Sara Bradley cut her teeth in high-caliber kitchens.
The Johnson & Wales grad worked many a shift under John Fraser at his Michelin-starred Dovetail in New York before spending two years in Chicago, where she cooked for prolific chef-restaurateur Paul Kahan at Avec, Blackbird, Nico Osteria and Publican Quality Meats.
When it came time to take the next step in her culinary career, Bradley left her Ukrainian Village apartment and made a beeline 375 miles south, back home to Paducah, where she opened her farm-to-table restaurant, Freight House, in a restored vegetable depot in late 2015.
“I could have never done this in Chicago,” said an aproned Bradley, standing behind the eatery’s rustic-chic bar stocked with more than 300 bourbons, whiskeys and ryes. “I would have needed a bunch of investors and get one of the big banks to lend me money. … Life is so much easier here. You can get a run-down vegetable depot, fix it up and open a restaurant that seats 140.”
There was a little more to it than that, like long nights spent washing the vaulted ceiling’s original wooden beams, by hand, with soap and water. She enlisted Dad to help design the space. Mom helped decorate — and continues to help by making the desserts.
All of their work has paid off. Bradley added a porch to expand seating capacity last year.
Her dinner-only restaurant, open Tuesday-Saturday, attracts customers from far beyond the borders of Paducah. The seasonal menu showcases the region’s impressive bounty. One of the starters features tomatoes from southern Illinois topped with pickled quail eggs, muffuletta relish and sourdough bread from Kirchhoff’s Bakery a few blocks away.
Plucked from nearby waters shortly before landing on customers’ plates, Asian carp — which goes by the name Kentucky blue snapper on the Freight House menu — is dressed in a bath of succotash, charred okra and smoked chili vinaigrette. The light, white fish makes a delicious $20 entree that could fetch twice the price in Chicago.
“And you’d better like to eat them in Chicago, because they’re headed for Lake Michigan,” Bradley said about the notorious aquatic invaders threatening the Great Lakes.
Serving Asian carp symbolizes a credo she holds dear: Chefs should not only feed people well, but feed them responsibly.
“We have an obligation to use this thing that’s destroying our waterways and killing our native species, and educate people about how healthy and delicious it is,” she said.
On a recent Saturday, I tagged along as Bradley, 35, filled the back of her car with crates of produce from Paducah’s downtown farmers market. She wandered up and down the aisles, assessing the goods while making small talk with locals. Several of the purveyors have been hawking their harvest at the market since she shopped here with her mom as a kid.
Bradley scooped up handfuls of bright red Jimmy Nardello peppers from the Koru Gardens stand staffed by a woman who grew up across the street from her.
“These are so good,” Bradley raved about the long, thin fruit. “We’ll dry them, powder them and add them to our fermented hot sauces.”
It was a short drive back to the restaurant, where the Jimmy Nardellos joined strings of ruby-hued peppers already hanging from the rafters in the kitchen at Freight House, 330 South 3rd St., 270-908-0006, www.freighthousefood.com.
Bradley, who’s getting married in October to a farmer who doubles as an attorney, said her homecoming story is similar to a lot of Paducahans her age.
“We’re boomerangs,” she said. “You grow up somewhere, graduate, go away, learn a bunch of cool stuff and bring it home. There are tons of boomerangs here.”
So what’s some of the cool stuff she learned in Chicago?
“Treat your employees well and they’re going to work really hard for you,” she said. “And it’s OK to have char on your food; char is flavor.
“Food doesn’t have to be beautiful and delicate,” she added. “It just needs to taste good.”
Twitter @lorirackl
