How the Gooey, Cheesy Hot Brown Became a Kentucky Icon

“It’s on a lot of people’s bucket lists,” says Mark Salmon of his employer, the Brown Hotel in downtown Louisville, Kentucky. The historic hotel is a destination not necessarily because of its rooms or amenities; rather, thousands of people from all over the country come every year to try the hot brown, a sandwich that’s on par with the Derby and bourbon as one of Kentucky’s cultural calling cards.

Invented at the hotel nearly 100 years ago, the decadent open-faced sandwich is a close cousin of both Welsh rarebit and the croque-monsieur, made with hand-carved turkey, bacon, tomato, Texas toast, and Mornay sauce. The bread — crusts removed for aesthetics and a more even texture — is placed in a broiling dish and topped with turkey, halved Roma tomatoes, and Mornay sauce (which is simply bechamel with the addition of cheese); strips of bacon are laid on top to form an X, and the whole dish is placed under the broiler. Once hot and bubbling, it’s finished with pecorino Romano, parsley, and paprika.

The hot brown sandwich has been a part of the American culinary landscape since 1926 (four years before the cheesesteak was invented in Philadelphia), and remains popular nearly a century later. But like many historical dishes, the recipe — and the story about its creation — has evolved over time.

The official story of the hot brown goes like this: In the 1920s, the Brown Hotel hosted lavish dinner dances during which patrons would work up an appetite dancing and merrymaking. One night, instead of the usual ham and eggs, head chef Fred Schmidt concocted a new dish with items he had on hand in the hotel kitchen. He called it the hot brown after the hotel.

“A lot of it is legend,” says Salmon, the hotel’s human resources director and unofficial keeper of the dish’s oral history. “No one wrote anything down. No one in 1926 thought we’d [still] be talking about this in 2018.”

According to Albert W.A. Schmid (no relation to Schmidt the chef), author of The Hot Brown: Louisville’s Legendary Open-Faced Sandwich, the dish was likely created on a cold night: “Something warm to eat on a frigid winter night during a break from dancing on the rooftop at the Brown Hotel,” he wrote. Historical record shows that chef Schmidt also created a cold brown, which was served at the hotel in the warmer months: The sandwich was still open-faced but was made with rye bread, turkey or chicken, lettuce, hard-boiled egg, and Thousand Island dressing. Ultimately it was only the hot brown that would catch on.

The hot brown may also have traveled down the Ohio River to the Mississippi River, all the way to St. Louis, where a similar sandwich was created at roughly the same time by chef Eduard Voegeli at the Mayfair Hotel. Called the prosperity sandwich, it was an open-faced sandwich with turkey, ham, bacon, and cheese sauce. “At that time the riverways would have been how to travel,” Schmid wrote, noting that yet another similar sandwich, the turkey devonshire, was created upriver at the Stratford Club in Pittsburgh in 1934. The Courier-Journal reported in 1985 that the first newspaper records of the sandwich date to the 1940s, with the paper’s food editor printing her own recipe for the dish in 1949.

The hot brown is many things: a celebration of place; a simple dish elevated by a derivative of one of the mother sauces of classic French cuisine; a culinary fascination. But many believe the exact recipe for the hot brown has changed in the nearly 100 years since it was first created, with the details differing even among Brown Hotel employees.

Schmid, who is also a chef and lived in Louisville for 17 years, says the sandwich may have first been served with pimentos instead of tomatoes. The Brown Hotel’s current executive chef, James Adams, claims the dish was originally made with peaches instead of tomatoes, which Salmon corroborates. “Peaches were lavish at that time,” he says. “When you wanted to impress people back then, you gave them fruit.”

The bacon may have been added at a later date, too. “Legend has it that the original chefs put [the sandwich] out there and some pain-in-the-neck waiter said, ‘It’s all the same color,’ so the chef put two pieces of bacon on the top,” Salmon explains. “So it’s very possible there wasn’t bacon on it that first night [it was invented].”

When the Brown Hotel was closed from 1972 to 1984, the dish was available on menus at other Louisville restaurants. In this time the original recipe was lost, Schmid says, and the classic dish instead became just a concept that others could tinker with.

