On the Road: Bourbon Trail Pit Stops
On Kentucky's backroads, we hit three spots for standout sausage biscuits, iconic cheeseburgers, and Texas-style barbecue.
Welcome to the weekend!
Kentucky has an outsized influence on American culture. It’s the birthplace of bluegrass music, the host of the Kentucky Derby, and, most importantly, the home of bourbon. Visiting the state’s most celebrated distilleries means setting a course for Kentucky’s rural counties and small towns. So in today’s On the Road newsletter, we are hitting a couple of worthy stops along the way: 150 Quick Stop in Bardstown for a morning sausage biscuit, Laha's Red Castle in Hodgenville for a diner cheeseburger, and Ken-Tex BBQ in Shelbyville for a barbecue dinner. Bourbon tasting calls for hearty meals.
Also this month, we debuted our new Field Guide to Brooklyn, New York. It features a three-day itinerary with our picks for coffee, breakfast, lunch, dinner, and drinks. All our Field Guides are included in a paid subscription, as is our Google Map of every spot we’ve ever written about.
Before we close our laptops and enjoy the summer Friday, our Weekend Reading list features a guide to Lexington-style barbecue, a spotlight on four places to eat on Martha’s Vineyard, and a look at spots in New York and New Jersey that are as fun as they are tasty.
Thanks for reading!
— Amy Cavanaugh & Kenney Marlatt
Editors, American Weekender
A Special Anniversary Giveaway with Our Friends at American Spoon!
As we travel the country for American Weekender, we are always seeking out good American companies producing delicious products. That is how we came across American Spoon. Headquartered in Petoskey, Michigan, American Spoon has a handful of shops around the state as well as an online store. During our annual Saugatuck summer trips, we always pay a visit to the American Spoon store in town to stock up on favorite products. We’ll get a few jars of chili jam to make pimento cheese, citrus and passionfruit curd for spreading on Vanilla Cream scones from King Arthur Baking (another good American company), and wildflower honey mustard for sandwiches.
To celebrate our three-year anniversary, our friends at American Spoon have graciously offered to send one lucky paid subscriber some of our favorite treats. Your gift box will feature all the products shown above, including the chili jam, citrus and passionfruit curd, and wildflower honey mustard, plus their sour cherry preserves, peach habanero jelly, and more!
How to enter: If you are a paid subscriber, you are automatically entered! If you are a free subscriber, you can enter by upgrading to a paid subscription — just $50 a year with our summer deal! You’ll also get all our paid perks like our Field Guides and Google map. Entries close on Friday, July 31, when we’ll randomly select a winner. Good luck!
Backroad Bites Along the Bourbon Trail
KENTUCKY — Most of the time we have spent in Kentucky has been in its biggest cities: Louisville and Lexington. We’ll also take a second to shout out Paducah, where we’ve spent a bit of time. Today, we’re making the stops in between the main events.
Let’s start in Bardstown, which is best known for bourbon distilleries. We are fans of Willett Distillery, which you could visit after fueling up with fantastic sausage biscuits at the 150 Quick-Stop. This classic gas station / market / restaurant mashup is the home of Jake’s Fresh Country Sausage. You’ll find it listed on Google Maps as “150 Quick Stop Jake’s Sausage,” and you may hear folks refer to it as “Jake’s” — that’s how you know the sausage is the star.
Whatever you want to call it, the place makes delicious mild and spicy pork sausage. You’ll find your standard truck stop products lining the shelves — chips and candy, grocery items, various flavors of Ale-8-One, Kentucky’s go-to soda. But you (along with everyone else) are here for the sausage.
In the mornings, you’ll find a heated glass case stuffed with foil-wrapped biscuit sandwiches slapped with an orange sticker denoting the filling. You can get a tenderloin biscuit; a bacon, egg, and cheese biscuit; a bacon and egg biscuit; a bacon biscuit; a ham biscuit; a sausage, egg, and cheese biscuit; a sausage and egg biscuit; a sausage and cheese biscuit; and a sausage biscuit. That’s a lot of offerings, so to make this easy, get our favorite: the sausage biscuit.
