Dreaming Up a Restaurant
Ouita Michel was dreaming up a restaurant in her teens. From the closets at Holly Hill Inn, we’ve excavated notebook after notebook, all filled with notes, recipes, menu ideas. The earliest ones pre-date the opening days of Holly Hill Inn, which she and husband Chris Michel, along with their business partner Roger Solt, purchased in 2000.
Here’s how she described that beginning —
Chris and I knew we wanted to bring new life to old Kentucky traditions.
We wanted crystal wine glasses and Kentucky pottery.
We wanted locally-raised foods prepared in new and creative ways, hoping to define a new kind of Kentucky cooking.
We wanted to celebrate history, agriculture, family, poetry and art.
We wanted our Inn to be an expression of our state and the town of Midway, but also of ourselves and our own interests.
We wanted to create a simple and really comfortable kind of place where our guests could connect over a long meal, and where we could cook whatever we could dream up. In a world of fast and casual chain dining, we aimed to open a slow, one-of-a-kind place.
Inspiration arrived from many quarters and had many mothers. Among them were Madeleine Kamman, with whom Chef Ouita had worked and studied; Julia Child, Simone Beck and Alice Waters. Camille Glenn and Marion Flexner contributed Kentucky and Southern flavors and sensibilities.
Mastering the Art of French Cooking, The Courier-Journal Cookbook, Out of Kentucky Kitchens, Simple French Cooking, The Heritage of Southern Cooking, The Joy of Cooking. These books still hold pride of place on our kitchen shelves and the most well-worn have been tenderly patched together many times.
From the start, Chef Ouita knew she wanted to follow the old tradition of continental dining with multi-course menus and award-winning wines. She likes to tell of the time that M.F.K. Fisher found herself in a small restaurant in the French countryside, dining alone in a beautiful old home, well off the beaten path. The restaurant had a timeless, forever quality; which perfectly mirrored Chef Ouita’s vision for Holly Hill.
Chef Ouita describes the food at Holly Hill Inn as “Kentucky” because it’s prepared with nearly all Kentucky-raised ingredients, but adds that “we use a more classic cuisine-oriented approach to cooking emphasizing — especially — simple French, Italian, Mediterranean and old Southern techniques.
In central Kentucky, we see the south of France all around us with our small family farms. When we opened Holly Hill Inn, it was a very vibrant time of change with lots of experimentation going on. This interplay between Southern cooking and European cooking has really influenced our cuisine.”
One of Chef Ouita’s early kitchen accomplices was Lisa Laufer, our sous chef for many years. Lisa came from Louisville armed with a rebel attitude and her mother’s innate sense of hospitality and gentility. With her steel-colored, close-cropped hair and daily uniform of faded t-shirts and jeans, Lisa could be fierce, smart, stubborn, profane, and gentle all at once.
Chef Ouita says Lisa brought to the table “this family heritage of fabulous cooking from her mother on down.” Lisa’s late mother, Carol Newkirk Laufer, once planned special events for the University of Louisville president’s office and helped shepherd the culinary rise of several Louisville chefs and restaurateurs, including the late Dean Corbett and Lisa’s childhood friend Lynn Winter.
Chef Ouita and Lisa often collaborated on dishes like our Holly Hill shrimp and grits, with Ouita supplying the technique and recipe for preparing the shrimp, and Lisa applying her expertise to cooking the grits.
To this day, our recipe for cheese grits includes Lisa’s cautions about the temperature of the milk and cream mixture (too hot and it will scorch!), how to add grits to the pot (do not let them drop in the pot; they need to stay suspended in the liquid!) and lastly, the importance of an ample rest when the grits were done. And, of course, only one particular pot would do.
Lisa kept her recipes in a little notebook and wasn’t inclined to indulge them, but somehow her version of Benedictine made its way into Susan Reigler’s intro to the new edition of Jennie Benedict’s Blue Ribbon Cookbook.
She did not suffer fools but if you were willing to listen and learn, Lisa had much to teach. Her respect for tradition, and attention to detail, and reverence for those who came before, especially the old Southern cooks, were all on militant display.
And while Lisa no longer works with us at Holly Hill, we all have our Lisa stories and her influence lingers on. A long line of aspiring chefs have followed in her footsteps and several of them lead our kitchens today.
M.F.K Fisher, Julia Child, Madeleine Kamman, Alice Waters and Camille Glenn. Continental ways of menu building. and the Slow Food movement. The venerable cookbook classics and the upstarts from up and coming chefs. Our Kentucky bluegrass heritage. The seasons and the farms around us. These were our foundation and continue to inform us.
“The life of a restaurant follows a cycle. The season, and the weather most often form the initial impulse of our menu — they point the way. Cooking is an act. Cooking is movement — smelling, touching, tasting, listening, looking. Cooking is timing.
In the best moments, when everything clicks, cooking can communicate our feelings to others through the presentation of a beautiful, healthful and tasty meal. When done just right, that meal creates a lasting memory; one that forms the basis of family lore; a memory that you’ll want to replicate time and time again. This is our aim when we cook at Holly Hill Inn.” Chef Ouita Michel
© 2022, Holly Hill Inn/Ilex Summit, LLC and its affiliates, All Rights Reserved
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