BOURBON TO BURGOO
‘Top Chef’ gets a taste of Kentucky
LOUISVILLE, KY. — Hoecakes and Hot Browns. Benedictine spread and burgoo stew.
Not familiar with these Kentucky classics? You will be if you tune in to Season 16 of “Top Chef,” debuting Dec. 6 on Bravo. The upcoming installment of television’s culinary smackdown unfurls in the Bluegrass State, at the tippy top of the nation’s Y’all Line.
Fifteen contestants attempt to saute and sous vide their way to the winner’s circle in a series of challenges set mainly in and around Louisville, a city regarded by some as the gateway to the Midwest, and Lexington, the front porch of the South.
These two L cities, whose combined population is less than a million, align with a “Top Chef ” trend to film in less obvious locales — places that aren’t necessarily stocked with a Milky Way galaxy’s worth of Michelin star power.
“There are a lot of exciting things happening, foodwise, outside of the big cities,” said the show’s head judge, Tom Colicchio. “Everybody knows there’s great food in San Francisco, Chicago, New York. It’s great to showcase these other areas.”
While I chatted with Colicchio on a drizzly day in late May, an army of TV production assistants, food servers and hungry Kentuckians was milling about a Lexington warehouse. The space was being transformed into the setting for a “Top Chef ” fan favorite: Restaurant Wars.
A few other things to look forward to: Contestants duke it out for the affection of Laila Ali’s taste buds at the Muhammad Ali Center in Louisville, and “The Chi” creator Lena Waithe drops by for a challenge that has chefs reimagining the iconic Hot Brown sandwich, a nearly century-old culinary tradition involving thick slabs of turkey, bacon, mornay sauce, Texas toast and enough calories to fuel the Kentucky Wildcats defensive line.
Given that the bulk of the planet’s bourbon comes from Kentucky, you can bet the brown spirit — an increasingly big driver of the state’s tourism — plays a role in the show. The chefs venture about 60 miles south of Louisville to Maker’s Mark distillery in Loretto, where they get a tutorial on the country’s native spirit.
“It was really fascinating to learn the process of making bourbon, to understand it’s something uniquely American and cannot be made anywhere else,” purred the show’s velvetvoiced host, Padma Lakshmi,outside her trailer on the “Top Chef ” set.
For a spirit to be considered bourbon, it has to be made in the U.S. The grain mixture must be at least 51 percent corn. It has to be aged in new, charred oak barrels and, unlike other whiskeys, no artificial coloring or flavoring can be added.
In Kentucky, where bourbon is to the state what wine is to Northern California, the spirit has shed its grandpa’s-drink image and evolved into a legit tourism draw, as well as a signature ingredient in treats like Cellar Door Chocolates’ to-die-for bourbon balls in Louisville and Crank & Boom’s bourbon and honey ice cream in Lexington. Bourbon trails keep on growing, and distilleries are in an arms race to soup up their facilities and tour offerings. Suffice to say bourbonism is booming.
A third of the world’s supply comes from Louisville, an ideal spot to get into the spirit. The Old-Fashioned ranks as the city’s official cocktail. Who doesn’t love a city with an official cocktail? The Kentucky Bourbon Trail Welcome Center — part tripplanning resource, part educational facility — opened this past summer in the Frazier History Museum downtown.
Louisville boasts an increasingly robust food scene too.
“There’s just so many spots that are small and independent and have a really good energy,” said Chicago chef and judge Graham Elliot. “In that whole region, they’re using old techniques and curing hams, aging things — a lot of the handmade, craft aspect of cooking. They’re not using a tweezer to plate every dish so it looks like it’s coming out of Noma.”
Elliot’s list of Louisville favorites includes Royals Hot Chicken, a casual joint in the artsy NuLu (New Louisville) neighborhood, where you can snack on baked pimento cheese and top off your meal with fried apple pie.
He was just as smitten with MilkWood, an Asian-meets-Southern eatery from Season 9 contestant Edward Lee, and Decca, from another “Top Chef ” alum, Annie Pettry.
Pettry puts a sophisticated spin on local, seasonal ingredients in her NuLu restaurant, housed in a restored 1870s brick building with an expansive patio and a dimly lit cellar bar that feels like your cool friend’s parents’ basement.
When I dined at Decca, I scooped up every last morsel of my buttermilk ricotta toast and steak tartare — handcut rib-eye sourced from Kentucky’s Black Hawk Farms — with charred beets, sunchoke chips, creme fraiche and dill.
“The show’s going to blow up a lot of people’s conception of Kentucky,” predicted Pettry, an Asheville, N.C., native who landed in Louisville in 2012.
“I was really worried there wasn’t going to be enough produce when I moved here from California, but it’s a lot more agriculturally rich than I thought,” she said about the bucolic surroundings, where tobacco farms have given way to more wholesome crops.
“The show’s going to be good for the state, the city and probably the restaurant,” Pettry added.
Eighty miles east in Lexington, I stopped in at one of the newest ventures from the queen of Kentucky cuisine, Ouita Michel. She’s a guest judge on the upcoming season.
An indefatigable fan of the region’s family-run farms and food purveyors, the prolific restaurateur opened Honeywood last year. The affordably priced menu is full of comfort-food staples. Five bucks gets you a hearty bowl of soup beans and a tasty hoecake made with cornmeal from sixthgeneration Weisenberger Mill near Midway, where Michel has her flagship restaurant, Holly Hill Inn.
“There’s such a vibrant food culture going on right now in central Kentucky, with lots of young chefs, new food entrepreneurs,” said Michel, who was invited to cook a Bluegrass meal at the James Beard House earlier this year.
“We have some of the most beautiful agricultural farmland in North America,” Michel said. “We’re also famous for our cornmeal, our grits, our sorghum, Kentucky lamb, chicken, beef. I’m hoping ‘Top Chef ’ will shine a giant spotlight on all of that.”
Her advice to viewers who might be inspired to see it — and taste it — for themselves?
“Just try to find places serving local ingredients, and you can’t go wrong,” she said. “And don’t leave without trying the bourbon.”