Since moving to the Commonwealth, I’ve learned (and enjoyed!) a lot about Kentucky. My favorites are its welcoming people, amazing state resort parks, first Saturday of May festivities, wonderful variety of bourbons and the legendary Hot Brown.
I love everything that goes into Kentucky’s Hot Brown open-faced sandwich, from the moist baked turkey, crisp bacon and slightly broiled tomatoes, to its bubbling hot, cheesy Mornay sauce. So, it’s no surprise that the flavorful Hot Brown has become my favorite “go to” meal. This being the case, last fall I jumped on my bicycle and pedaled my way to various parts of the Commonwealth to see what I could learn about Kentucky’s most famous dish. Since the Brown Hotel in downtown Louisville is where the Hot Brown was created—thus the sandwich’s name—that’s where the bike ride began.
Ten things to know about Kentucky’s iconic Hot Brown:
1. Just as all roads led to Rome at the peak of the Roman Empire, so it is that all roads lead to the Brown Hotel for those seeking the epicenter of the Hot Brown world. “Experiencing” a finely crafted, perfectly prepared and elegantly served Hot Brown at the historic Brown Hotel should be on every Kentuckian’s bucket list. As for me, I’ve asked that the Hotel’s Hot Browns be served at my funeral meal!
It’s not by accident that, of the tens of thousands of meals served at the Brown Hotel each year, the Hot Brown is the most often requested dish. According to Executive Chef James Adams, who was kind enough to visit when I stopped by, every year the Brown Hotel uses more than 3,000 10-pound turkeys and 5,000 gallons of Mornay sauce to prepare 75,000 Hot Browns for its guests. That’s an average of 200 every day!
This being the case, the Hot Brown and the Brown Hotel are joined at the hip. The hotel celebrates this association, as posters there proudly commemorate the 1926 birth of the Hot Brown. More importantly, Adams is passionate about preserving the hotel’s Hot Brown as the “world’s best.” When it comes to Hot Browns, nothing is left to chance.
2. The Hot Brown began as a midnight snack. Back in the Roaring ’20s, the Brown Hotel drew 1,200 guests to its weekend dinner dances. The band played into the wee hours of the morning. When the dancers needed a break, they headed to the hotel’s restaurant, where an egg-and-ham dish was the long-standing favorite.
Late in the autumn of 1926, Chef Fred Schmidt began to seek a more interesting alternative to satisfy his hungry guests. Looking around the hotel’s kitchen for available ingredients, he decided to top a slice of toast with a scrap of turkey, a dollop of a cheesy sauce, and a couple of strips of bacon (out-of-season tomatoes were not available in the 1920s). Schmidt assembled this concoction, broiled it a few minutes, added seasonings and—magically—a new dish was born! In no time at all, the Hot Brown was on its way to becoming the legendary dish that now is a Kentucky favorite. Since that fateful night, the Brown Hotel has served more than 1.5 million Hot Browns.
3. The key to the Brown Hotel’s Hot Brown is the homemade Mornay sauce—and it’s a big secret. Although the hotel placed its Hot Brown recipe on its website for all to see, I have concluded that there’s more to the hotel’s fabulous Mornay sauce than meets the eye. Adams admitted as much when he told me that he and three others are the only people in the entire world who know what that is.
After being invited to the hotel’s kitchen to watch Hot Browns being made, I offer a hint: It may have something to do with the proportioning of whole milk to heavy cream, the type of saucepan that is used, and an uncommon seasoning that is sprinkled on each Hot Brown seconds before it’s taken bubbling hot to a dining room.
4. The Hot Brown is a sandwich … or is it a casserole? As I biked from place to place, I kept wondering what I should call the Hot Brown. If it is a sandwich, clearly it is open-faced. But the Hot Brown is so much more than a sandwich. When it emerges from a broiler bubbling hot and picturesque, it looks like a casserole, which is what a few Kentucky restaurants call it. So, which is it: sandwich or casserole? When I asked Adams, he told me: “If it goes in as one, is magically transformed, and then comes out as the other … then it’s both!” Sounds good to me.
5. Hot Browns are HOT! As in being tremendously popular, throughout Kentucky and beyond. Chefs at every Kentucky restaurant I visited told me that the Hot Brown is their most often requested dish.
The dish’s fame grew outside of the state when popular celebrity chefs such as Bobby Flay, David Chang and Sean Brock featured the Hot Brown on their shows. Tourists, media bigwigs, Hollywood stars and celebrities attending the Kentucky Derby all began making a point of enjoying a Hot Brown while in Louisville. And then they would go home and tell their friends and colleagues. Louisville Tourism reports that a large number of foodies travel to the city for the simple purpose of experiencing a Kentucky Hot Brown.
