Regional Delicacies

Going home.

I just returned from from a week in Kentucky, staying on our family farm, the Ben T. Kimsey Home Farm, where my family has lived since 1903. The farm is in Henderson, Kentucky; as of 2020, the population of the county was 29,781.

Parts of my hometown are aggressively ugly. The main artery in and out of town, United States Highway 41, colloquially known as “The Strip,” is a treeless vein of fast food restaurants, cell phone shops, car dealerships, and rotten, decaying husks of commerce. Here, the death rattle of late-stage capitalism rings its shrill pitch.

Beyond this hellscape are boundless expanses of cornfields, farmland, and a mostly unspoiled, undeveloped river bank abutting the massive Ohio River. This is the same town where John James Audubon, America’s premier naturalist painter, lived and painted for close to a decade.

Henderson was home to Sights Denim Systems, a family-owned concern that revolutionized the way raw denim was washed, aged, and patina’d. For decades it attracted many of America’s brightest and boldest designers, who made their pilgrimage to commune with the Sights family. The next generation has continued to be outsized in their impact on the global denim landscape - daughter Carrie went on to found Nashville-based Imogene + Willie, and son Bart leads Levi’s famed Eureka Innovation Lab in San Francisco.

I know a lot of people who hate going home. Not me. My visits are mostly spent indulging in the many delicacies and traditional foodways of the region:

We are known for our Western Kentucky barbecue, specifically mutton, the meat of a fully adult sheep. (As opposed to lamb, which is a sheep under one year old.)

Grippo’s, a sweet and spicy BBQ potato chip based in Cincinnati, Ohio, has its strongest following in our area - you’ll see a bag at every summertime cookout.

Across the river in Indiana, there is a strong culture of Germanic taverns that survive to this day. We always visit our favorites for lunch, quaffing beers poured into massive frozen goblets called “fishbowls.” These same taverns are known for their deep fried pig’s brain sandwiches, and thick-cut German bologna, seared on a flat top.

The region is also home to many pizzerias serving a style known as “Una Pizza,” a humble kin of the beloved thin-crust, square cut pies of Chicago bars and New Jersey taverns. We vacillate between favorites (RocaBar, Deerhead, and Turoni’s), debating who offers the best.

Here are some photos:

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