Refuel yourself at the new Trail Town Pub & Grill

By Jeremy D. Wells
Carter County Times

The Trail Town Bar & Grill is open now, for limited hours. You can try their menu items Thursday, Friday, or Saturday, between 1 and 9 p.m. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t working full-time in the kitchen. The staff is there every day – doing prep, working on new menu items, and getting ready for the opening of the full restaurant on a regular basis once remodels are complete. It’s been challenging, but also rewarding for executive chef Shawn Spears.

“I thought I was just going to be here a few hours a week, training staff,” explained Spears, who already had a full time job as a counselor with A Center 4 Change and only expected to be advising. But, as it turns out, there was more need for him in the restaurant than he anticipated.

“I didn’t think I’d be doing it, because I thought, ‘I’m still working a full-time job with A Center 4 Change.’ So I thought I’d just come in, help a little bit, maybe eight hours a week. Now I’m doing 32 hours plus, and I’m okay with that because I see how we’re doing something different.”
He said the community reaction and support has been overwhelming as well, with positive reactions to all the menu offerings so far.

“They’re giving us a chance and it blows my mind,” he said.

“I guess it’s kind of a dream,” Spears continued. “Because I ran the Ambassador restaurant in Ashland at one time.”
Before that he worked in the kitchens of other restaurants, and learned a lot in those environments, he said. But despite those experiences, and a culinary school education, he’d put that life largely behind him as he pursued his work as a counselor. But food, and passion for it, isn’t born entirely out of a culinary school experience. And we all have to eat, and cook, no matter what else we do in life, so it isn’t a passion easily set aside.

Spears passion, he said, was born out of necessity, and a desire to make something delicious even within modest means.

When asked where his love of cooking came from, he answered confidently and without hesitation.

“Being poor,” he said. “We were real poor. My dad was a garbage truck driver. My mom was a stay-at-home mom with four kids. Mom grew up in a house where they didn’t have electricity. They cooked from a (wood burning) stove. So it was important for me, and I always felt, growing up in our life, there wasn’t money… but I was always happiest, and my family was always happiest, when there was food among us. I would watch and study my mom, and how happy we were when we were eating. It wouldn’t matter what it was. It could be soup beans and fried potatoes, all the way up to our monthly lasagna.”
His grandma was important to his culinary journey as well.
“My grandmother, I used to watch her, and just go spend time with her and grandpa, and watch them cook. It was just never a bad time,” he said.

From there he tried a variety of different ways to connect with folks and make them happy – music, food, and eventually social work. He earned a master’s degree in clinical social work, and he said, “I thought, ‘This is it. This is going to be the rest of my life.’ And, well, here I am at Trail Town Bar & Grill, working on new recipes daily and training staff.”
That staff comes to him with a wide range of kitchen experience. Some of them, he said, “have never even peeled a potato before.” But, like Spears, they all have a shared desire to connect with others through the medium of food.
“And now, they’re throwing out food that the community seems to be liking,” Spears said.

That includes items that you can’t necessarily find anywhere else. Sure, there are sandwiches and burgers, but he said he sat down with the owners and they asked themselves, “What can we bring to the community that we don’t have?”

“Next thing you know, we’re talking about hand cut steaks,” Spears noted. “Everything we make is from scratch.”

Their seasonings are custom mixed in their own kitchen. They fry their own tortilla chips.

“Our smashed potatoes, we cut them every day. Nothing out of a box,” he continued.
And while some menu items are going to stick around, some may change. Right now, he said, they are getting rave reviews on their bacon queso mac n cheese and their pork carnitas nachos – two dishes that blend Mexican and hillbilly sensibilities. But when your pork carnitas are slow roasted for more than eight hours with a custom spice rub, that’s the kind of thing folks are going to notice.
“We’re real big on spices and turning things up,” Spears said. “But we want to have fun with it. It (the nachos) has tri-color chips, a homemade Baja sauce, sour cream sauce, fresh jalapenos and tomatoes, we just go crazy with it.”

They also don’t skimp on the portions. If they are going to charge $11 for their kitchen sink fries – hand cut fries smothered in everything but the kitchen sink – he said he wants to make sure they get $11 worth of fries for that table to share.
He isn’t afraid to make folks get messy either. The mac n cheeseburger, for instance, is a towering monstrosity that looks impossible to eat with your hands.
But, he said, the messiest food is often the best food. To him, he said, taking an item traditionally eaten as a sandwich and making it so messy you need utensils tells you it’s okay to have fun with it.
“You can eat it with a fork. You can eat it with a spoon. Just have fun with it,” he said.

“I want folks, when they’re done, to look down and go, ‘Oh! I’ve got some mac n cheese I can still eat in the morning!’”

He said he’s slightly changing the menu every week as well, and collecting feedback from patrons, so that by the time the restaurant opens on a daily basis they’ll have a set menu of seasonal and permanent items. That might be a burger. It might be a chicken breast with mornay sauce and asparagus. But whatever it is, Spears said, it will be prepared with love and passion by his staff.

You can check out the Trail Town Bar & Grill at 530 East Tom T. Hall Boulevard in Olive Hill, KY, on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday evenings, with expanded hours to come.  

Contact the writer at editor@cartercountytimes.com