first written references to barbecue mutton is an 1806 account of the wedding feast of Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks, the parents of Abraham Lincoln.
Today, taste for the gamy meat remains localized and unimpeachable. Some businesses have taken to printing wallet-sized cards embossed with the summer season’s roster of church barbecues, which in any other Kentucky community would boast the local high school basketball team’s schedule. And though locals might argue that the best barbecue mutton and burgoo—a huntsman’s concoction somewhat similar to Brunswick stew—are to be found only at these picnics, quite a few Owensboro restaurants do a fine job with the stuff, including George’s, Old Hickory, Shady Rest, and the Moonlite Bar-B-Que Inn.
As a rule, I like underdogs, unsung heroes, and unlikely champions. I prefer restaurants more likely to be touted by a tubby cop on the beat than a glitzy billboard towering above an interstate exit ramp. Yet, despite its status as the biggest barbecue joint in town, despite the omnipresent advertising and rampant commodification—everything from sponsorship of a stock car to production of canned burgoo offered for sale in local super-markets—I can’t help but like the Moonlite.
The family that cooks together stays together. Just ask the Bosleys, pictured here in the pits at Moonlite.
It’s a sprawling behemoth of a restaurant, surrounded by a good acre of black asphalt. Forklifts loaded down with hickory ricks scoot from one building to the other. Sheep carcasses arrive by the trailer load. A monstrous pagoda-style pit sits at the center of the kitchen, fueled by a subterranean firebox stoked with hickory coals.
The mutton itself is surprisingly subtle, kissed by a touch of smoke, a hint of lamb-like whang. Doused with a glug of Worcestershire-spiked black-dip barbecue sauce, the ribs (really chops) are my favorites, for they benefit from a thin vein of fat that runs along the bone, keeping the meat comparatively juicy. The burgoo is a textbook version thick with corn and potatoes, onions, chicken, and yes, mutton.
And despite the restaurant’s size and fame—Calvin Trillin once sang the praises of their mutton in a New Yorker article—it’s still a family-focused company, not too far removed from the day in 1963 when Hugh Bosley Sr., furloughed from his distillery job, raised the capital to purchase a little barbecue stand by selling the family home. Today, more than a dozen Bosley kith and kin run the place. Chances are, most days, you’ll spot Ken Bosley by the register and Janet Bosley Howard walking the dining-room floor. Oh, and if you happen to take note of a table tent promoting the sale of white zinfandel by the glass, look the other way. Even the best in the business get some things wrong.
2840 WEST PARISH AVENUE / 270-684-8143
STARNES’ BARBECUE
“You can go thirty or forty miles from here just across the river and the barbecue will be different,” says pitman Tim Starnes, grandson of restaurant founder Floyd Starnes. “They might do their meat different, their sauce different. It’s all different out there. But we do it the way we’ve always done it, cooking over hickory for ten to twelve hours. And all our sandwiches get toasted, always have. We’re scared of change. We get a lot of ribbing about the color of the paint on this place,” he says, his arms sweeping wide to take in a lime-green cinder-block building that would seem more at home in Miami Beach. “I know in my heart that if we painted it a different color, our business would fall off.”
Tim’s family business has been a part of Paducah since 1958. Though the surrounding neighborhood has changed—across the way the Dragon House Chinese restaurant looms with an eighty-item buffet—Starnes’ remains reassuringly hide-bound. The spare interior is a throwback to the 1950s: nineteen stools and two booths set around a horseshoe-shaped counter with an island at the center. Bottles of sauce line the counter; a vinegary smell lingers in the air. On the day I visit, I am one of two customers, the other an older gentleman—a hunter—who stopped in for a sandwich and a quote on getting a shoulder of venison smoked. “Fifty cents a pound,�
�� comes the reply from Tim.
The gentleman wolfs down his sandwich in four quick bites and is gone. Moments later my own sandwich arrives. Wrapped tight in a blanket of waxed paper, it is as tidy a barbecue sandwich as I have ever seen. No hunks of meat spilling out of a bun, no sauce smearing the wax paper, just finely chopped pork—crunchy with outside meat—doused with a lively vinegar and pepper sauce, served between two slices of wasp’s nest white bread, the whole affair smashed flat and toasted brown by one of those mysterious machines that resembles a clothes press. I offer my compliments to Tim but he shrugs them off: “It’s what we’ve been doing since day one. Like I told you, we’re scared of change.”
