3. David Danielson - Churchill Downs, Old Stone Inn, Finished Bourbon includes Legent and Jeffersons Rum Cask

You can stop in here and grab a great bourbon or a glass of wine or a beer and a sandwich and it's very very casual and easy. And you've got a great old-fashioned here. Got a great old-fashioned.

I keep hearing about this thing. I'm gonna have to come here and try one of these things.

Welcome to another trip down the Bourbon Road with your hosts, Jim and Randy. So grab a glass of your favorite bourbon and kick back.

We would like to thank Tommy and Gwen Mitchell from Log Heads Home Center for supporting this episode of the Bourbon Road. Find out more about their fine rustic furniture at logheadshomecenter.com.

Randy, how you doing today? I'm doing well, doing well. We enjoyed today. This was fun. I just, Chef Daniel sent over there at the old Stone Inn, the charm of the place. I mean, you can imagine being a traveler from, you know, going from Louisville to Frankfurt and stopping in there to change horses and Like 1816. 1816, way back then. And having a meal at the tavern and something to drink and moving on down the trail.

What kind of bourbons were on the shelf? Actually, they weren't on the shelf back then, right? They were in the barrel.

Yeah. And he talks about, in this episode, about the buck. He said that was a forerunner to the mule and you'll have to have to listen in and check that out there that They've served right about that time and places around here like like the Old Stone Inn.

So yeah, I Really think our listeners are gonna enjoy listening to chef David Danielson chef and proprietor of the Old Stone Inn and Tavern in Simpsonville, Kentucky and also executive chef of Churchill Downs And also, he's an author. Yeah, wrote Urban Country Cooking.

Urban Country Cooking. With Tim Laird. With Tim Laird, yes. That's right. There you go.

Yeah, so I think we hit the trifecta there.

Yeah, great show. Really enjoyed it and enjoyed our porous today as well. It's a couple of things we hadn't tried. Anyway, I'm looking forward to coming and actually eating at the Old Stone Inn.

Yeah, I'm actually returning. I've been going to the Old Stone Inn now for probably 30 years, but it was under different ownership back then. So I've got a faint memory of the Old Stone back in my younger days, but I tell you what, it's a beautiful place and it's got a lot of culture and character to it. And now it's a great place for the bourbon community to come and enjoy a good meal and a good pour. A good bourbon on the stone. You'll have to check that out and you'll find out what that's about. Well, let's not tell them the whole story, Randy. All right, so here's our interview with Chef David Danielson. We hope you enjoy. We've got with us today, we've got Chef David Danielson. And Chef has been kind enough to afford us a little time to sit down with him and talk about what he's got going on and talk about and drink a little bit of bourbon with him.

There you go. And so what do we call you? Chef David, Chef David, Chef Danielson?

You know, Dave, Chef, whatever you feel comfortable with. I'm just happy to have you guys out here today. Thanks for coming out.

It's good to be here. My family and I have been coming to this place for a lot of years and it's kind of exciting for us.

Well, it's an amazing place and we're really happy to be here. We've been open now about six months and it's really exciting what's happening out here. And like I said, yeah, we're really excited to not only have you guys here, but to be back open and be having everybody come in to see what's going on out here.

Okay, so today we're having for our first pour, Legent from Jim Beam. Legent is a collaboration between Beam Suntory, both they're Eastern guys in Japan and they're guys here in Kentucky and they've taken bourbons and they've sent them across and had them finished. I think it's going to be interesting to try this.

I'm really excited to try this. It's one of these things that I've been looking forward to tasting. Yeah.

It's a beautiful bottle. For those who haven't seen it yet, it's got a great graphic. It definitely has kind of a Japanese look to it a little bit. If you're familiar at all with Japanese whiskeys, they have that sort of clean shape and design.

So what has this been finished in?

This is finished in wine and cherry cast, but it says on the label that it's partially finished.

I've not seen that before. So what is the base I know is from Jim Beam? Is this out of their small batch collection? Do we know exactly kind of where this came from or how they picked that?

As far as I can tell, at least from what I've read, Fred had chosen some barrels that he thought were appropriate for this project. And over the course of a couple of years, they were able to collaborate on this. They had samples going back and forth for some time until they arrived at this particular flavor profile.

Well, let's just quit the chitchat and get to it then.

I like the nose on it. Oh, yeah. Nice. It's kind of subtle. But I, but I think when I smell it, I don't really, I don't really pick up sherry cask too much. It's tasty. Yeah, that's a, that's a delicious dram right there.

That's really good. But it's very, I mean, it's got great flavor. It's, it's still very, very mellow and yeah.

What proof is this?

I think it's 94 proof.

94 proof.

So it doesn't really jut out in any one direction. They certainly didn't overdo it with the cask finishing.

No, it doesn't have a lot of... It's not, you can't tell it's not really, really altered, not a lot. You know what I mean? It's really straightforward bourbon. It's got a little bit of caramel notes to it. It's got good flavor, but it's very, very smooth too. And especially, you know, it's a little bit higher proof, but it's not hot. That's what I was saying.

For 94, it's really actually very smooth. Yeah.

I'm just getting just a tad of bitterness on the back end. I don't know, but it's not off-putting at all.

Mm-mm.

So Shinji Fukuyu, master blender of Suntory.

So is this the first collaboration between Beam and Santori that you know of? First thing they've done together?

As far as I know, this is it. This is it. Very good. Yeah. Yeah, I think it's a... Thumbs up here. It's a delicious pour. I think I might add this to my bar.

What if something like this goes for...

A gift shop price was $35 or $37. Yeah, it's fairly priced. That's really nice. It's hard to find a good bourbon in that price range.

Yeah, everything seems to be creeping up and creeping up and creeping up.

