In early October, whiskey writer Frank Dobbins III visited Willett Distillery in Bardstown, Ky., and posted about it on Instagram. He joined master distiller Drew Kulsveen for a behind-the-scenes tour. He spoke admirably of the distillery’s expansion effort. He wrote glowingly of its proprietary 11-year-old distillate. Yet all the commenters on Dobbins’ post wanted to talk about was an egg salad sandwich.
“Egg Salad Sandwich!!!” wrote one commenter. “That MF egg salad sandwich is so good,” wrote another. “BEST EGG SALAD SANDWICH 🔥,” wrote yet another. “Always the egg salad,” wrote fellow drinks writer Jake Emen.
Willett Distillery has long been a cult sensation among the whiskey cognoscenti. That’s largely due to the thousands of Willett Family Estate single barrel releases over the last two decades, each packaged in handsome, Cognac-style bottles with cryptic labeling virtually impossible to parse for newbies. There’s even an iPhone app to help collectors track all the esoteric bottlings over the years. Yet, its distillery restaurant, known as the Bar at Willett, has an egg salad sandwich that, over the last five years, has become a cult sensation in its own right.
Get Ya an Egg Salad Sandwich
The Bar at Willett opened in September 2019 on the second floor above a gift shop and visitor’s center, with John Sleasman as its executive chef. He had previously worked under James Beard Award winner Sean Brock at McCrady’s in Charleston. Inspired by the Kulsveen family’s French heritage and Nordic roots, Sleasman claims he wanted to produce a menu featuring approachable yet complex dishes that would pair well alongside the distillery’s coveted whiskeys.
The opening day menu included such dishes as country ham spread served with pork rinds; beef tartare served with grilled shiitake mushrooms, oyster, endive, and thinly sliced pumpernickel; and fried catfish.
There was also an egg salad sandwich made using local eggs prepared in three different ways: hard boiled, jammed, and cured. While admitting he wanted to make the best egg salad sandwich he’d ever had, Sleasman never expected it to take off the way it has.
“[I thought] it is a staple in many Southern households and our regional guests visiting the distillery would enjoy a familiar style of sandwich,” he says.
Still on the menu today, hard boiled eggs are mixed with applewood-smoked Duke’s Mayo, nutritional yeast, smoked paprika, yellow mustard, celery salt, Champagne vinegar, and ground black pepper, then spread between slices of toasted brioche. The entire sandwich is then slathered with jammed egg yolks that have been blended with smoked soy sauce. Finally, 7-day salted-cured egg yolks are microplaned atop everything, then garnished with minced chives.
From day one, seemingly, reports came in from bourbon tourists discovering the sandwich on visits to Willett.
“Get ya an egg salad sandwich while you wait,” wrote one man in a Sept. 17, 2019 post on a private Facebook group exclusively dedicated to Willett fans, the earliest online touting of the sandwich I can find.
Calls imploring visitors to sample the egg salad sandwich soon became as common in this group as posts about esoteric single barrel numbers, the potential for gift shop bottle releases on any given day, and what rarities were currently available to drink at the bar.
“I had heard about the famed Willett egg salad sandwich for years, enough so that I felt haunted by the ghost-like impression of a half-forgotten dream where, surely, I was already familiar with it.”
“I was wondering who the heck was ordering so many damn high end bottles and I’m over there on Friday just trying to enjoy my egg sammy,” wrote another poster later that year.
Very quickly, egg salad sandwich discussion escaped the realm of mere Willett stans and became a checklist item for any and all Bourbon Trail visitors, no different than wanting to get a bottle signed by Jimmy Russell at Wild Turkey or score one’s own personal bottling at Michter’s.
Exceeding the Hype?
Like many whiskey enthusiasts, Emen had been reading the online chatter about the egg salad sandwich pretty much since the Bar at Willett’s opening day; like many obsessive foodies, he was vexed by his inability to actually try it. That finally changed during the pandemic when in the fall of 2020 he was finally able to visit Kentucky to report on the reopening of distilleries, one of which being Willett. Of course, after his journalistic work was complete he headed straight for the bar.