Snag one from the case, fill up a styrofoam cup with drip coffee, and grab a seat at one of the tables. The golden brown biscuits have a tender crumb and a smashed patty of juicy, peppery sausage with craggy edges. If you opt for one with an egg, it’s fried with a cooked yolk. There’s nothing fancy here, just a good, satisfying breakfast.
The biscuits aren’t the only draw here, and you could eat every meal at the 150 if you wanted. The weekday lunch menu features $9.99 plate lunches with a meat, two sides, and a roll. Options include Jake's sausage cheeseburgers, fried chicken, and pork chops, with sides like broccoli casserole, green beans, and creamed sweet corn. From 4 to 7 p.m., there are smash burgers and freshly fried potato chips, and deli sandwiches are available all day.
You can also take some sausage for the road. Refrigerated cases are filled with stacks of one-pound sausage tubes, and both the mild and spicy versions are popular with chefs in the region. Beechmont Bakehouse in Louisville uses the sausage for Scotch eggs. Scout & Scholar Brewing Co. in Bardstown turns it into sausage balls made with Tillamook cheddar. Mr. Tubs in Bardstown puts it on pizza and tucks it into flatbread sandwiches with tzatziki and green sauce. Mileta, which we featured in our Lexington Overnight Stay, uses the sausage in ragu with Calabrian chilis and serves it over lumache. Or, just tuck it into a biscuit — sometimes the simplest thing is the most satisfying.
We had learned about Jake’s from our favorite culinary travel show, True South, and now we’ll head to another spot featured on the show — Laha’s Red Castle. Make this your lunch stop. Laha’s, which is located about 30 miles southwest of Jake’s, is in Hodgenville, the birthplace of Abraham Lincoln. There are all kinds of Lincoln things in this town, including statues, the Lincoln Museum, and the radio station, WLCB Abe 93.7 FM (the station’s logo incorporates both a stovepipe hat and a penny).
Laha’s is also a Hodgenville icon, and the scent of burgers wafts through town. A little corner grill, the diner opened in 1934 and is still in the Laha family. Pull up one of the red or black stools to the counter and order a double cheeseburger with fried onions. It’s only one patty, but it’s larger than the regular. The burgers and hot dogs are cooked on the griddle, which dates to 1954. When your burger is ready, the cooks will slide it off the well-seasoned griddle and serve it directly to you on a square of wax paper. You can get the burger served deluxe with lettuce, tomato, pickles, and sauce, or just squeeze on ketchup and mustard from the bottles on the counter. This is a tasty burger, loaded with delicious onions that perfume the air. Round things out with a chili dog, crinkle fries, and a Coke or Ski.
Finally, about 75 miles north of Laha’s in the town of Shelbyville, you’ll find Ken-Tex BBQ. Kenney has been stopping here for decades and during his college years in Indiana, he’d always return from breaks with a pound or two of Ken-Tex brisket stashed in a cooler. We’ve picked up that tradition and stopped in during our own drives across the state. The restaurant turns 40 this year, and as you might gather from the name, brings Texas influences to Kentucky (the two original owners hailed from these states). The wooden exterior is marked by a sign with a Texas Longhorn, and the menu features Longhorn Stew, as well as hickory-smoked brisket and smoked sausage, the two hallmarks of the state’s barbecue.
You can also get chopped pork or chicken, sliced pork loin, pork ribs, or smoked salmon (available on Friday nights). The prices are affordable — $6.50 for a large chopped barbecue sandwich ($8.99 for sliced) and $2.89 for a six-ounce side dish like pinto beans or chili. For the ambitious among us, there’s even this option — “Eat everything in the restaurant you want & then finish your meal with any dessert of your choice” for just $39.99 (those desserts might include spice cake, cherry cobbler, or pecan pie). Sit at one of the black-and-white-checkered tablecloth-covered tables in the wood-paneled dining room or out on the front porch. Make your order a brisket sandwich or sliced brisket, with sides of creamy potato salad and cole slaw; load up on cornbread, pickles, and pickled jalapeños, and enjoy it all with an Ale-8-One — this is still Kentucky, after all.