Don't you know it? I guess we can basically blame that on the recent bourbon boom here.

That's right. So, Jeff, what does the bourbon culture mean to you?

Well, you know, I'll tell you, it's it's very funny as somebody who's not originally from Kentucky or from Louisville and not a recent transplant. I've been down here now almost nine years. You know, I drank a little bit of bourbon before I came down here. It certainly wasn't a large part of my life. But coming down here and kind of watching the history over the last eight, seven years and really watching kind of how this is going and ingraining myself, it's really amazing how it's kind of taken off and how people have embraced it, not only from the culture of here but watching what's happening around the country and I think also watching internationally. I've been very fortunate over the last several years to travel doing several Olympics, Russia to Rio to China and watching bourbon expand in a lot of those markets. But it's very interesting from the collectors. I think there's one aspect of people who are really trying to get into that, watching the collectors. As you say, the bourbon prices keep going up. Also watching this whole kind of cocktail culture come in where people are going back and the craft cocktails have come move to the forefront and that's become a big thing. And then for me, somebody who's here watching and really learning the history and the lore and a lot of what's gone into that and getting to know the players and getting to know the distilleries and seeing kind of the old school as well as the new craft and the new people who are popping up, not only here, I mean, certainly around here, but our little country as well. It's very interesting to kind of sit back and watch this whole thing happen.

Yeah.

So you said that you'd had bourbon before you came and hit the bill here.

Yep. What was your first bourbon?

I think my first bourbon was probably Maker's Mark.

Maker's Mark.

OK. You know, I think when I was younger, I drank blended. You started seeing things like Seagrams and Veo and Canadian type blends that were not bourbon. And as a younger guy, you saw that. As I got older, I started really looking at it. And then I moved into Maker's, which was very, very prevalent up in Chicago. So I started, I had friends who either drank Jack Daniels or drank Makers. And that was the first time I really started drinking, you know, bourbon on the rocks or having a Manhattan or having an old fashioned. That was really kind of my first foray into that. So when you grew up in the Chicago area then.

Correct. So was there a deciding moment when you knew food would be your career?

You know, I think when I was young, I was always somewhat infatuated and I probably didn't really realize I was so into it. And I think one of my first jobs, one of the the moment that kind of the light switch came on. I was very young, I was working as a dishwasher in a French pastry shop. And watching these chefs make these amazing pastries and getting to taste all different new things and seeing this, that was a very marvelous thing to me. And I was like, oh, my gosh, look at this. What, you know, what are these flavors? What are these guys doing? And so that was the first thing that really kind of, wow, there's something to this, you know, and pastry shop.

There you go.

You know, but I was stuck in a dish tank with my elbows in a sloppy, sloppy water. But but that was the first thing that like it really intrigued me. Like that was that was I looked at the cases full of pastries and I thought, wow, this is something. Yeah.

So Chef, can you tell us about some of the places you've worked?

Yeah. Kind of after that, I went on kind of bumbling around, looked at what I was going to do. was a little bit involved in restaurants from the front of the house. And then I really kind of decided this is what I wanted to do. I went to a very small French cooking school outside of Chicago. And then I started my career with Ritz Carlton in Chicago. Shortly after that, they sent me to France for a year. I was very fortunate to work in the south of France. For a year, I worked in two different restaurants and a pastry shop there. I came back to Chicago. I went to work for a gentleman named Charlie Trotter, who at that time had really one of the top restaurants, not only in Chicago, but the country. Excuse me. And then, you know, from that, I started working in some some bigger hotels and traveling around. I spent some time in Las Vegas working on one of the casinos, the Aladdin Casino. I moved to New York, where I worked for a gentleman named David Boulay, a couple of small restaurants there. I spent a little time working for a resort company in the Caribbean. And then I moved back to New York, where I went to be the executive chef at Rockefeller Center. Then I left there, went to the United Nations, and then I moved back home to Chicago and was involved in a hotel there called the Palmer House Hilton, 1700 room, very large Hilton hotel in Chicago where I spent a lot of time. And really that's what started developing my career and seeing larger volume, bigger events. through that time, I did some side work on some sporting events, US Open tennis. I got involved in the Olympics. I went to Beijing. And so, you know, my background had really been kind of fine dining. And as as it progressed, I got into doing larger events and larger events, started a foray into sporting events. And ultimately, you know, that's what led me to moving here to Louisville to be the executive chef at Churchill Downs.

So was that a natural progression in your career? Do you feel like you were drawn in that direction or?

You know, I think what had happened was up until then, when you went to a sporting event, there was really a low expectation. You know, it was here's a lot of people coming in, we're feeding people and just get them through the line, get them fed. And as people's expectations changed, these events were trying to do nicer and nicer food. And they realized this was really a part of it. So They reached out to people who were more formally trained coming out of fine dining. And there was really a small net. There was a very small niche of people who understood how to take fine dining food, really high quality and escalated and extended out to do that type of volume. I think there's a lot of people probably didn't want to do it because they saw that like, oh, that I don't want to do that. Or people who didn't know how to do it. So yeah, that's kind of how that got to be. And that's what ultimately led me here to Churchill. And that was really, you know, for the last eight years at Churchill has been our mission is, you know, Oaks and Derby Day, we have 24,000 people that are on our premium areas between Millionaires Row and the Swedes and the turf club.

How many was that?

24,000 people a day. So how do we feed those people a restaurant quality, high-end dining experience, you know, in a kind of a seasonal temporary position where you turn it on for one week and then you turn it off. It's a very difficult type of thing, so.

So what, I mean, what was the transition that brought you to Kentucky? What was the, you know, the event?