1008 JOE CLIFTON DRIVE / 270-444-9555
Winchester
HALL’S ON THE RIVER
Gone are the days when bar food meant a pickled egg, swimming in a brine tinted pink by beet juice, or a pig’s foot put up by the barkeep at a neighbor’s hog killing. Today, Buffalo chicken wings are as much a barroom menu fixture in Bardstown, Kentucky, as they are in Buffalo, New York, the city of their birth. But a few peculiar bar food favorites endure, rarely seen elsewhere. In Kentucky fried banana peppers and beer cheese top the list.
Though the historical record is scant (bars tend to leave few records save old debt ledgers), general consensus holds that both were born on the Kentucky River, in the wilds south of Lexington. Over at Hall’s, a riverfront restaurant and tavern of Colonial vintage near Winchester, they claim a lineage that goes back to the 1930s when Johnny Allman, a onetime captain of the Kentucky Highway Patrol, ran a riverside tavern widely credited with introducing the two items. (That said, I have an inkling that at least the beer cheese may have preceded Allman, dating back at least to the days when saloons were inclined to ply drinkers with free eats. Beer cheese represented a novel use for stale beer.)
A description: fried banana peppers are the simplest of the two, butterflied or halved mild pickled peppers, sheathed in batter, fried until brown, and oftentimes served with a spicy cocktail sauce spiked with horseradish. Some versions have a pronounced vinegar nose that seems to rise like a noxious cloud off the plate; others fail because the batter slips off with the first bite. Like the fried dill pickles of Arkansas and Mississippi, though they sound simple enough, fried banana peppers require a deft hand, a good batter, and hot grease.
Beer cheese, also known as snappy cheese, may look like Cheez Whiz, but it’s actually pungent, yeasty, garlicky stuff that packs a wallop. Along the river, any number of bars serve up their own take on it, but Hall’s wins my vote for the best, if only because they employ Mrs. Jean Bell, who worked under the watchful eyes of Johnny Allman and has been stirring up her version since 1965. Served in pleated, paper specimen cups alongside a selection of crudités, the taste of the neon-orange spread varies from day to day, depending upon the whims of the cook. Don’t even think about asking Mrs. Bell for her recipe unless you can take a good tongue lashing. I left the kitchen at Hall’s, propelled solely by the withering gaze she cast my way when I was so audacious as to ask whether she preferred to use fresh beer or stale beer when making a batch.
1225 BOONESBORO ROAD / 859-527-6620
Hot Brown Sandwich
from Brown Hotel
Serves 4 to 6
Might as well admit it: this is ideal hangover food, just the kind of thing you crave, say, around 11:00 in the morning, when the bottle is still too much with you. The bland comfort of turkey breast. The salty bite of bacon. The creamy consolation of mornay. And I believe that such an application may well be what Fred K. Schmidt, the Brown Hotel chef, imagined when he first concocted this dish as a late-night feed.
8 to 12 strips bacon
2 tablespoons heavy cream (optional)
½ cup (1 stick) unsalted butter
6 tablespoons all-purpose flour
3 to 3½ cups whole milk, room temperature
6 tablespoons freshly grated Parmesan cheese, plus more for garnish
1 large egg, beaten
1 to 1½ pounds roast turkey, thinly sliced
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
8 to 12 slices toasted white bread, (crusts removed, optional)
Heat a large skillet over medium heat. Add the bacon without crowding, and cook, turning once, until crisp, 5 to 7 minutes. Remove to a plate lined with paper towels and keep warm. Repeat with remaining bacon, if needed.
Place the heavy cream, if desired, in a small bowl. Using a whisk, beat until light and fluffy, about 45 seconds. Set aside.
Heat the butter in a medium saucepan over low heat. Blend in the flour, and cook slowly, stirring until the butter and flour foam without coloring. Add the warm milk all at once. Immediately beat vigorously with a whisk to blend the liquid and roux. Bring to a boil and then reduce heat to simmer. Remove from the heat and add the Parmesan cheese and egg. Fold in the whipped cream, if using. Taste and adjust for seasoning with salt and pepper.
