The Best Drink You'll Find in Kentucky

A slightly-misleading subject line, PLUS: comfort-food reading, loud/dumb music, post-Mardi-Gras cocktails, and BEEF WEEKEND VII???

Scott Hines

20 Feb 2026 — 11 min read

Photo by Jon McCallon / Unsplash

This past weekend, I took my wife out to a nice dinner for Valentine's Day. We went to a new-ish restaurant downtown, and after handing us our menus and the wine list, our server half-jokingly offered to "start you off with some of Louisville's finest?", an offer punctuated by the presentation of a pitcher of tap water.

"WE WERE JUST TALKING ABOUT THIS ON THE WAY HERE!", I exclaimed.

Here's where I have to clue you in, if you're not familiar.

Louisville has great tap water. This is a personal opinion that I hold firmly, but it's not an outlier like my opinions on certain types of chili. Our water is consistently rated as being some of the best-tasting tap water in the country. Not twenty minutes prior to our server's offer, we had passed the city's historic water tower on the drive in and had a conversation about how the water here has spoiled us for living anywhere else.

I've lived in Louisville for eleven years now, long enough to consider myself a local, and my opinions on the various things the city is known for have settled into the kind of complicated ambivalence that familiarity breeds. The Kentucky Derby is a one-of-a-kind spectacle, but one plagued with problems and steeped in problematic traditions. Bourbon is something I enjoy consuming in moderation, but it's not the kind of thing you should build an entire civic image around. The Hot Brown sandwich, Louisville Sluggers, Jennifer Lawrence, Jack Harlow–I can weather criticism of any of our local products with relative indifference.

Our water, though?

I'll throw hands over our water.

ACBN readers come from all 50 US states and a number of other countries, and I genuinely love hearing about where you're from and what's good there. Today, I want to start out by raising a toast of Louisville Pure Tap water and asking:

What's something you're especially proud of where you're from?

Holding out for a Gyro, or: the Glorious and Timely Return of BEEF WEEKEND

I try not to get sucked into online food trends. I'm doing my own thing here, y'know? Aside from that, I find it disorienting any time I watch a video wherein someone purports to try "the viral __" and it turns out to be something that I've never heard of.

I'm not made of stone, though.

One new food trend kept crossing my feed, and it involved a longtime favorite food of mine: döner kebab, the Turkish dish of spit-roasted beef and lamb that's a street-food favorite across Europe. Normally, the meat in these kebabs is shaved off a giant rotating spit, a method of cooking that's hardly practical at home, but TikToker MezeMike popularized a 'hack' that involves rolling a ground-meat mixture flat between sheets of parchment, folding it up and baking it in the oven.

I had to try this, primarily because... well, I wanted to eat it. Beyond that, though, it would provide the perfect jumping-off point for BEEF WEEKEND.

What's that, you say?

Why, it's a completely made-up holiday that I've celebrated here in late February every year since 2020. What's it involve? Eating beef, mostly. Why? I don't know. But it's led to some great stuff here, like the development of my elevated-cafeteria-food favorite, Sloppy Julias.

Is it weird to do this on the first Friday of Lent? Probably, but that wasn't on purpose.

For the kebabs themselves, I hewed closely to the NYT Cooking version of the recipe, with some slight modifications.

Sheet-Pan Döner Kebabs

2 onions, finely chopped
1/4 cup olive oil
1 pound ground beef
1 pound ground lamb
1/2 cup full-fat plain Greek yogurt
2 tablespoons paprika
2 tablespoons dried oregano
2 tablespoons ground cumin
1-1/2 tablespoons garlic powder
1 tablespoon kosher salt
1 tablespoon fresh-ground black pepper

Preheat your oven to 400F.

Run the onions and olive oil through a food processor to form a paste; if you don't have a food processor, I've had good luck grating onions on the large holes of a box grater before to achieve the same effect. In a large mixing bowl, combine the onion-oil paste, the meats and spices and mix until well-combined; I used a Danish dough whisk to help the process along.

Split the mixture into six portions, and lay each one between two sheets of parchment paper (NOT wax paper–this is going in the oven). Roll between the sheets until they're a quarter-inch thick, then fold the flattened mixture over itself lengthwise like you're rolling up a sheet of puff pastry, about an inch wide per fold. Repeat with each portion, then lay the prepared rolls out on a baking sheet. Bake for 30-40 minutes, stopping midway through to pour off some of the grease that collects in the pan. (The Times recipe saves this to whisk into a sauce; that's too far for me, and I just used a regular tzatziki.) Once it's looking nicely browned, unroll from the parchment–it'll fall apart a bit, but in a way that kinda looks like it's cut off a spit.

It turned out pretty good!

Maybe not as good as it'd be off a streetside spit, but darn tasty for something out of my home oven.

Of course, replicating this recipe wasn't my actual end goal.

I realized from the get-go that this meat would make an excellent pizza topping, and so I used the ample leftovers for just that purpose, assembling what might be the best pizza I've ever made at home?

Döner Kebab Pizza