I had just recently come back from the Olympics in Vancouver, 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, and I'd come back to Chicago. Levy Restaurants, which is the food service provider here at Churchill Downs. I had some friends who worked for the company. Some people said, hey, look, you know, Churchill is looking to continue to move their food service in an elevated way. And would this be something you're interested in? And I thought, you know, there were two events on my bucket list. I'd never done, which was the Kentucky Derby and the Masters. And I said, well, you know, I'm interested in seeing it. So I got on a plane. We flew down here. And my first day, they said, we're going to get this out of the way right now. They made me a hot brown for lunch and and gave me a tour of the place. And we looked around and You know, I thought this is something I really wanted to do. And it was, it exceeded even my wildest expectations once I saw the size and scope of what the Kentucky Derby was. And I looked at it and said, wow, this is really something. This is going to be an unbelievable challenge. And that really excited me. And that's, that's really what drew me to come down here.

Can you, can you kind of give our listeners the, just a, a 10,000-foot view of the scale of that operation? How big that operation really is?

Well, before I came over here this morning, I just checked in 10,000 pounds of short ribs. Wow. Yeah, you know, it's the type of thing everyone always asks, what do you guys do all year? And I said, you wouldn't believe it. We're playing for the Derby, right? Because it is 400,000 people coming through our doors Derby week. And it's not just the Oaks and the Derby. That whole week has become bigger and bigger. And we oversee all the food service from concessions all the way through to the premium dining. And we have 4,000 food and beverage employees. About 900 work directly for me in the back of the house. And it is an army of people preparing tens and tens and tens of thousands of pounds of food.

You must have a great senior management team.

We have an amazing team.

So what do you think the key is to having a successful event like the Derby? Go Flawless.

One, good planning, you know, a lot of planning and having a solid plan, being very, very organized, and then being flexible because plans change. You know, I mean, and that's the thing. So for us, it's about really understanding the skies and scope. Getting everything together and then as event day happens if it's sunny and 70 or if it's 40 and rainy or whatever it is being able to adapt really looking at it and being flexible and and anticipating you know our guests needs and anticipating what what can happen and being able to respond quickly.

So this derby coming up is this going to be what number for you? This will be my ninth derby. Ninth. So you you kind of have your act together by now I would think. Well we hope.

So go ahead. Oh so Chef are you you're responsible for the bar service as well?

I'm responsible. I have a beverage director who takes care of all the ordering, putting that in, but we work hand in hand. As far as beverages, looking at cocktails, looking at guest experience, obviously there's a lot of crossover. You know, bar fruit, this, that, cutting. You know, we have a semi-truck of mint shop, right? We have 125,000, 127,000 mint juleps. So we worked hand-in-hand sourcing these products, moving them in, working with our staff to make sure that we are making sure that we get the right product in the right places and be able to execute it.

There's just a little bit of bourbon consumed that day.

A little bit.

Well, let's switch gears for a minute. Let's talk a little bit about your book. Sure. What gave you the idea to work on the Bourbon Tentative Cookbook?

You know, when I came down here, I was, again, you know, it goes back to, you know, you talk about Bourbon, you talk about the culture of Bourbon down here. Before anybody comes to Louisville, you know about bourbon, you know about horses. And as I came down here, I really realized how little I knew about bourbon, how little I knew about the culture of bourbon. And that really opened my eyes to how little I knew about the agriculture, about the products from the area and the history. of the food and the dining in not only Louisville, but the South Appalachia in this region. So as we got into that and I started building relationships with farmers and finding amazing products and the different stories here, I really over the last eight years, found my kind of culinary voice cooking this regional American food and building relationships with farmers and doing that. And Tim Laird, chief entertaining officer for Brown Forman, him and I are great buddies and we happen to both love bourbon and would sit at night and have a couple of bourbons and talk a lot of this. And I told Tim I really wanted to write a cookbook and I was really interested in and I know he had written two previous books about entertaining. And we decided this would be a great collaboration. So we kind of put our thoughts together and decided not only want to write a cookbook, but we wanted to also talk about bourbon, we want to tell the stories of the area. And that's kind of how the whole thing, you know, kind of came together.

Did he focus a little bit more on the on the drinks maybe and then you a little bit more on the on the fair?

Yeah so I mean Tim certainly took the lead on the beverage side of it but you know he'd done a lot of entertaining and he's been through a lot of derbies and we both had a lot of friends so we collaborated kind of back and forth. And we looked at what was important. You know, there's different things in the book. We have a whole chapter on how to throw a derby party. So what was important on that? What would people enjoy? And so we kind of came together on a lot of that. And, you know, it was a lot of fun. We tested all the recipes many times, both drink recipes and food recipes. And It's great to collaborate like that. It's great to look at some of the stories. Dan Dry, who did the photography for the book, amazing photographer, really captured not only great images of that, but also brought some amazing images of the surrounding area of Essence of Derby and some other great stuff to go that really added to the book.

And the pictures are phenomenal. If you get a chance to get a hold of this book, the pictures, well, pictures worth a thousand words in this book, hey.

Well, absolutely. That was something important to us. You know, Dan did an amazing job and it really shows the area and it shows You know, it captures, I think, bourbon country as a whole. So that was kind of what we wanted to do and put together and tell that story.

Well, I particularly like that picture of shrimp and grits.

You know, when they're done right, and I've had shrimp and grits in Georgia, so I need to try your shrimp and grits. We've got a good one. So I think I'm going to have to make a move over here to the old Stoney Inn and bring the wife because she's all about that grits too, you know.

Yeah. And that's a great story. I mean, there's a perfect example just in that dish. You know, our grits are all local. We deal with a couple of different people. Weissenberger down here does amazing grits. Lua Mill right down the street here in Anchorage. We sort of grits from both of them. The Tasso using our Tasso gravy is made locally for us from a guy came smoking goose. So we've taken a lot of these local products and tied them together and made this really great, great dish.