The Hot Brown has been featured in Southern Living, the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, NBC’s Today show, ABC World News with Louisville’s own Diane Sawyer, the Travel Channel and The Wall Street Journal. In January 2015, National Geographic magazine named Louisville as one of its top 10 international food cities. Louisville was one of three American cities to receive this recognition. Cincinnati was included for its chili; Buffalo, New York, for its Buffalo chicken wings; and Louisville for its Hot Brown. Truly, the legendary Hot Brown has put Louisville and Kentucky on the world’s cuisine map.
6. The world’s most noted Hot Brown “Throwdown”: The buzz surrounding the Hot Brown reached dizzying heights in 2008 when the aforementioned Flay and his wildly popular Throwdown! With Bobby Flay television food show challenged Brown Hotel chefs to a Hot Brown throwdown. Judges, who were not told whose Hot Browns they were tasting, determined the Brown Hotel’s was better than Flay’s. The prize: bragging rights and a bottle of Woodford Reserve bourbon.
As part of the prestigious 2017 Cookbook Awards—the Oscars of the food world—held by the International Association of Culinary Professionals at its annual conference in Louisville, a friendly Hot Brown “Smack-Down” was held at the Palace Theater. It was an enormously popular exhibition of Hot Brown making. Five hundred professional chefs from around the world enjoyed the rare privilege of sampling the planet’s best Hot Browns. Kentucky chefs received enthusiastic and highly deserved acclaim.
7. There’s amazing variety in Kentucky’s Hot Brown world. Even chefs who are committed to offering the traditional Hot Brown find ways to innovate the use of breads, sauces, cheeses, meats, tomatoes and seasonings to distinguish their creations. No two Hot Browns that I sampled during the bike ride were the same.
I was fascinated by chefs who are more focused on creating their own rendition of the Hot Brown than in trying to clone the traditional sandwich. When I stopped at the Bluebird restaurant in Stanford, Executive Chef William Hawkins stated emphatically, “I don’t want my Hot Brown to taste like anybody else’s. There are plenty of places to go if one’s looking for a good, traditional Hot Brown. There’s no need for me to offer one more. While I am respectful of time-honored recipes, I delight in treating guests to dishes that are unique and intriguing.”
At Hawkins’ Bluebird, the Hot Brown is cleverly named “Hot Blue.” As promised, it was a striking alternative rendition of the traditional Hot Brown. Visually appealing, light in texture, and distinguished by multigrain toast points, fried green tomatoes, slices of country ham and turkey, smoked gouda sauce, a roasted red pepper coulis and a tomato-bacon-scallion crumble, Hawkins’ Hot Blue is a fabulous dish. It’s worth driving—or biking—many miles to experience.
Seeking variety, I also came upon a breakfast Hot Brown (much like an eggs Benedict), Hot Brown pizza, Hot Brown panini sandwich, Hot Brown tater tots, Hot Brown burger, Italian Hot Brown, Hot Brown crêpe, Hot Brown soup and Hot Brown salad. There’s even a Cold Brown, created especially for summer dining.
8. Who would have imagined a vegan Hot Brown? I came across this dish at the popular V-Grits Restaurant in Louisville. In this day and age, anything seems possible, but a vegan Hot Brown? The restaurant’s name—Vegan Girl Raised In The South—describes its owner, Kristina Addington, who told me that she grew up in southern Kentucky eating the traditional Hot Brown. When she became a vegan, one of her goals was to “eat more compassionately without missing out on any of Kentucky’s great dishes,” she said. So Addington set out to create a vegan Hot Brown, as she stated, by “using ingredients that are savory, appealing, animal friendly, and better for the environment and our health.”
When asked how she replaces the Hot Brown’s traditional ingredients without sacrificing flavor, Addington said that a layer of pimento cheese grits is placed at the bottom of an iron skillet, and then a homemade biscuit is placed on top of the grits, followed by a layer of thin slices of vegan turkey. The base of vegan turkey is protein wheat flour, similar in texture to bread dough, and spiced up with typical turkey seasonings. Caramelized onions are added, along with a coconut milk-based white sauce, roasted cherry tomatoes and large strips of seasoned, roasted coconut that taste a lot like bacon. How popular is her version of the Hot Brown? Addington gave me a thumbs-up, adding, “It’s incredibly popular!” Count me among its fans.
