Day Trippin’ or Even Overnight, Check out… Paducah

You know I love my local homies and as a small business person I always preach buy local, not blindly, but always where possible and plausible.

However, for some things, like a night away, that really doesn’t apply. And last weekend we found a super great get away for some of you stressed couples, Paducah.

Yeah! Paducah. Who would have thought?

A couple years back we did a Valentine’s dinner there at a place called the Freight House. It was excellent, but we really hadn’t had an opportunity to go back.

So, when a couple of great friends, traveling from St. Louis to Nashville wanted to join up with us on a Friday night to hang out and catch up, we immediately thought of this place.

Here’s the deal with the Freight House. It’s a farm to table joint. If you haven’t heard of this, it basically means the chef endeavors to craft all their meals around locally sourced, or locally grown and raised food.

If you go to their website, you will see the different farmers they choose from. And yes, in the area there are farmer’s growing greens year-round!

This also means, the hams cured here, or the ducks harvested here or even the Asian Carp caught in our lakes here, are on the menu!

And here’s the kicker. They are all good! Yes, even the carp. Yes, even the duck!

I had the carp a couple years ago. It’s still on the menu. My buddy had it though, and when I asked him if he enjoyed it, his answer was “totally!”

This time I wanted to try something different, so I did this weird thing, which the server probably hates, I picked three items and asked her to bring me the best. It was the duck! And it was excellent!

Look we all have buddies who are duck hunters and I’m gonna tell you, these boys don’t eat all those ducks. I mean somebody does, but duck is not an instantly tasty treat. Whoever prepares it has got to know what their doing. Most of my pals drop it in some Dale’s sauce and wrap it in some bacon.

But not at the Freight House. Here you simply have a cut of duck breast. And it tastes like New York Strip.

When you can make duck taste like a good steak. That’s something.

So how does this happen?

Well it turns out the chef, Sara Bradley, who is a Kentucky native, trained under a bunch of Michelin star chefs! And recently came in second on Bravo channel’s Top Chef!

Yeah, she’s been on television!!

So mark that place down.

But mark this place down, too, 1857 Hotel.

Look I said this was a night away from home. So, you need to stay over. And if you do, you’re going to want to stay a block away in this great little bed and breakfast hotel.

What the proprietors have done is taken a regular old brick and mortar building downtown, gutted it and added two floors of rooms. And may I add, two charming floors with walls covered in local art.

For a $115/night you get a quaint little hotel room. Also in the back of it, doubling as their lounge is an event center. Our room overlooked Kentucky Avenue.

But here’s the next cool thing, not only was the restaurant a block away, but several other night spots as well!

And for breakfast, The Gold Rush Café and Catering. It was the bomb, yo.

Allow me to name a few things:

Bread Pudding Waffles, Cajun Chicken Omelet, Scotch Eggs, and Hollandaise Sauce everywhere!

Truthfully if you’re planning even a day trip to Paducah for whatever the reason, I’d get up an hour early and have breakfast at this place. There’s a reason people name it and the Freight House as the top two restaurants in town.

That completes today’s travelogue, next week I’ll get back to being obnoxious.