So chef, you're a classically trained chef, basically. So how does one make the transition from being classically trained to this southern cuisine, so to speak?

Well, you know, I mean, here's the thing, right? Classically trained is really about technique, you know, and so even if you look at whether it's Southern cuisine, whether it's in Louisville, whether it's in New Orleans, whether it's a lot of the techniques and stuff come out of Europe are old techniques, I think. So what I did was I took that classic training. I came here, I looked at you know, what people were doing in the areas. And then you start looking at ingredients and you start finding out things like the greens that come here and how people prepare with their young spring greens. They're, you know, wilted maybe in a pan very quickly. The collard greens at the end of the season are braised down with some ham. So I took that classic experience. I took history has talked to a lot of people and I started looking at the ingredients and the history of what was happening here and really combine those two and really embraced kind of that Southern culture and that and that's how we combine them and came up with a lot of these dishes and a lot of that.

So what is Southern cooking to you? When they say Southern cuisine or Southern cooking, what constitutes that?

So to me, you know, there's a rich history here that comes back to when immigrants started moving to this area, you know, finding products that were either indigenous here that were brought in here. You had, at one point, 90% of the people who were in this area were farming and self-sustainable. So the majority of these recipes, the majority of these dishes came from what people were cooking on their farms. They were raising their own hogs, they were raising their own chickens, they were had their own dairy cows and growing their own vegetables or finding them or foraging them. So a lot of these dishes came out of that. We have a dish at the Old Stone Inn called an Appalachian stack cake. It's a very, very famous cake that came out of Appalachia. you know, the people there were impoverished. So these were special event cakes. And every family would make one layer and they would come together and when they came together, they would stack that up and it was traditionally served for weddings or special events.

How many layers do you think?

We've got about seven in ours. The more popular you were, the more layers you had. But here's something that has, you know, 100, 150 years of history to it. It's very, very well known. We took some historic dishes like that. And it's very funny. Probably, I don't think a week's gone by where I haven't had somebody from Eastern Kentucky come in and say, oh my gosh, I can't believe you have this. My grandmother made this. My aunt made this. My mother made this. And we always talk about everyone's little nuances. And the one thing they always tell me is we've never seen this on a restaurant menu. So, you know, this is this is a family thing. This is a traditional thing. So we've tried to find those stories and find that history and bring that forward and put that into our restaurant because we're trying to tell that story and we're trying to bring those those stories forward. So that's a lot of what we do. We look at, you know, potlicker and we look at the beans and we look at the ingredients that people were cooking with. And that's how we incorporate those into our dishes.

So when you open your book, in the very front, there's a few nice words said by Chef Edward Lee, and one of the things he says is that you, Chef, are generous, unflappable, you're a maniac, and the most experienced chef he knows, and also the funniest. And we've talked to you a few times now, and I can't agree with most of that, but what I don't understand is the maniac part. Could you elaborate? Where does that come from?

Well, that probably comes from about seven o'clock in the morning, derby morning. Yeah. You know, Edward was one of the first chefs we had up in the mansion several years ago. And everybody who, you know, has small restaurants, I think Magnolia 610 is probably a 50, 60 seat restaurant. And so whoever came in that day and we were, you know, it was derby day and we were getting ready to have 160,000 people in the house and there was lots of energy and lots of things moving around and No, he saw me and I was walking by rather quickly. I turned around and said, Hey, you know, what's going on? You're looking for something. And I took him to where he was going. And I think in the probably four or five minutes of me getting him to where he needed to be. He probably saw 10 or 15 interactions between myself and some other people and just was kind of overwhelmed by, you know, the volume and the energy and what was going on everywhere. And, you know, for a lot of I've had a lot of chefs come through who have had a lot of experience and were amazing chefs, but very, very few people ever get to see something the size of the Derby. And I've done a ton of stuff and have never seen anything of that magnitude. So I think he was like, you are out of control.

You take a walk down the hall, you have to handle five or six things during that trip just to keep up. Well, you know, the Derby is something that takes a lot of your time. We certainly appreciate you being with us. But I'm kind of curious about how you wind down after something like that. I mean, how long does that build up and that event last? And then how long does it take to wind down from that? I mean, it must be overwhelming.

You know, I think it's one of the crazy things that I've come to notice over the years is No, the derby, I mean, I think I see it greater with the derby, but the Olympics with any big event I've done, but the derby is certainly because of the size of it. There's so much more thought put into it, the planning that goes into it, the timing of it. There is also this very big emotional and adrenaline rush that hits you when you get into derby week. You know, a normal derby week for myself and my crew is 20 hour days. We're there anywhere between midnight and two in the morning and we leave at eight to 10 at night. You know, you go home, you sleep two or three hours a night, you come back and working on a 20 hour day. And it's really, you're running on adrenaline and then it's over. And I think there's a real letdown. You know, there's a, it's almost, I don't want to say depression, but there is an emotional, like, you know, you're physically and mentally exhausted. And then here's this thing that you've been waiting for and building up for for months now. So you're like, oh my gosh, now what are we going to do with ourselves? Right.

Right.

And so, I think you kind of regroup. Fortunately for us, we don't have a lot of time to regroup because we have 7,000 people coming from Mother's Day brunch to next week. But there's certainly a part of you that when it's over, There's a huge void there and you got to figure out, okay, what are we going to do? Pick ourselves back up and keep moving on.

What do you do in your downtime? I open a restaurant.

