Jeffrey Scott Holland: Down memory lane, with thoughts of good times and beer cheese

By Jeffrey Scott Holland

Are there still gourmands out there who share my fond memories of the long-gone Johnny Allman’s Restaurant?

Allman’s once stood along the Kentucky River in Boonesboro, just minutes from Clay’s Ferry and not far from the present location of Hall’s On the River. From the 1940s to the 1970s, it was a well-loved spot among people from all walks of life. It was not uncommon to walk into Allman’s on any given evening and encounter suit-and-tied lawyers and businessmen sitting side by side with grizzled, bearded bikers and “river rats,” enjoying the fine food and the fine view overlooking the river.

Though the restaurant is gone, reverberations of its greatness are still resounding around the nation in the form of Beer Cheese, one of Kentucky’s most lasting contributions to the world of cuisine. Johnny Allman and his cousin Joe developed the first batch of Beer Cheese ever made at the Driftwood Inn (the precursor to Allman’s Restaurant) in the late 1930s. The influence of southwestern-style cooking on Joe has been cited as the inspiration for bringing such spiciness to the Bluegrass, and some sources also credit him with the popularization of fried banana peppers.

Soon Hall’s also offered a very similar, but not quite the same version of Beer Cheese in their restaurant. And by the way, the “Hall’s Snappy Spread” sold commercially in stores is a totally different formula and nothing like what you get in the actual restaurant. I highly recommend visiting Hall’s to get a taste of their real Beer Cheese! Their menu describes the recipe as “A few shakes of this and a few shakes of that – depends on Ms. Bell’s mood.” (“Ms. Bell” is Jean Bell, the Hall’s chef who has personally overseen the creation of the cheese in question since 1966.)



Allman’s tragically went up in a fire in the 1970s. I’ll never forget the day my family and I drove down there about 6 p.m. for dinner, only to find nothing left but a charred skeleton of the building, still smoldering. Allman’s was such an institution that it was unthinkable that they wouldn’t rebuild. So everyone waited. And waited. But the new Allman’s never came.

Today, Johnny’s grandson Ian is keeping the original Allman’s recipe alive with their Allman’s Beer Cheese, currently available in select locations like the Good-Foods Co-Op in Lexington, Little Sack in Richmond, and Happy Meadow in Berea. It’s worth making a road trip to any of the places to get your hands on a tub of it.

But before Johnny’s kinfolk resurrected the cheese, Bob Tabor of Winchester’s Engine House Deli was already keeping the faith with his own River Rat Beer Cheese. Tabor’s product was originally available only in the central Kentucky area but now is branching out all over the state. When I first tasted it several years ago, I almost cried. It is indeed, as their slogan states, “Just Like Johnny’s.”

Another contender for the Beer Cheese sweepstakes is Brown’s Tastee Beer Cheese. The package says they’re based in Versailles, but their website says Lawrenceburg. Either way, both fine towns with a beer cheese to be “Kentucky Proud” of. Brown’s Tastee meets my core criteria for all Beer Cheeses:

1. It’s delicious.
2. It’s spicy-hot but not stupidly so.
3. It contains beer. (You’d be surprised how many wannabe Beer Cheeses don’t!) However, the beer does not dominate the flavor, nor does the garlic, which is as it should be.
4. It has an approximation of the correct texture, for which there is no word to adequately convey. “Fibrous” doesn’t sound right, and “grainy” comes closer but still misleads. But the texture is there.

And when you put it in the freezer with the lid off – not long enough to freeze it solid but just long enough to give it an extra crystalline surface veneer — and knife it into small paper ketchup-cups, it succeeds as a simulacra of what my childhood mind recorded in the late 1960s and early 1970s during my visits to Johnny’s with my parents. We were regulars enough that our usual waitress (I remember her name was Doris) would even let me visit the kitchen and see the stuff being made in person.

If you have any recollections and anecdotes about the good old days of Johnny Allman’s restaurant and/or Beer Cheese adventures in general, write me! I’d love to hear from you.

Jeffrey Scott Holland is a native Kentuckian, painter, writer, actor, musician, paralegal — and interested in all things. He joins a growing stable of talented, interesting regular columnists for KyForward, bringing his gift of a well-turned phrase, quirkiness and humor to entertain and enlighten — and sometimes provoke — our readers. He can always be reached at any time, by anyone on the planet, at jshpaint@gmail.com.

Photo courtesy of Alman’s Beer Cheese.