Road Food: Hot and Brown
It's a slow Friday afternoon, and most of the civilized world appears to be off at a convention in the Bay Area anyway, so any blog entries made now are in little danger of being read. It's a liberating feeling, and I guess this would be a good time to confess to a few crimes or make a sullen and pouty post about politics, but since I don't have any of that in me I think I'll try to work through my backlog of things I really and truly meant to write about in 2008. In this case, that means a restaurant report to be filed under Tasty Food That Will Kill You.
Last January I was passing through Louisville, and took the opportunity to try one of the local specialties, the Hot Brown sandwich. The Hot Brown, besides being a perennial silver medalist in Food That Sounds Like The Punchline To A Poop Joke competitions1, is a sandwich in name alone...
The Hot Brown was invented at Louisville's Brown Hotel in 1926, according to sources quoted by Wikipedia that I can't be bothered to verify, "as an alternative to ham and egg late night suppers". In other words: drunk food. Apparently you can find these all over Kentucky, but I went to the Brown itself for the canonical version. The dish's drunk food origins makes sense when you get into it-- thick sliced turkey breast meat served on toast, covered in Mornay sauce, finished under a broiler and topped with bacon and sliced tomato. It's basically a non-breakfast version of a breakfast skillet, which is exactly the sort of thing that sounds like an excellent idea when you've got a large amount of ethanol coursing through your system, and you're more interested in something to soak it up than in long term cardiovascular self preservation. Call it a classier way of filling the same niche that keeps taquerias open late and White Castle in business.
Forgive the blurriness of the pictures, they were taken with a lousy cameraphone, but you get the idea. A better picture, along with a recipe, can be found here. If the presentation in my pictures seems a little lame compared to the picture in the link, it's because my pictures show a half order. After a request was made at the time of ordering for an extra plate so the sandwich could be shared, the waiter niftily served it as two separately plated half orders without any extra charge.
The overall effect was very tasty, though a half order was more than enough. The turkey was moist, the bacon crisp, the Mornay sauce, while quite rich, had a nice tang to it that complemented the other flavors well. As noted, these are served all over the Louisville area and beyond, but considering the mutating influence of laziness that allows eggs Benedict to eventually transmorgrify into the Egg McMuffin, don't be surprised if someone's serving this in a bath of nacho cheese sauce instead of the Mornay.
On a related note, the Brown itself is an impressive old hotel. It was pretty empty the day we stopped there for lunch, which added to the impression of faded, elderly grandeur, reminiscent of the Algonquin, the Palmer House, or the Gigglesnort. A weird cool touch is the fact that the bathroom's wallpaper consisted of old New Yorker cartoons:
I kind of want that wallpaper. Reading a Thurber cartoon while I peed was probably what put me in the mind of the Algonquin, I guess. Anyway, I promise I'll stop taking pictures in bathrooms now.
1 Invariably edged out by Outback Steakhouses' "Chocolate Thunder From Down Under".
Last January I was passing through Louisville, and took the opportunity to try one of the local specialties, the Hot Brown sandwich. The Hot Brown, besides being a perennial silver medalist in Food That Sounds Like The Punchline To A Poop Joke competitions1, is a sandwich in name alone...
The Hot Brown was invented at Louisville's Brown Hotel in 1926, according to sources quoted by Wikipedia that I can't be bothered to verify, "as an alternative to ham and egg late night suppers". In other words: drunk food. Apparently you can find these all over Kentucky, but I went to the Brown itself for the canonical version. The dish's drunk food origins makes sense when you get into it-- thick sliced turkey breast meat served on toast, covered in Mornay sauce, finished under a broiler and topped with bacon and sliced tomato. It's basically a non-breakfast version of a breakfast skillet, which is exactly the sort of thing that sounds like an excellent idea when you've got a large amount of ethanol coursing through your system, and you're more interested in something to soak it up than in long term cardiovascular self preservation. Call it a classier way of filling the same niche that keeps taquerias open late and White Castle in business.
Forgive the blurriness of the pictures, they were taken with a lousy cameraphone, but you get the idea. A better picture, along with a recipe, can be found here. If the presentation in my pictures seems a little lame compared to the picture in the link, it's because my pictures show a half order. After a request was made at the time of ordering for an extra plate so the sandwich could be shared, the waiter niftily served it as two separately plated half orders without any extra charge.
The overall effect was very tasty, though a half order was more than enough. The turkey was moist, the bacon crisp, the Mornay sauce, while quite rich, had a nice tang to it that complemented the other flavors well. As noted, these are served all over the Louisville area and beyond, but considering the mutating influence of laziness that allows eggs Benedict to eventually transmorgrify into the Egg McMuffin, don't be surprised if someone's serving this in a bath of nacho cheese sauce instead of the Mornay.
On a related note, the Brown itself is an impressive old hotel. It was pretty empty the day we stopped there for lunch, which added to the impression of faded, elderly grandeur, reminiscent of the Algonquin, the Palmer House, or the Gigglesnort. A weird cool touch is the fact that the bathroom's wallpaper consisted of old New Yorker cartoons:
I kind of want that wallpaper. Reading a Thurber cartoon while I peed was probably what put me in the mind of the Algonquin, I guess. Anyway, I promise I'll stop taking pictures in bathrooms now.
1 Invariably edged out by Outback Steakhouses' "Chocolate Thunder From Down Under".