Well, we're going to, I tell you what, let's take a short break here. We've got another pour we want to get to, but we want to get into that new restaurant and start talking about that a little bit. But we're going to take a little bit of a break, folks. And when we get back, we'll have a new pour in front of us and we'll start talking a little bit about what else we've got to do. Yeah, let's do it. We would like to thank Tommy and Gwen Mitchell from Loghead's Home Center for supporting this episode of the Bourbon Road. Loghead's Home Center, nestled in the hills of Kentucky, is an industry leader in building handcrafted rustic furniture. Family owned and operated, they take pride in offering only the very best for their customers. The Logheads, and that's what they like to call themselves, are skilled wood crafters who are passionate about creating rustic furniture for people who appreciate the beauty of natural wood. Owners Tommy and Gwen don't just sell the rustic lifestyle, they live it. And you can be sure that Loghead's furniture will always be handcrafted in Kentucky by artisans who embrace the simple way of life. Loghead's rustic furniture is made from northern white cedar, a sustainable wood that's naturally rot and termite resistant. Its beauty and quality will add warmth to your earthy lifestyle for generations to come. Be sure to check out everything they have to offer at LogHeadsHomeCenter.com. And while you're at it, give Tommy and Gwen a shout on Facebook or Instagram at LogHeadsHomeCenter.

Welcome back, everybody. We're here at the Old Stone Inn with Chef David Dunn. I'm Danielson, excuse me. And he is going to introduce our second half pour here. I'm looking forward to this one. Tell us about it, Chef.

So our second half pour, we have the Jefferson Reserve Old Rum Cast Finish.

I don't think I've ever had a bourbon finished in rum casks before.

I don't think I ever have either. Neither have I. And I spent several years in the Caribbean sampling many, many rums. So one of the reasons that I picked this rum or one of the reasons I picked this bourbon was many, many years ago, when I first moved down here, I had the fortune of talking to Lincoln Henderson, the former master distiller of Woodford and Brown Foreman before he opened Angels Envy. And I had a great conversation with him about when he created the Masters collection, he started doing a lot of the finishings and that whole process. And I found it really amazing that this you know, the tradition and bourbon and the lore and history of it, that they were still continually looking to change the experience and change the product and look at how they continued to evolve this historic beverage, right? I mean, this is America's spirit. And it's got this long history, but they never just let it sit and say, hey, this is what it is. that even today, you know, we see that the distillers are out there and they're taking their bourbon. They're looking at how they finish it. They're looking at what they do and continuing to change and give us different expressions of these experiences. And just like the food, how it continues to evolve, I found that very, very interesting. And so that's what led me to to choose this.

Yeah, well, I'm excited to try it, Chef. So let's go ahead and take a nose on it. So I can pick up the rum on the nose, no doubt. Now, when we tried the Legent, it was a little hard to pick up the sherry or wine finish, but I'm getting the rum here. For sure. and on the palate as well, but I think it's a little more pronounced on the nose.

Yeah. You really don't get, I mean, I get it a lot on the nose. I think that for me, the bourbon still comes forward. I get a little bit of sweetness in it, you know, so you pick up a little bit of that, but again, really pretty smooth and

Yeah, I'm getting a little bit of, Randy, you tell me, can you pick it up? You getting a little bit of English toffee?

It's not tough. I'm getting more of a molasses almost on that back end, it seems like, but you know, each to your own. But that dark, you know, that I get what you're saying.

Yeah, it's like a molasses or a sorghum or you get that. This was the cane, right? I mean, that's where the rum comes from. So you get a little bit of that sweetness, but it's not, I think a lot of rums The sweetness is a little bit more on the front end. I think this sweetness is really more like on the back end. It's almost like a really on the back of your throat, like a really a dark sweetness, like a dark molasses that really thick. kind of syrupy flavor.

Yep. That's what I was looking, you know, where a lot of times you'll get that maple on some other stuff.

This is more of a dark, it's darker than that. Tasty.

Yeah, it's very tasty. 90.2 proof. So really pretty smooth.

Now, is this a, I'm not familiar with, is this a new offering from them or has this been around a while?

I think this is brand new. I haven't seen this out before.

Chef, why don't you tell us a little bit about the history of the Old Stone Inn?

Well, the Old Stone Inn has got quite a storied history. It was a building built in the early 1800s. It opened up about 1816. It was built and took about 17 years to build. And if you've never been out here, it's got two and a half foot thick stone walls. And the area had recently been wrestled from the wilds of that. It was built by a gentleman to live in. It took him 17 years to build. He actually went broke and never lived here a day. And then it was sold and turned into a stagecoach stop.

Now this was about when?

1816. 1816. So right about that time, it became a stagecoach stop. And this was a major place for people to switch their horses and the stagecoaches to come through. And a lot of prominent people came through here. The French general Lafayette came through here in about 1820s and they threw a ball upstairs for him. Andrew Jackson came through here, Abraham Lincoln came through here. Then over the years it became a boarding house, several other things. It turned into a restaurant around 1921. Two sisters had it for many, many years. And in the 50s, 60s and early 70s, it was really one of the prominent restaurants here in Louisville. Before the highway, 64 was built. Chilbyville Road, which we sit on, was the main thoroughfare connecting Louisville to Lexington and Frankfurt. So everyone came through here and this was kind of an amazing restaurant. Over the next several years, it went through several owners and had some ups and downs. And I kind of found this place about three years ago and remember driving by the first time and think, wow, that's the kind of place that I've always dreamed about owning. I started doing some due diligence and it took many years and here we are, you know, kind of through some odd coincidences. But one of the reasons that brought me to doing this is while Churchill is this amazing place in the Derby and I feed tons of people out there after many, many years, I felt that I needed a place personally and professionally where I could get back in the kitchen very, very hands on with a small group of people, create and create a little bit more personal experience for my guests and for me to have some interaction as well as find some new farmers and artisans and local people and continue to, you know, work on my craft of cooking.