“I had heard about the famed Willett egg salad sandwich for years, enough so that I felt haunted by the ghost-like impression of a half-forgotten dream where, surely, I was already familiar with it,” he explains. Still, it managed to exceed the hype for him.
“It’s been a fun talking point for the staff to sell an egg salad sandwich famous enough to have its own Instagram.”
“It was revelatory, superseding the lofty, imagined status it already held in my head,” he says, “[straddling] the line between childhood classic and elevated adult fare at the precise point in which you can unselfconsciously enjoy both realms, pretension free.”
In many ways, to have the sandwich, and post about it online, became proof of one’s bourbon industry bona fides. While taters were off searching for BTAC bottlings and Wellers, the true connoisseurs had always gravitated toward Willett, especially the brand’s highly coveted cask-strength bourbon and rye single barrels that were released starting in 2006.
“It’s that ultimate, extra little bit of insider’s knowledge,” Emen says. “No, it’s not enough that you secured that much-coveted tour at Willett and tried the specific, can’t-miss gems on its epic back bar. You also need to order the egg salad sandwich, or else you dropped the ball right at the end.”
Emen also believes the egg salad sandwich’s aesthetic beauty — if impossible-to-eat-with-one’s-hands plating — is another reason it has become an online sensation, ideal fodder for a social media share.
The Egg Salad Speaks
Willett is certainly not unaware of the sensation it has created, even playing off it by adopting an Instagram account for @theegsaladsandwichatwillett. It was unofficially started by Brian Beyke, known as @abandonbourbon online, who was supplying the bar with its Quills coffee at the time of its opening.
“Hello. I am the egg salad sandwich at Willett,” read the caption on the account’s first post, from February 2020. It accompanied an image of the sandwich, so zoomed-in one could see the individual curlicues of each cured egg shaving. (In recent months, a white cheese has become the garnish.)
“It’s been a fun talking point for the staff to sell an egg salad sandwich famous enough to have its own Instagram,” says Beyke.
Nearly five years later, the account is still posting regularly, finding new fans and still causing a Pavlovian response for those who have had it before.
“We live in troubled times and this sandwich is the only beacon of hope,” wrote a commenter on a recent post.
But the egg salad sandwich is not merely an Instagram sensation these days. It is touted on Twitter, Facebook, and TikTok; discussed on bourbon sub-reddits and even nerdier bourbon message boards.
Non-bourbon industry content creators have made the pilgrimage to try it, too. Like Luke Collins, he of the @lukefoods TikTok account with 1.1 million followers, who had it back in August. The congenial TikToker effusively praised the sandwich, giving it a “9.2 out of 10,” as he gorged on it in his car.
It has begun to make more mainstream lists as well, like a recent “The best places to eat egg salad in the US” listicle featured on Mashed. There, it appeared alongside sandwiches from big-city restaurants in San Francisco, Manhattan, Atlanta, and Houston.
TripAdviser reviews for the Bar at Willett almost always mention the egg salad sandwich as well, many even including it in the title of their critiques (“Best Egg Salad!,” “The best Egg Salad ever,” or, simply “Egg Salad.”)
“[T]he egg salad sandwich has so many levels of flavors that it is up there with Japanese standards,” wrote one reviewer. “[T]he egg salad sandwich is off the charts!” wrote another, while yet another noted that “other reviewers, plus distillery tour staff, weren’t kidding when they said the egg salad sandwich was the best they’ve ever tasted.”
As do user posts on Yelp, where the egg salad sandwich is currently mentioned in 72 out of 143 restaurant reviews while an image of it appears in 46 of those. An insane batting average, all the more so as it comes from maybe the most critically acclaimed distillery in the country.
Though, as a recent YouTuber, in reviewing the distillery, noted, “The piece de resistance at Willett is not the bourbon, it’s the egg salad sandwich!”
