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Sam's Restaurant: Homemade highlights

Sam's serves heaping helpings of seriously good food

By Linda B. Blackford Lblackford@herald-Leader.Com

If you order a Kentucky hot brown at a place called Sam's Restaurant, well, really, you've been warned.

After all, a place called Sam's sitting smack on the Fayette-Scott County line conjures up blissful ideas of heaping plates of country cooking, and said hot brown is one of the richest, most fattening turkey-cheese sauce combos in existence. Nonetheless it was ordered, it was predictably overwhelming, huge and rich and really too much for mere mortals. Delicious, yes, but like a culinary song of the sirens, it led to some digestive insanity.

So that's the introduction to Sam's, although it hardly needs one. It's been sitting on that county line for more than 50 years, and its tables and booths are packed every day at breakfast, lunch and dinner. It still has 1950s-era signs from nearby stud farms, still has ashtrays on the tables, still has plates of greens cooked with fatback and waitresses who bring vinegar along with them.

In two visits, I feel like I hit some serious highlights (though the hot brown actually went to my dining companion, oh, let's just call her Amy Wilson). The first time, I got the lunch special: beans, corncakes, greens and fried potatoes. With the first bite, you step back to a better time, before we counted every calorie or every minute of our hectic days. The beans were nice and soupy, the greens succulent and garnished with a hard-boiled egg. Another friend got the Samburger, a "nearly half pound" burger with all the trimmings.

Sam's is also famous for its breakfast food, which it very kindly serves all day long. So on a second visit -- the hot brown episode, I'll call it -- I got steak and eggs, featuring a well-seasoned 4-ounce steak that tasted great in a little runny egg yolk. And of all the guilty pleasures, it also comes with those wonderful hash browns, just a patty of grated potatoes that are all crispy on the outside and chewy on the inside. Oh, and for the health conscious, some homemade biscuits.

Because Amy and I decided that if you're going to blow your calorie count, then blow your calorie count, we also got two pieces of homemade pie, coconut meringue and chocolate meringue. I think their quality could be simply described by saying that even after our entrees, we ate every bit.

Nor will anyone be surprised to hear that on two visits, we barely dented the menu's offerings. Others include fish and chips, sauteed chicken livers, breaded pork cutlet sandwich, taco salad, chicken fried steak, fried country ham sandwich, omelets, pancakes, biscuits and sausage gravy, on and on, nearly all designed to make your tummy sing and your cholesterol wince.

But not your wallet. The most expensive item on the menu is $10.99, nice old-fashioned prices to go with delicious, old-fashioned food.

RESTAURANT REVIEW

Sam's Restaurant

Address: 1973 Lexington Rd., Georgetown.

Phone: (502) 863-5872.

Hours: 7 a.m.-10 p.m. Mon.-Sat., 7 a.m.-2 p.m. Sun.

Other: Sam's also does catering. Visit www.samsrest.com.