So that was your vision that when you when you saw this place, you go, hey, this is what I want to do with it. Very much so.

And your vision differed from your predecessors, at least going back a number of years.

Yeah, I think, you know, everybody before me tried to hold on to what the Old Stone Inn was, right? So you have this place and it becomes very famous and everyone says, this is what it was. And then every owner tries to do the exact same thing. You know, it's kind of like the game of secret, right? You whisper a secret to somebody, then they whisper it to the next person. It goes down the line. But by the end, it's completely different story. So because it was never really their story. So we came here, we embraced the history and the magic of what this building was. This is a cornerstone in the community and the people who came here and celebrated weddings and rehearsals and all these things here. But we want to do our expression of food, our expression of service and hospitality and drink, which is a much more contemporary type of food, a little more modern, but still holding on to tradition of what the building was and what that meant to the community.

And the experience here in the dining room is a little bit different than what you'll experience in the bar area.

Correct. We have two different menus. So, you know, this for a long time was a special occasion restaurant, and I really wanted to make this someplace where everybody could come. It's funny when I opened this up, I As I was going around town and talking to people and going through the licensing process and all these things, I talked to people who said, well, I've never been there because I couldn't afford it. And I thought, oh my gosh, you know, how do you, how do you live in a community for many, many years and never go to this place because, you know, that's, that you couldn't afford it. So I wanted to make sure we had someplace that was accessible. So we have a dining room menu, which is a little bit more upscale, but still approachable. And then we also created a tavern menu that's got an amazing burger and it's got sandwiches and some salads. And so if you're out at the outlet malls or you're out shopping or you're out working on the farm or whatever, you can stop in here and grab a great bourbon or a glass of wine or a beer and a sandwich. And it's very, very casual and easy. And you've got a great old fashioned here. Got a great old fashioned.

I keep hearing about this thing. I'm going to have to come here and try one of these things shortly.

So your bar manager's name is Rob. What a find.

And Rob used to make me old fashions at another bar that I won't mention. And I said, I got to get this guy. And that's it. We really pay attention to the hospitality. We really pay attention to the experience. But we want to serve great drinks, and we want to serve great food. And yeah, it's very important to me that we do that.

So what's been the most challenging part so far?

You know, I think that, uh, initially when we first opened, uh, people came in and had, uh, expectations of the old place and said, Oh, you know, do you have a hot brown? Do you have fried chicken? Do you have the eggplant casserole they had on the menu for 40 years? And to explain to people, no, we're moving past that. We have this and that. And, you know, give us a try. And I think, you know, that lasted for about a month and then that kind of went away. And I really haven't heard that in months, you know, and people now really realize what we're doing and get it. But I think the the. The challenge is to come here every day and get people in here. It's operating at a high level and we have all different people coming in here and trying to exceed people's expectations every day. It's a very unique place. I've worked all over the world in some of the finest restaurants, finest hotels. I have never worked in a place where people have come in every single day and thanked me for being open. That's going to be very rewarding, I guess. Yes, it's very rewarding. But you also feel like, oh my gosh, you know, right? We have these people that are emotionally attached through generations. So it's a great thing. But you're also, you know, you're the torchbear, right? You're doing that and you're making sure that every day that we come in and that we are not only meeting but exceeding the expectations and the staff is doing that and they're all in tune. It's like operating any great restaurant. In one aspect, I come here, I tell people, everyone says, how do you do this? I go to Churchill during the day, I come here at night. One, I'm very fortunate, I have amazing staff here. My chef who's here, Jeremiah Brown, was with me at Churchill Downs for many, many years. My front of the house managers, my staff has come from the finest restaurants in the city. So we have an amazing staff here. But it doesn't feel like work. I feel like we come here and this is kind of a stress reliever, but you know, I do feel that with something this iconic and something that is this in touch with people that, you know, we have a very large responsibility to make sure that we're delivering on that responsibility every day.

There's a little bit of culture here. Absolutely.

It plays an important role. Sure.

So Southern cuisine is really kind of hot right now. I mean, it's the hot thing. So is bourbon, right?

We're in the right place at the right time.

How does it feel to have an inn and tavern like this with Southern food and bourbon right off the Bourbon Trail? Literally right off the Bourbon Trail.

Well, we're very, very lucky. And I think that, you know, we're in the middle of it. I find myself, like you say, you know, we're surrounded by some great distilleries. We have some local folks right down the street, Jebediah Creed. Bullitt is building right here. We've got Woodford and Buffalo Trace not very far down the road. And we see an enormous amount of people, both the locals who come in here every day. And it seems every day I have people who are traveling through, whether they're on vacation or whether they're coming into Louisville and want to get out of downtown and want to come out in the countryside a little bit. And we're really not that far outside of the city, right? You'd get on 64 and it's 15 minutes and you're out here. So we're also a saddle-bred capital of the world. So there's an enormous amount of people coming around the country to buy horses here. We have horse auctions and shows. So we have a great, great demographic, a very wide demographic of people who are coming out here. for the horses, for the bourbon, for all that, and want to experience a little bit of that. So, you know, us showcasing the Southern food, obviously showcasing the bourbon, educating our staff on the bourbon, I happen to be very lucky and I've just written a bourbon cookbook, you know, it all kind of plays, puts us in a great place, like I say, at the right time in the heat of it. So it's good. And, you know, the funny thing is we didn't really, I never set out to play on that whole thing as much as I did to really create a warm, open, embracing kind of dining experience. We never said, hey, gosh, we got to open a Southern restaurant right out here because this is the trendy, cool thing to do. When I came down here and we did this, that really wasn't the plan. But I fell in love with this building. I fell in love with that. And we really wanted to just kind of deliver that great experience and then we realized, you know, that we were kind of stuck up, caught up in the middle of it.

