Having visited a couple of bourbon production sites, we decided to spend our final night in Louisville (the capital of Bourbon country) exploring some of the many consumption sites...or "bars", as they are known here. After several bourbon cocktails, a craft ale aged in an old bourbon barrel and a couple of "Old Grand Dad" bourbons and coke, we awoke this morning feeling...the "effects".
We needed food - and more food than our motel's continental breakfast buffet could provide. We needed fried chicken. And when you're in the home of Kentucky Fried Chicken, why go anywhere else than THE home of Kentucky Fried Chicken. Cue a three hour drive to Colonel Harland Sanders' first and original roadside restaurant in Corbin, Kentucky. This international franchise started with a gas station and a few home cooked meals served in his family dining room to hungry travellers. He gained a reputation for excellent food and eventually moved across the road to open his first restaurant.
Part KFC restaurant, part museum and part national historic site, this perfect slice of Americana allows diners to sit in the original dining room beside the actual open kitchen where, during the 1940's, the Colonel perfected his unique fried chicken recipe and speedy 'fast food' cooking technique. The white wooden building, then on the main route to Florida, once annexed a motel complex which was also owned and run by the man in white. In order to tempt passing diners into staying the night, he constructed a model of one of his clean and modern rooms inside the dining area. Seeing that it was often the lady of the house who chose where her family slept, he placed the entrance to the ladies restrooms inside this "room", along with the public telephone. The motel room is still there today.
When planned construction of a nearby interstate motorway threatened to divert the Colonel's steady stream of customers, at the age of 65, he took to the road himself in order to sell his brand to other restaurants around the USA. Clearly, this was a successful strategy - a quick check of the list of franchises reveals that there is at least one KFC in every country we have visited during our trip. The story of this innovative and fascinating gentlemen is well worth a read - and he actually was a Colonel. Check out the Wikipedia article.
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| Originally a motel, gas station and restaurant complex, the remaining dining room and kitchen has been lovingly restored |
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| The ten piece bucket, (originally called 'the barrel') with boxes of potato wedges and biscuits |
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| In order to show diners how clean his kitchen was, Colonel Sanders was one of the first to introduce the 'open kitchen' concept. |
And now to Nashville Tennessee...
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