Sara Bradley's Seasonal Plates Speak to Kentucky
Cover Story: Paducah's Freight House explores the intersection of Midwestern and Southern food
Welcome to the weekend! Here’s what you’ll find in this week’s newsletter:
Cover Story: Take a trip to Paducah, Kentucky to eat at Freight House, where Sara Bradley serves dishes that draw on her family heritage.
Weekend Getaway: Madison, Wisconsin has many great restaurants and bars. Get all our recommendations by downloading our Field Guide to Madison, a 38-page dining guide organized into a curated three-day itinerary with 25+ recommendations for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and drinks. It’s free this month for paid subscribers!
The Order: Portland, Maine’s Quanto Basta serves delicious blistered pizzas — the Limone is our must-try pie.
Weekend Reading: Amy shares a go-to new cocktail bar,
takes a tour of some of Chicago’s top hot dog stands, plus points you to the best of Cape Cod.
‘Paducah is a Confluence’
PADUCAH, KY. — To get to Paducah, Kentucky from Chicago, we drove for six hours down the length of Illinois, then crossed the Ohio River, which forms the border between the two states. Crossing the border of what’s considered Midwest into what’s considered South means that Paducah is not just a northern Southern city, it’s a city that forms a bridge between the South and Midwest. “People talk about diasporas, where it all goes out from this spot, but this is the exact opposite,” says chef Sara Bradley. “Paducah is a confluence. It’s where it all meets. It’s Midwestern, it’s Southern, it’s got a Rust Belt feel. It has a little bit of everything.”
We went to Paducah to eat at Bradley’s Freight House, a restaurant that had been on our radar since it opened in 2015. Bradley, a Paducah native and a finalist on last season’s Top Chef: World All-Stars (she was also a finalist on Top Chef Kentucky in 2018), serves seasonal food with a sense of fun. Over two visits, we ate butterbean hummus, crisp chunks of housemade jalapeño-cheddar bologna with spicy-sweet mustard, tangy pickled beets with feta, deviled eggs, wedge salads, shrimp with pimento cheese grits, pot roast lasagna, and braised pork shoulder with field peas, while sipping bourbon alongside.
Bradley’s food draws on her childhood in Paducah and family heritage (her mother’s side is Jewish and father’s side is from Appalachia) as well as her time cooking at Dovetail in New York City and at Blackbird in Chicago. “I think when you’re young, your identity is like ‘I’m from Paducah, Kentucky’ because you don’t have a lot of identity until you go into the world and get to create your own,” she says. “As I’ve grown and become a better chef, I have started to look at other areas. Part of my identity was living in Chicago and New York. If I go two miles over [from here], I’m in Southern Illinois and people don't consider that the South, it’s more Midwest. What has been fun about my food is that it doesn't have to be anything specific. I don’t have to follow one way.”
That philosophy allows her to pull in her own experiences as well as those of the changing South. “The ‘new South’ is going back to the way that people cooked many years ago,” she says. “At some point, people stepped away from highly seasonal, locally sourced food and were getting products from all over the world. The new South is keeping the history alive by cooking the food but using different techniques and adding flavors.”
The throughline is food that’s hyper-seasonal — for instance, while we ate the wedge salad with apples and candied pecans in March, now it’s being served with local strawberries and goat cheese — approachable, and inclusive. “There are always vegan, vegetarian, and gluten-free options,” Bradley says. “We designed the menu in a way so that a lot of things happen right at the end so that we can accommodate everyone. We have a really strong belief that everyone should have access to good food.”
Signature dishes include shrimp with pork, mushrooms, and New Orleans barbecue sauce over pimento cheese grits and braised pork shoulder with field peas, sweet greens, fennel aioli, and bacon fat cornbread. “Around here, smoked pork shoulder or pork butt are king.” Bradley says. “That’s what everyone does — they smoke it, chop it, and it goes on white bread with a vinegar-y barbecue sauce. I didn’t have a smoker, so we brine pork shoulders for two days, rub them with smoked paprika, and braise them with Dr. Pepper, dry sherry, dried chiles, dried prunes, and cranberries overnight very low and slow. It's really smoky and very tender.” The accompaniments are “very Kentucky:” field peas grown in nearby Marion, greens with vinegar and brown sugar, and bacon fat cornbread. “It’s cooked in my grandmother’s skillet.” Bradley says. “Her nickname was Jumper and her given name was Lula. Every piece of cornbread comes out of one of her skillets.”