Yeah. I think it's, you know, if you're an out-of-town visitor coming to the Louisville area, the Bourbon Trail, and you're traveling between Bardstown and Frankfurt or even downtown Louisville now with the urban Bourbon Trail, You know, this is a convenient location for somebody. It's an easy off on the interstate.

I get people in here every week who are staying downtown and they say, I try to go out and talk to every table every night. And every day I talk to people who were staying downtown Louisville, I say, you know, how did you hear about us? And, you know, various things, whether it's advertising or people, you know, on their phones or whatever. So yeah, it really is a very interesting thing. And I think people, when they come down here, Louisville in general is a hot destination and people want to come down and experience. And I think the bourbon has really played into the tourism that is that is attracting not only people to come down here, but an interest for them to get out and get out into the country and experience some of that history and, you know, take a look around.

So for some of us locals, I told my wife about this place. I said, you know, it's reopened. We need to go back and check this out. So I bring her here to the Old Stone Inn. What are some popular menu items that you might recommend for us?

Well, we've got, you know, we deal with a lot of local farms. That's one of our big things is trying to partnership with a lot of the locals. So our menu is constantly changing. We always offer a ton of specials right now. We've got this amazing cornmeal crusted catfish with a little bit of chow chow tartar sauce with some grilled okra. We've got a fabulous, we call it a lamb pot pie from Freedom Run Farms, which is our local lamb grower. We've got an amazing pork chop with some sweet potato and Brussels sprouts that we're doing with a little sorghum glaze. We've got a farm where we had the whole crew out yesterday about 30 miles south of here in Mount Washington called Aqua Fresh, which is an aquaponic farm which grow all of our own lettuces. We hope start this farm about two and a half years ago. It was very difficult to find products the first weekend in May for Derby. So we started this aquaponic farm and we grow our own lettuce. So now, I think we've got about 7,000, 8,000 head of little gem water growing for Derby. And so it allows us to grow a lot of our own produce year round. So we're always doing stuff like that and folding it into the mix and putting some interesting twists on it. And of course, I mentioned earlier, we've got this Appalachian apple stack cake. I think that will probably never come off the menu. It's a must to finish up your dinner.

Does anyone ever ask you what chow chow is?

All the time. So chow chow is kind of a Southern relish. Ours has got a little bit of cabbage, a little bit of carrots and peppers, onion, a little cider vinegar, some sugar, and then we cook that down. A little chili flakes, not really spicy, but it's kind of like a pickled kind of condiment. And then we take it. and we use that as a base for our tartar sauce and give it a little bit of southern love. Oh, that's great. That's great.

So, okay. Popular drinks then. Is the old-fashioned, the popular drink?

You know, man, the old-fashioned is king around here, right? So, everybody loves an old-fashioned. We serve a lot of Manhattans. Out on the patio, we're getting ready to open up. We, Tim and I, collaborated on a drink for the book where we do a grilled lemonade. So we take lemons, we cut them in half, dredge them in sugar, we grill them, and then we make a rosemary simple syrup. And so we make that lemonade, we add a little bit of bourbon, and it'll be an amazing drink on the patio this summer when it gets a little hot out there. But we also have a custom ice press here that we We worked with our friends at First Build and we made this ice press that makes a replica of a stone we found here at the Old Stone Inn.

It's not bourbon on the rocks anymore. It's bourbon on the stone. Exactly. Bourbon on the stone, man.

You can't go wrong. We've got a nice selection.

So when do you expect your patio service to? We're going to open it the week after Mother's Day. Great. Awesome. Yeah. Looking forward to that. I know that in June, let me see, it's the 26th of June, actually, you're having the Louisville Bourbon Brotherhood out here for an event. Absolutely. Cooking at cocktails.

cooking cocktails. Tim Laird, my good friend and co-author will be out here. We're going to be doing some tasting of some little dishes and a bunch of different cocktails out here. And we've got a bunch of fun little things for them. And that's another great group. And that's one of the other things. There's so many great bourbon groups coming together out here. And You know, it's really fun to watch all the groups just looking at, you know, the heritage and the history and getting people out here and meeting people and hearing the stories. And I'm talking about bourbon and talking about what everybody likes, just like tonight, you know, there's always something new to look at. And it's always very interesting to to take a look at them.

Yeah, there's bourbon culture and there's also bourbon community and we've got a big community here.

Absolutely. And there's also bourbon flight. And I understand that you have a unique perspective on a bourbon flight that you're talking about serving here at the Old Stone Inn. We do. So we've got a unique building.

So we've got a little taste of bourbon through the ages, right? It's a history of bourbon told through the Old Stone Inn. And what we've kind of done is gone back to the beginning and created a flight based on bourbon over the ages. So it starts off with mellow corn, which was, you know, before we were aging it in charred barrels. And so we do a little mellow corn, which we do a drink called a corn buck, which is really the predecessor to a mule. And so bucks were traditionally anything with liquor based, a little bit of citrus and then finished with ginger beer. So we use mellow corn. We do that. And then we kind of move through, we do a little bit of a pre-prohibition where we're doing a bourbon punch, milk punch with bourbon, and then a kind of a modern day twist on a bourbon drink. And we've got a couple ones that we float back and forth with. So it's kind of a fun thing to come in and say, hey, look at, you know, going back to the 1800s, here's three different drinks and we can look at how bourbon has progressed and how it's changed as well as look at the history of this building and, you know, where we were in time. So it's fun.