For each Hot Brown, place 2 slices of toast on a metal (or flameproof) dish. Cover the toast with a liberal amount of turkey to make an open-faced sandwich. Pour a generous amount of sauce over the turkey and toast. Sprinkle with additional Parmesan cheese. Place the entire dish under a broiler until the sauce is speckled brown and bubbly. Remove from broiler, cross 2 pieces of bacon on top, and serve immediately.
LOUiSiANa
hat’s a seven-course Cajun meal?” asks the wizened man, sitting on the steps of Johnson’s Grocery in Eunice. “A six-pack of beer and a link of boudin,” he crows, cackling with delight and taking a sip from a beer can sheathed in a brown paper bag. Take a peek in those crock pots that sit atop the counter in most any store south of I-10 and you’ll spy a coil of plump boudin sausage. What is more, you’ll find a wealth of little meat markets and crawfish stands scattered all across the southern end of the state, from Richard’s Seafood Patio in Abbeville to the Best Stop in Scott. And then there’s New Orleans, where you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a great poor boy shop or oyster house. Meet Tee Eva, who sings, dances, and dishes up a mean pecan pie at her Magazine Street snowball stand. Or lend an ear to the story of Creole chef Eddie Baquet, famous for his gumbo, red beans and rice, and pork chops with oyster dressing.
Abbeville and New Iberia
OYSTER HOUSES
Still life with bivalves and root beer.
Locals like to tell of the days when Joseph Dupuy would pole his skiff down the Vermilion River some twenty miles, harvest bushel after bushel of giant bivalves with a pair of oversized oyster tongs, and then turn around and pole his way back upriver to the little town of Abbeville, where he would sell his prize for a pittance. By 1869 he built a little bar of sorts by the river, catty-corner from the St. Mary Magdalen Catholic Church. In a short while, the cold, salty elegance of the mollusks he pulled from the local waters won Abbeville a reputation as the Cajun Country’s premier oyster town.
When Joseph died in 1928, his son Tee-Tut and his wife Loretta took over operations. Their son Roland followed, picking up his first oyster knife at the tender age of ten. The restaurant has seen a few changes in ownership since, including a long stint in the 1980s and 1990s when it was operated by Jack Faris, who now owns a glitzy nearby spot known as Shucks. Today Dupuy’s is but one of three oyster bars in this 11,000-person town. Black’s joined the fray in 1967 when the Borque family bought out Musemeche’s Restaurant around the corner. Shucks followed in 1995.
In the intervening years, all of the Abbeville oyster bars have made moves up market, adding pasta and crab cakes and other folderol. Of the three, Dupuy’s retains the most integrity. It has never been a fancy place: terrazzo tile floors, a horseshoe-shaped bar, a few oilcloth-covered tables scattered about the dining room, and a parking lot paved with spent shells. On a recent visit, the oysters, presented on a tray of crushed ice, smacked of salt like they should. Across the street at Black’s, now housed in an elegant former dry goods store, I sampled one of the best oyster stews that has ever graced my palat
e. Thick with chopped celery, onions, and plump oysters with a skein of butter floating on top of the milky morass, it was pluperfect. Either bar seems a fitting culinary tribute to the old oysterman Joseph Dupuy.
DUPUY’S OYSTER HOUSE / 108 SOUTH MAIN STREET / 337-893-2336
BLACK’S OYSTER BAR / 319 PERE MEGRET STREET / 337-893-4266
CRAWFISH BOILING POINTS
Locals call them boiling points or seafood patios, and they are so prevalent in modern-day Louisiana that it is difficult to imagine they are recent arrivals on the scene. Most are housed in prefabricated metal buildings—oversized garages really—with poured concrete floors and neon beer signs shining from narrow window slits. A few older boiling points are set in concrete-block roadhouses or barn-like structures covered in tar paper or galvanized metal siding.
No matter the setting, the trappings—and menu offerings—are similar. Out back you’ll find gargantuan boiling pots perched atop propane-fired flames. Inside, tables often covered in yesterday’s newspaper are set with rolls of paper towels and scattered about a bare-bones dining room. There’s a sink over in the corner for washing up. The menu is usually pretty simple: crawfish is the primary draw, though shrimp and crab are also offered, depending upon seasonal availability. All are boiled in a fiery slurry of cayenne pepper, salt, and any number of other spices from bay leaf to nutmeg. Boiled potatoes, boiled onions, and boiled corn are the side dishes of choice, though of late, some boiling points have taken to offering everything from gumbo to French fries.