“When a chef works in an establishment, a lot of times what happens is dishes will migrate when the chefs migrate,” Schmid says. “Then the other chefs, they’ll put their little twist on it to make it ‘better.’ The hot brown started at the Brown and then it kind of changed.”

When Hilton reopened the hotel in 1984, some “reconstructed” version of the hot brown was served, Schmid says, inspired by what the other restaurants were doing. In the 1985 Courier-Journal article, one of the Brown Hotel’s then-sous chefs, JB Hart, provided a recipe very different from the one used today. It didn’t include tomatoes and the sauce was made with milk, cream, and eggs — quite unlike a traditional Mornay, which is a cheese sauce thickened with a flour and butter roux. According to Salmon, it wasn’t until chef Joe Castro was hired in 1990 that the original recipe was somehow discovered and brought back to the Brown Hotel.

The hotel shares its hot brown recipe with everyone: It’s available on its website, printed in various publications, and even plastered on promotional postcards distributed all over Louisville. But as it turns out, the widely shared recipe isn’t the same recipe the hotel uses.

“There are only three people that make the Mornay sauce. I’m one of them,” explains executive chef Adams, who says the sauce was at one time prepared for guests tableside. “We don’t just give it out to any cook. It’s passed down from chef to chef. The recipe we give out is designed for home use, but when we make it in bulk at the hotel, [it’s different].”

The decadent, carb- and cheese-heavy nature of the hot brown makes it a popular hangover food, so the fact that it was created in the land of bourbon is hardly surprising. It was invented during the height of Prohibition, but there’s more than enough reason to believe that alcohol was nevertheless being consumed at the dinner dances taking place at the Brown Hotel.

“I was not working here at the time, but I will tell you that I’ve been told there was no shortage of liquor here in town,” says Salmon.

Schmid agrees there was some imbibing going on at the hotel during that era. “They had alcohol, it just wasn’t legal,” he says. “Distilleries were shut down, but there were a lot of [bourbon] barrels in warehouses.”

What works in 1926 works a century later, too. In an episode of the PBS show The Mind of a Chef, chefs David Chang and Sean Brock make a hot brown amidst discussion of a night of drinking. “I think we were in agreement that whoever invented it was drunk, or was cooking it for drunk people,” Chang jokes.

While it may have originated as a late-night drunk food, it’s also plenty popular with more sober guests: The Brown Hotel sells an average of 1,000 hot brown sandwiches per week, and on Derby weekend, it sells that number in just three days. “At any given time we could be serving 100 people and 90 of the orders will be hot browns,” says Adams.

The hotel also serves a half-size hot brown, a vegetarian hot brown with portobello mushrooms and ratatouille and even specials like hot brown fries, though it doesn’t promote the spin-offs. “We don’t advertise [the variations] because we don’t want to put them up against the hot brown,” Adams says. “We have to stay true to what we do.”

Indeed, the hot brown is essential to the hotel’s culture: New hires learn the history of the sandwich and eat it during training. “You have to know everything about the hot brown,” says Adams. “Our general manager will call out to someone in the middle of the meeting, ‘Tell me what’s in the hot brown. Who started it?’”

The Brown Hotel may serve the original, but the sandwich can also be found at dozens of other places in town: The Louisville tourism group’s website lists more than 40 restaurants across the city that serve iterations of the beloved sandwich. At the Bristol Bar & Grill, diners can order a hot brown made with green chiles and pico de gallo. Sicilian Pizza & Pasta serves a hot brown pizza with cheddar cheese sauce. Popular brunch spot Wild Eggs serves a hot brown topped with a fried egg.

But while riffs on the hot brown can be found at numerous restaurants, first-timers should try the Brown Hotel’s “authentic” version first, says Schmid.

“There’s just something so special about eating a hot brown at the Brown Hotel,” he says. “There’s a mystique.”

According to Salmon, the dish defines its hometown. “This is a city that prides itself on its history and its spirits, and you can’t enjoy those things in a hurry,” he says. “You can’t eat this sandwich in a hurry, and that’s Louisville.”

Georgia Kral is a reporter and editor, and a journalism professor. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.
Jessica Ebelhar is an editorial and advertising photographer based in Louisville, Kentucky.
Editors: Whitney Filloon and Erin DeJesus