Bradley is a chef whose food speaks to what Paducah is today, but to get here, she had to leave town. “I was born and raised here and left the day after high school,” Bradley says. She went to the University of Kentucky and culinary school in North Carolina then honed her skills in big cities. But missing home made her think about returning. “When I was working in New York, it was so far away,” she says. “I couldn’t make it home for my nieces and nephews’ birthdays. In Paducah, I could be part of the community. I wouldn’t just be another restaurant, I could really make an impact here.”
That impact includes approaching her restaurant with openness. After seeing dozens of properties, Bradley toured the former vegetable depot that would become her restaurant. “This was the agricultural epicenter for Western Kentucky and Southern Illinois and it felt like this space fit perfectly with the highly seasonal food I wanted to cook,” she says. “I’m a very transparent business owner, and I loved that I could do this open kitchen. You can see all the way into the office from the dining room — there’s no place to hide. There’s nothing to hide behind in my food.”
The open space gives diners a view into how the restaurant works, but it goes both ways. “As a chef who worked in many basements, I love that our restaurant is open and that the cooks can look out,” she says. “I never got to see people eat my food until Chicago. That changed my idea of what you do for people in a restaurant. I could see them being happy.”
330 S 3rd St # 102, Paducah, KY 42003 | @freighthousefood
Download all our Madison Recommendations!
Madison, Wisconsin has a thriving food scene, and we’ve put together a guide to all our favorites in our Field Guide to Madison, which is free this month to paid newsletter subscribers. This 38-page dining guide includes a curated three-day itinerary with 25+ recommendations for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and drinks. It’s downloadable for offline reading and formatted for your phone — perfect for easy reference on your next trip.
Paid subscribers received a link to download a free copy of the guide, so upgrade your subscription today and get your complimentary copy. (You can also purchase this Field Guide on our website, but a paid subscription is a better deal, plus you’ll receive 50% off any other Field Guide you’d like!)
Limone Pizza at Portland’s Quanto Basta
PORTLAND, MAINE — Neapolitan pizza is always going to be my favorite style, and on our last visit to Maine we popped into Quanto Basta to try theirs. This little restaurant, which launched in 2021 as a food truck, opened in a brick and mortar space last July. We’ll always check out a new spot, but we were even more excited about this one — owner Betsy English moved to Portland after living in Chicago and working at great restaurants like Lula Cafe. Here, she’s using a sourdough crust for pizzas that are chewy and blistered and topped with local ingredients.
Start with a round of spritzes, then order the Limone pizza. It’s dressed with garlic confit, marinated red onions, capers, and Castelvetrano olives, so it has a salty-briny thing going on. Thin slices of Meyer lemon peels give the pie its name and a lightly bitter, floral flavor, while chopped pistachios add some crunch. This pizza is great on its own, but you must order a side of the bagna cauda to dip the crusts into. You can order it with crudité for an appetizer, or just go with the side sauce. Either way, dipping the last chewy bites into the bagna cauda — funky and salty from garlic and anchovies — is a beautiful bite.
249 Congress St, Portland, ME 04101 | @quanto_basta_maine
ILLINOIS
Chef’s Kiss: We have a new go-to cocktail bar in Chicago, Bisous, and Amy recently wrote about it for Chicago magazine. “The cocktail spot, which opened in January, is from Peter Vestinos, a longtime barman and the Footman Hospitality partner behind the Gold Coast rum bar Sparrow. Here, he takes inspiration from 1960s France, which means brandy drinks, martinis, French wines, and an overall fun, lounge-y vibe.” The bar opens at 4 p.m. on weekdays and 2 p.m. on weekends, and stays open late. So it’s great for a pre-dinner drink or a nightcap when dining out in the hot West Loop neighborhood.
Top Dogs: A few weeks back,
shot a video with Adam Witt where they went on an eight-stop crawl of Chicago hot dog stands. Their day took them to some of our favorite places in the city including neighborhood standby Byron’s Hot Dogs, Superdawg, and The Vienna Beef Factory Store. If you know, you know.MASSACHUSETTS
Escape to the Cape: Writing for her newsletter, On The Map,
has been sharing some of her favorite spots on Cape Cod. So far, Luiso has published guides to Provincetown, Wellfleet, Truro, Eastham, and more. Her newsletters pull together all her go-to restaurants, shops, beaches, and hiking trails, so if you are headed that direction this summer her newsletter is a great resource. And if you aren’t, her photos might make you change your plans.— Compiled by Kenney Marlatt
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.
I think it’s so cool how rooted Sara has stayed in Paducah. It’s amazing to see a chef so connected to their hometown.
Also that limone pizza…. Looks amazing….
Thank you, love you guys!