Butchering whole hogs? Downtown Lexington brewpub is turning out not-to-miss food

Born out of necessity, Salt & Vinegar has become the brand that’s banishing the idea of pub food as stale salted nuts, bags of chips and pickled eggs with, on a good day, the hope of a food truck to accompany a craft beer.

Chef Greg Spaulding built a loyal following at Lexington’s Blue Stallion Brewing Co. with his inventive turns on things like tomato soup and grilled cheese (vodka and tomato bisque with aged balsamic vinegar, toasted pine nuts and black truffle salt served with a sandwich of Kenney’s white Cheddar, Camembert and cream cheeses on local sourdough with Jalapeno preserves, $14.50).

But this spring Salt & Vinegar opened a second location, at Ethereal Brewing’s Public House in downtown Lexington. The menus differ at the two locations (fish and chips at the pub is blackened catfish dipped in a twice-fermented Ethereal beer batter and fried with home fries for $13.50) but Spaulding, who has been cooking professionally for over 20 years, says they will stay true to his brand, which he describes as “American Southern old world cuisine with 21st century technique.”

Like many chefs, Spaulding had always wanted to open his own restaurant. That idea stuck with him over two decades while he made pizzas at Domino’s and Puccini’s Smiling Teeth (he competed as a member of the United States Pizza Team, winning awards in Italy and Australia in international competitions) helped open Middle Fork in the Distillery District, cooked at Coles 735 Main and as executive chef at West Main Crafting Company. When the pandemic hit, closing restaurants along with much of the rest of the world, he found himself unemployed for the first time in his adult life.

Salt & Vinegar at Blue Stallion takes off

Pre-pandemic, craft breweries had largely relied on food trucks to provide the nourishment that keeps customers at tables for a second or third round but the shutdowns “basically obliterated the food truck scene,” Spaulding said. So, out of a shared necessity – he needed to work and Blue Stallion needed food served on the premises – Spaulding opened Salt & Vinegar there on February 1, 2021, investing both his life savings (“which wasn’t much”) and his sweat equity: “I was my sole and only employee for about four months.”

Blue Stallion customers took to the menu that made use of and complimented the brewery’s German-style beers and now, just 15 months later, Spaulding has five employees working there in addition to himself and “it’s hard to keep up, honestly.”

Spaulding’s style and success led a longtime acquaintance to reach out to him when Ethereal began looking for someone to run the kitchen at its downtown location. Andrew Bishop, a co-founder of Ethereal, and Spaulding met at the Distillery District in Ethereal’s early days when the chef was cooking at the closed Middle Fork. “We became friends in the alleyway,” Bishop said, and he kept track as his friend’s career progressed in other locations.

“Greg was kind of an obvious first stop for us,” he said, when the Ethereal partners began considering who would take care of the food at it downtown spot, which opened in the middle of the COVID shutdown. “He was looking to run a kitchen and we were looking to run a bar and neither of us wanted to worry about the other part.”

That symbiosis between chef and brewer makes for a good business partnership. Blue Stallion and Ethereal draw in customers who want to try their beers, people who can become diners who order Spaulding’s food. On the other hand, as Bishop explained, “people get hungry,” and if there’s no food at the pub “they have to go find food and people leaving is bad for business.”

Committed to local foods

At Blue Stallion the kitchen is a small and building codes rule out natural gas in the space, “so we have to be very innovative,” Spaulding said. But when Ethereal bought the pub building the kitchen was renovated along with everything else. Bishop asked him “every month for about six months,” to come and take over that kitchen, Spaulding said, but he was reluctant with both a new business at Blue Stallion and a new baby girl (“she was obviously my priority”) but finally agreed to extend the Salt & Vinegar brand to a second location and opened for business at the Public House in March. With two employees there he has more space to butcher the whole hogs he buys fresh from from Tyler Greene’s Sunwatch Homestead farm in Garrard County, cutting them up into pork chops, pancetta, bacon, using the shoulders and hams to make bratwurst, the head to make terrines and “great stock from the bones.”

It’s all part of Spaulding’s commitment to keeping his food as local as possible and aiming for zero waste. Many of S & V’s vegetables are supplied by Black Soil and if he needs something more or different, “we just run over to the farmer’s market.”

Bishop says it’s all worth it, at least to his customers. The price point is right and they’re surprised by the quality that comes with it, he says. When they dig into fresh pork chops or Maine scallops or humble fish and chips, “you just look at their eyes light up.”

Salt & Vinegar

Ethereal Brewing Public House location

Where: 102 W Vine St.

Hours: Wednesday-Saturday 4 p.m.-9 p.m.; Sunday 11 a.m.-3 p.m.

Blue Stallion Brewing Co. location

Where: 610 W 3rd St.

Hours: Tues.-Sat. 11 a.m.-9 p.m.

Online: Saltnvinegarlex.com

This story was originally published July 25, 2022 at 6:00 AM.