150 Quick Stop: 4598 Springfield Rd, Bardstown, KY | @jakes_sausage
Laha’s Red Castle: 21 Lincoln Square, Hodgenville, KY | @lahas_red_castle
Ken-Tex BBQ: 1163 Mt Eden Rd, Shelbyville, KY
More On the Road Features
All Our Favorite Spots in Brooklyn, New York: A New Downloadable Field Guide for Paid Subscribers
All our Brooklyn favorites are now available as a three-day Field Guide that you can download on our website. As always, it’s free for paid subscribers — just use the discount code found in this month’s Weekend Getaway newsletter at checkout. Here’s what you get:
Three-day recommended dining itinerary
Picks for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and drinks
Downloadable for quick reference
Designed for your mobile phone
Reminder: As a paid subscriber, you can use this month’s code to download any other Field Guide you’d like for free! We recommend saving your Field Guides to Apple Books or Dropbox for the best experience on an iPhone. Google Drive works great too on other smartphones.
Members-Only Google Map
Paid subscribers also get access to the American Weekender Google Map. This map includes every place we’ve ever mentioned in our newsletters plus every place we’ve ever recommended in our Field Guides. Whether you’re looking for roadside barbecue in Tennessee, afternoon cocktails in New Orleans, or a farm-to-table dinner in Western Michigan, our map — which has more than 1,350 locations! — will point the way. We update it with new spots each week, so keep it bookmarked for your next trip. Paid subscribers can find the map linked in our latest Weekend Getaway newsletter.
NEW YORK + NEW JERSEY
8 Fun Restaurants in NYC and NJ: Robert Sietsema rounds up spots that offer more than good food – they’re a fun experience as well. A sense of fun is something we are also seeking, and Sietsema’s picks sound like a delight. We have been to Crif Dogs, the hot dog stand attached to the cocktail bar PDT, but are adding the others to our visit list. Take Killmeyer’s Old Bavaria Inn: “Located in the Staten Island backwaters along the Arthur Kill, Killmeyer’s occupies a rambling inn that dates to 1855. The elaborately carved mahogany bar was imported from Bavaria in 1890, and the adjacent dining room is decorated with dozens of beer steins and stuffed animal trophies. What better place to enjoy a German menu of schnitzels, sauerbraten, and sausages, with pitchers of beer imported and domestic?” (Robert Sietsema’s New York)
MASSACHUSETTS
The many personalities of Martha’s Vineyard speak through its restaurants.: Anne Manning heads to Martha’s Vineyard, where she finds four spots that stand out. She hits AAlia’s, a Lebanese coffee shop; Black Joy, a restaurant that celebrates the Black diaspora; The Maker Cafe, a pasta spot; and State Road, of which she writes: “Nothing represents the quiet confidence to me more than the burger. No unnecessary theatrics. Just one of those burgers that reminds you why classics become classics. We had it with the works. Bacon. Cheese. Onion. It was a messy ooze, as a great burger should be.” (Trusted Tables)
NORTH CAROLINA
The Top Spots for Lexington Style North Carolina Barbecue: While on a recent Kansas City barbecue tour, we were discussing regional styles and realized that for both of us, North Carolina variations are the ones we’ve eaten the least. So I was eager to read John Tanner’s dispatch for The Smoke Sheet, which features 12 picks for Lexington-style barbecue. What’s that? Tanner explains: “The Lexington style involves pork shoulders or butts cooked low and slow, preferably directly over wood coals. When it’s ready, the pork is pulled from the bones, then chopped for service and dressed with a sauce of vinegar, pepper, and ketchup. The pork comes as a sandwich, served in a tray with red slaw (slaw tossed with that barbecue sauce), or as a plate with vegetables. Everything in North Carolina comes with hushpuppies. There’s usually a container of additional sauce — “dip” — on the side.” (The Smoke Sheet)
— Compiled by Amy Cavanaugh
Want more? Chat with us on Substack, download our Field Guides, check out our archives, or follow us on Instagram @americanweekender. We’ll be back next week.
Amy! Thank you for including me in the American Weekender. This is a first for me and I think it's pretty cool. Also, I loved the pit stop travalogue. It's definitely a keeper. I'm a huge barbecue fan so I hope someday to follow those backroads. Looking forward to seeing what you write about next! Anne
Thanks to your post, Hodgenville is now at the top of my list of city names for the Kentucky puzzle I’m planning. I like to make city names into word scrambles and tell a little history about the place. It’s a weird hobby I must admit. Great story, BTW.