What is Kentucky Bacon Pie, and does it really taste 'like Christmas morning'?

Leah Hunter, Louisville Courier Journal
Updated ·2 min read
One Nineteen West Main in La Grange is home to the Kentucky Bacon Pie, which is a pretzel crust with a caramel toffee filling made of bacon, chocolate chips, candied praline pecans made from scratch. The pie is topped with a whipped topping drizzled with mocha.
One Nineteen West Main in La Grange is home to the Kentucky Bacon Pie, which is a pretzel crust with a caramel toffee filling made of bacon, chocolate chips, candied praline pecans made from scratch. The pie is topped with a whipped topping drizzled with mocha.

When Jason Kinser created the menu for One Nineteen West Main, he wanted to feature a dessert unique to the restaurant's Oldham County location.

What he came up with is the restaurant's trademarked Kentucky Bacon Pie.

"It's got a little bit of that salty, smoky bacon flavor, but it's definitely not overwhelming," said Kinser, the president and owner of One Nineteen West Main. "The overall taste I say doesn't taste like bacon. It tastes like Christmas morning to an 8-year-old."

Traditional ingredients like bacon and pecans go into Kentucky Bacon Pie ($6.99 a slice), which is a pretzel crust with a caramel toffee filling made of bacon, chocolate chips and candied praline pecans made from scratch. The pie is topped with a whipped topping drizzled with mocha. The dessert first appeared on the menu in 2012.

The amount of bacon in the pie is a trade secret, but there were between 10 and 12 prototypes before the recipe was perfected. Kinser said they had to balance the pie's sweet and salty flavors. One version would be too sweet while another would be too salty and a third would taste too bland.

"The overall taste I say doesn't taste like bacon," Jason Kinser, the president and owner of One Nineteen West Main restaurant, said. "It tastes like Christmas morning to an 8-year-old."
"The overall taste I say doesn't taste like bacon," Jason Kinser, the president and owner of One Nineteen West Main restaurant, said. "It tastes like Christmas morning to an 8-year-old."

"It's a very rich dessert, but it also balances out," Kinser said. "We finally nailed it just right."

Once featured on the Food Network show "The Best Thing I Ever Ate," the Kentucky Bacon Pie is only available at One Nineteen West Main, which is located at 119 W. Main St. in La Grange, Kentucky, and is open every day from 11 a.m. to 8:30 p.m.

The restaurant opened in 2011 and offers new Southern cuisine, which Kinser describes as traditional Southern ingredients put together in a new, upscale way.

"It's ingredients that you know and love but put together in a way that you haven't seen, so it's unique without being weird," he said.

"I've been in the restaurant business basically my entire life and knew that I wanted to open a restaurant one day, so about three years before I opened One Nineteen, I just sat down and started writing out the menu for La Grange or Oldham County," he said.

If you're looking for other eccentric desserts, try the restaurant's Fried Banana Unsplit ($5.99), which is a banana fried in Fruity Pebbles breading. Crispy on the outside and warm and tender on the inside, the dessert is topped with vanilla ice cream, caramel, raspberry, chocolate sauce, whipped cream and a cherry.

"The overall taste I say doesn't taste like bacon," Jason Kinser, the president and owner of One Nineteen West Main restaurant, said. "It tastes like Christmas morning to an 8-year-old."
"The overall taste I say doesn't taste like bacon," Jason Kinser, the president and owner of One Nineteen West Main restaurant, said. "It tastes like Christmas morning to an 8-year-old."

Reach features reporter Leah Hunter via email at lhunter@gannett.com.

This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: One Nineteen West Main restaurant sells Kentucky Bacon Pie in LaGrange