Three culinary gems hide in plain sight among Kentucky’s rolling hills, just East of Louisville. First, there’s Madeline’s in La Grange, where a refurbished older home contains the aroma of simmering sauces that greet you at the door. Then, unassumingly tucked away in Crestwood, The Crestwood Bistro dazzles with its appetizers and entrees. Finally, at Crestwood Meats, a 28 year family run butcher shop in contains ruby-red ribeyes and Amish raised chicken behind glass cases that gleam under the lights. These family-run establishments share one magnificent trait: food that makes your eyes roll back in ecstasy.
Jaw clenched, I often watch locals and tourists alike queue up at chain restaurants, their minivans and sedans filling those cookie-cutter parking lots while Madeline’s and The Crestwood Bistro’s deserve lines out the door. And Crestwood Meats—where 28 years of family butchery presents marbled ribeyes with surgical precision while sharing stories of the Amish farmers who raise the chicken presented under glass—remains one of the area’s best-kept secret.
The Crestwood Bistro serves deviled eggs so sinfully good they’d make a priest question his vows—the yolks whipped to a cloud-like consistency that somehow supports the weight of a delishess relish and candied bacon without collapsing. Their lunch menu continues the assault on your diet resolutions with sandwiches stacked taller than a toddler’s ambitions, while dinner transforms into a parade of plates that leave you calculating if your stretchy pants can endure one more bite.
I cringe watching my neighbors and visitors alike shuffle like zombies into chain restaurants, where microwaved meatloaf and limp vegetables await their dulled taste buds. Meanwhile, at Madeline’s and The Crestwood Bistro, chefs are practically performing culinary ballet with local ingredients. And don’t get me started on those fluorescent-lit grocery meat departments, where plastic-wrapped chicken breasts lie in their own sad puddles while the artisans at Crestwood Meats hand-trim steaks with the precision of neurosurgeons and the reverence of priests.
Imagine your taste buds staging a tiny protest, waving microscopic picket signs that read “WE DESERVE BETTER THAN (INSERT YOUR FAVORITE CHAIN HERE)” Those same buds—which you’ve been subjecting to microwaved chain restaurant mediocrity—could be experiencing the equivalent of a flavor spa day at places where chefs actually remember your food wasn’t born in a freezer truck. Your stomach deserves that promotion from processed cheese products to hand-crafted delights, from sad iceberg lettuce to arugula and romaine so crisp it could win a debate and from pallid, watery supermarket steaks with the texture of wet cardboard to hand-cut ribeyes so richly marbled they resemble Renaissance paintings, each creamy white vein of fat promising to dissolve into buttery perfection on your tongue.
I hope to see you there, there and there my friends.