9. A Hot Brown’s presentation affects its flavor. While watching Hot Browns being made and noticing that chefs painstakingly place each ingredient to make the dish visually attractive, I began to wonder if the arrangement of ingredients in the skillet or plate also affected the dish’s flavor. When I asked this question of Dan Robinson, a retired chef, he told me, “Yes, indeed! The artistry of food design [that is, the ordering and arranging of ingredients on the plate, the careful placement of each in relationship to the others] causes colors, textures and flavors to merge … thereby affecting the Hot Brown’s appearance and taste. It’s basic chemistry.”
Every chef I talked with underscored the importance of transferring the bubbling hot Hot Brown from kitchen to table as quickly as possible. This immediate delivery enables the sauce, cheese, bacon, turkey, tomato, paprika and other seasonings to merge in front of the diner. Robinson described this melding as the “greatest moment.” As the Hot Brown is served, he continued, “Its smells fill the air with flavor. Nostrils flare, eyes are delighted, and the mouth begins to water … all in anticipation of a dining experience that has been accomplished by an expert chef who artistically created this visual, aromatic and taste sensation. That is what the Hot Brown was, is and always should be. Not just another dish but a memorable, sensual dining experience.”
10. The largest Hot Brown ever! In 1999, the staff at the now-closed BiScotti Bistro in La Grange decided their best chance at being mentioned in the Guinness Book of World Records was to make the largest-ever Hot Brown. They created a mammoth 65-pound sandwich that measured 56 by 28 inches and was 3 inches deep. Wow! In putting the sandwich together, the BiScotti Bistro staff used 10 loaves of bread, 16 pounds of turkey, 3 gallons of cheese sauce, 200 tomato slices and 2 pounds of bacon. There’s no record that Guinness officials confirmed the dish to be the largest-ever Hot Brown, nor is there a record of the number of people this enormous dish served.
The Last Word: Hot Browns may not be for those on a diet or trying to lower their cholesterol. But if you are looking for a comfort food that is a delight to view and a pleasure to eat, warms your tummy, and sets you up for a nice nap, the Kentucky Hot Brown is exactly what the doctor ordered. As celebrity Chef Bobby Flay stated: “The only bad thing about a Hot Brown is that you’ll need a nap right after you eat it.” Tell me, what in the world is so bad about that?
Kirks Favorite Hot Brown Experiences
I heartily suggest that readers enjoy a Kentucky Hot Brown whenever they have the opportunity. If, however, you find yourself near one of the following eateries, don’t make the mistake of passing by. They are certain to provide a memorable Hot Brown experience:
Brown Hotel, Louisville | This is the most perfect and satisfying Hot Brown Experience in the entire world! The Brown Hotel knows how to do Hot Browns right. It should, since it’s been serving the dish since 1926.
Bluebird, Stanford | Chef William Hawkins’ Hot Blue is a creative and highly enjoyable nontraditional rendition of the Hot Brown. The Bluebird experience is made evenmore satisfying by a friendly and attentive staff.
Two Rivers Restaurant at General Butler State Resort Park, Carrollton | Everything about the Hot Brown experience that I enjoyed here was superb, but the Kentucky Proudbacon and country ham were the stars. This terrific version of the Hot Brown is offered at all 17 Kentucky state resort parks.
Serafini, Frankfort | Serafini presents a splendid ambience in which to enjoy a colorful, flavorful Hot Brown along with a variety of appealing salads. If you are in our state’s capital city and are in the mood for a Hot Brown, Serafini is definitely the place to go.
Suggins Bar & Grill, Lexington | Suggins is an informal, cozy neighborhood restaurant and gathering place. Its regular diners are fortunate to have convenient access to a fabulous Hot Brown, which is thoughtfully offered in regular and half-size servings.
Parkette Drive-In, Lexington | Featured on the Rachael Ray Show in 2013, Parkette’s popular Hot Brown burger includes two Angus beef patties smothered with creamy Alfredo sauce and topped with three slices of turkey, two slices of bacon, American cheese and a sliced tomato, served between toasted hamburger buns. This is atrue gut-buster!
Greyhound Tavern, Fort Mitchell | This welcoming family dining venue, full of tradition and gracious sophistication, is the perfect place in northern Kentucky to enjoy a robust Hot Brown—with salty country ham, oven roasted turkey breast or both. Attentive service assures a satisfying experience.
Old Talbott Tavern, Bardstown | Dining on a bubbling hot and perfectly seasoned Hot Brown while seated in front of a blazing fire on a cold, rainy afternoon transformed a dreary day into a thoroughly enjoyable occasion. Other diners in the room agreed that the Talbott Tavern Hot Brown experience is the best in the area.
The Whistle Stop, Glendale | The Whistle Stop is highly regarded for countless menu items, such as its remarkable meringue pies. Its Hot Browns also receive enthusiastic acclaim, and for good reason.