Could this beer cheese recipe be the one Hall’s is known for? Make it and decide.

When we started digging in our archives, looking for recipes of dishes from places people were missing, we were looking at local restaurants that have closed.

This one has closed and reopened so many times over the years it wins the Lazarus award: Hall’s on the River on Athens-Boonesboro Road in Clark County.

Yes, it’s come back to life to open again recently. But maybe don’t everybody run down there at once because restaurant owners Melissa and Karl Crase are still getting things in order. They declined to comment for this story.

In the meantime, if you’ve been missing their classic beer cheese while they were closed for remodeling after massive flooding from the Kentucky River during March 2021, we can help.

Kentucky beer cheese history

According to legend, the recipe for beer cheese was “invented” by creekside restaurant owner Johnny Allman.

In 2000, longtime Herald-Leader food writer Sharon Thompson profiled the historic “river restaurant” scene: Allman opened a restaurant in the late 1930s that flooded several times and burned down at least twice.

He moved it to where Hall’s is today near the Kentucky River in the 1940s, then sold it to Karl Johnson. But five years later Allman came back and opened Johnny Allman’s Fisherman’s Inn. Allman put fried banana peppers and beer cheese on the menu and both restaurants thrived.

Karl Johnson was shot and killed in his bar in July 1965 “over a gambling debt,” Karla Crase told Thompson. George and Gertrude Hall bought the place and renamed it. It burned down again and they rebuilt it again.

And Hall’s built a following for its “river camp” atmosphere that welcomed folks out for a nice meal by Lower Howard’s Creek as well as celebrities and politicians. In a 1985 column about the restaurant celebrating its 20th anniversary, Herald-Leader columnist Don Edwards wrote that then-Gov. Martha Layne Collins and ex-Gov. John Y. Brown Jr. were frequent visitors, and that Lily Tomlin, Lee Majors, Raymond Burr, Art Carney and Jennifer O’Neill had dined there.

And most started their meal with a dish of beer cheese and crackers, celery, carrots or radishes to dip into it.

Who makes Hall’s Beer Cheese?

For more than 30 years, the beer cheese was made at the Winchester restaurant by the same employee, Jean Bell, who patterned it after what Allman’s served, she said.

In 1992, Bell told Thompson that she made 100 pounds a week by hand in 10-pound batches, almost always in private. “They really don’t know what I put in it. I go over there and dash it in so fast,” she said at the time. The only secret she would share is that the beer and cheese must both be at room temperature.

In 1990, authors Lani Basberg and Jeanne Jennings published the cookbook, “Lexington in Good Taste,” a restaurant guide with menus and recipes from some of the most popular local places. Included in there, along with several other Hall’s menu favorites such as fried banana peppers and Kentucky hot brown, was a recipe labeled “Hall’s Beer Cheese. The recipe also ran in the Herald-Leader.

Is it the same that originated from the popular restaurant? Hard to say. Hall’s Beer Cheese is made and sold commercially now, available in stores and online at hallsbeercheese.com if you want to taste and compare.

But either way, try to make a batch of this homemade beer cheese and it might just be the thing to put you in the mood for a drive down to the river for a meal.

This story was originally published April 28, 2022 at 6:00 AM.

Janet Patton

Lexington Herald-Leader

859-379-5233

Janet Patton covers restaurants, bars, food and bourbon for the Herald-Leader. She is an award-winning business reporter who also has covered agriculture, gambling, horses and hemp. Support my work with a digital subscription