At This Louisville Restaurant, Even the Scraps Have a Story
At North of Bourbon, Executive Chef Brittany Kelly draws on her Appalachian roots while digging into the surprising history behind every bite. Image: Frankie Fiore
At North of Bourbon, a new chapter is being served. After more than three years in the kitchen, Brittany Kelly stepped into the executive chef role in August 2025, bringing her Appalachian roots and fascination with Southern food history to the forefront.
Brittany took the reins from longtime Executive Chef Lawrence Weeks, having worked alongside him as North of Bourbon earned national acclaim, including a spot on The New York Times list of the 50 Best Restaurants in America in 2024. Now, she’s putting her own stamp on the menu, digging into the history behind familiar Southern ingredients and finding new ways to tell their stories.
Every Menu Tells a Story
“I pride myself in really taking time to do the research [on each ingredient] and find the best possible source for it,” Brittany tells us of her efforts to create memorable dishes that give old ingredients and traditions new life. “I do so much research on how these ingredients ended up here to begin with. I read a little history, and then my brain starts going around in circles to think about how I can bring it back around to the past.”
In other words, those aren’t just grits with the pork neck sourced from Valley Farms. They are Rosebank Bohicket grits, a preserved pre-Colonial heirloom variety, indigenous to South Carolina. And that charred okra you’re enjoying alongside the seared scallops with Cajun popcorn rice risotto and tomatoes? You might be interested to learn that okra seeds made their way to North America on slave ships, hidden in the hair of enslaved Africans, who smuggled them for a taste of home.
Brittany’s excitement is evident as she explains that okra, corn, and tomatoes are often served together because they are companion plants, meaning they are planted together to help them grow. “Because of that, they are all harvested at the same time, so it’s really an old one-pot meal,” she explains.
She goes on to detail how the pawpaw watermelon barbecue quail with heirloom cowpea purée and habañero-peanut emulsion is, in fact, a transcontinental journey on a plate. “It might appear like a classic Southern dish, but it’s an exploration of Low Country cuisine and deep African roots,” she explains. “All of those ingredients were brought here from other places.”
Waste Not Want Not
While much of Brittany’s inspiration comes from scouring cookbooks — Sean Brock’s Heritage and Jubilee: Two Centuries of African Cooking by Toni Tipton Martin are two favorites — she also draws on her childhood. Raised by her grandparents in Estill County, Kentucky, Brittany says that many of the family’s meals came straight from her grandfather’s garden — and saving every last kitchen scrap was a finely honed skill.
“We saved the strings from the beans to make vegetable stock or infused vinegar. Leftover tomatoes became chow chow. We had to make every last thing count,” she explains.
The waste-not, want-not sentiment is on display at North of Bourbon as well. The carrot pulp from the summer menu’s carrot-washed old-fashioned was used to make carrot bisque, oyster sets with pickled carrots, and carrot-caramel topping for cheesecake. Sweet potato peels were turned into a syrup used in the bar’s sweet potato old-fashioned.
This season, the Thank Ya Baby cocktail takes its lavender hue from the cooking water of ancient blue tree rice, an heirloom grain that was nearly lost to history in the 1800s before being preserved in the Carolina and Georgia Sea Islands.
A Storied Past
Brittany’s own culinary journey is as interesting as many of her ingredients. In 2017, she was looking for a job when Lexington’s Summit at Fritz Farm opened within walking distance of her home — and with it came Smithtown Seafood.
The aspiring chef nabbed her first restaurant job working under Smithtown owner Ouita Michel, who instilled in her a deep appreciation for locally sourced, artisan ingredients. She soaked up the hustle of the kitchen, along with Ouita’s farm-to-table philosophy.
“Up until then, I had really only watched the Food Network, but even then I knew it was a male-dominated field and that Ouita was doing incredible things,” says Brittany of the James Beard-nominated chef. “It hit close to home, and I felt like that was what I needed to do.”
From Smithtown, she moved on to another Ouita Michel kitchen, Honeywood, where she met James Beard Award semifinalist, Lawrence Weeks. From Lawrence, she caught the research bug, and it wasn’t long after Lawrence came to Louisville to open North of Bourbon that Brittany packed her bags to join him as his sous chef. She assumed the role of head chef in August 2025 and set to work putting her personal stamp on the New Orleans-inspired menus.
Today, she hopes to dispel the notion that Southern food has to be plain, and to remind diners that every dish can tell a story if only we are curious enough.
“There’s such an emotional connection to Southern food — that idea of Southern comfort food,” says Brittany. “But there’s also a story of perseverance, of making it through and making do in the South. It can be a troubled history at times, but it’s also the story of where we are today.”
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Beth Clayton
For over 20 years, Beth Clayton has either been working in a newsroom or pitching one. A natural storyteller and word nerd from the moment she could pick up a pencil, she earned her journalism degree from Butler University and spent the next decade as a writer, reporter, and editor. She now lives in Louisville, KY with her husband, three kids, and a very bad dog, and loves immersing herself in old lady hobbies such as houseplants and macrame.