That's really awesome. So, when you have friends coming in from out of town and you've got 24 hours with them and you want to take them out somewhere to eat, somewhere to enjoy a few drinks, other than the Old Stone Inn, we know that's first on the list, of course. Where do you like to take them?

You know, we've got a great... kind of crossover here of some historic restaurants, places like Jack Fry, where you really kind of come. I take people to Wagner's, right? You know, here's here's the morning of where the Jackie's and all the trainers and everyone go at a place like Wagner's for breakfast or you go to someplace like Jack Fry. But then we've also got this amazing new whole group of restaurants that have shown up here in the last several years in Louisville, places like Harvest, places like Becca places.

But

You know, I love to check out a lot of the different places. I go to, you know, Havana Rumba, I go to Luvino. I was just at an amazing dinner over there the other night. You know, the other day I stopped on Trolley and got a cheeseburger down on 4th Street. So, you know, I'm kind of all over the city. And I think that we also have some amazing museums here in town. Everybody loves to go see the Slugger Museum. I always take some people out on the Bourbon Trail. You know, I take them to my favorite distilleries and show them some of that kind of history. Muhammad Ali is amazing history. You know, there's really a lot of fun and interesting things here to do in the city, I think. Some of the new distilleries that have opened are amazing. I really love Evan Williams downtown. I think it does a great job of kind of telling the whole history of Whyleuville and the story of the river and how things move down here. They do a good job of explaining it. So, you know, it's the whole downtown, all the new distilleries down there. It's a great thing. You used to have to get out and really spend a whole day driving around to really see that. And while I love to get out and see The distilleries, I think they've also made it very, very convenient for people who are in town for a very short time to come down and really get a touch of that and experience it without, you know, having to spend an entire day going on to Claremont or going out to Woodford or some of the other places. So, you know, there's really something for everybody. And depending on how much time you've got, you just got to kind of figure out where that sweet spot is.

Yeah. I think that, uh, you know, certainly the, the main street bourbon experience now is amazing. Yeah. It's really something. I mean, we've got, well, we've got mix of, uh, of, you know, old, old hat distillers as well as some new guys. Right. Right.

So rabbit holes down there. You got, uh, you know, the whole urban bourbon trail.

And they're not, they're not just making a little bit of bourbon down there.

I mean, rabbit holes really putting out some, some, I also think too, you know, old Forester, they got the Cooperage in there, right? So that's something you don't get to see every day. And so there, there, there's some, there's a really interesting stuff happening.

So what do you think have been the keys to your success?

The key to my success, I think, you know, it's, um, I was very, very fortunate when I was young that I worked with some amazing people that taught me to always keep learning, you know, that taught me to be curious and taught me to always keep pushing. I mean, so I've been cooking for 30 years and I feel like I have as much to learn today as I did when I started. And so it keeps me completely engaged and keeps me focused and keeps me wanted to know more. And I think that, you know, I also think the big thing is I was fortunate enough to work in some great places that taught me a standard of excellence, you know, and really what That is in kind of the pursuit for that and every day you keep working, you keep working for that and never stop chasing it.

Yeah, so if you were to give a few words of advice to a young chef entrepreneur now that kind of looks up to you, what would those words of advice be?

Find a good mentor. You know, I mean, I, you know, I spent a lot of time. I think it's very important giving back because somebody did it for me. And I think today everybody wants younger, younger people want immediate satisfaction, right? They want to come in. They want to be the boss. They want they want immediate. Hey, I got to be here. And I think they lose sight of the journey and working with people and, you know, I traveled around the world. I worked in places and really spent time learning my craft. And that built an appetite to keep wanting to learn and keep wanting to challenge myself and keep wanting to get better. So I think part of it is, you know, take time to enjoy what you're doing and and, you know, don't chase the money chase chase. the good stuff, right? Chase excellence, chase what you want, and everything else will come. Great advice. Great advice.

Well, Chef, I want to thank you so much. Randy and I would like to thank you for taking time out of your schedule. Literally.

Well, man, thank you guys for coming out here today. Oh, man, I enjoy this place.

So, you know, we're literally a couple of weeks here before the Derby, right? Not even know right at a couple of weeks, about three weeks, three weeks. And so your schedule's got to be pretty hectic right now. For you to take time out to spend with us is very much appreciated. If you would like to share with our listeners maybe how they get a hold of you, whether they see you on social media or... A little bit about how to find your restaurant.

Yeah, how to find this. Headed west from Lexington, Frankfurt area. It's a Simpsonville exit there.

Exactly. Old Stone Inn. We're out here in Simpsonville. We're at the exit with the outlet malls right on Shelbyville Road. in the booming downtown Simpsonville.

We do have a stoplight.

We're half a block from the one and only stoplight, so you can't miss us. And then I'm on Twitter at KY Derby Chef. I'm on Instagram, KY Derby Chef, and I'm also on Facebook at the Old Stone Inn and Tavern, as well as David Danielson on Facebook. And we're posting regularly.

Well, we'll put all that in the show notes so people can look you up. And again, Chef, thank you so much for spending time with us. We appreciate it.

We appreciate it. It's been an honor, and we really enjoyed this. Well, great. Thanks for coming out, guys.

Thank you.

We do appreciate all of our listeners, and we'd like to thank you for taking time out of your day to hang out with us here on the Bourbon Road. We hope you enjoyed today's show, and if so, we would appreciate if you'd subscribe and rate us a five star with a review on iTunes. Make sure you follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, at The Bourbon Road. That way you'll be kept in the loop on all the Bourbon Road happenings. You can also visit our website at thebourbonroad.com to read our blog, listen to the show, or reach out to us directly. We always welcome comments or suggestions. And if you have an idea for a particular guest or topic, be sure to let us know. And again, thanks for hanging out with us.