One Barrel. One Night. No Repeats: Inside Our Old Forester Single Barrel Dinner at Cork & Bull Chophouse

Let me tell you something about this dinner before we even get to the food.

Everything you drank that night, every single glass, every cocktail, every pour, came from one barrel. Our barrel. A barrel that exists exclusively at Cork & Bull Chophouse in Chesapeake, Virginia. No other restaurant, no liquor store, nobody else on earth has access to it. When it's gone, it's gone. Full stop.

That's what a barrel pick means. And this one? This one was earned.

What Is a Bourbon Barrel Pick and Why Does It Matter?

This is actually our third barrel pick here at Cork & Bull Chophouse. We've done Knob Creek, Woodford Reserve, and now Old Forester. Each time, our Bar Manager Andrew Lewis leads the charge: organizing the tastings, bringing the team together, and guiding us through the process of finding the right one.

This round, we sat through tastings with around six different companies before we landed on Old Forester. And I won't lie to you, some of those sessions were rough. When you're working through bourbons at 112 and 115 proof trying to make a decision, it's a lot. It's fun, but it's a lot.

What we were looking for, and what Andrew kept steering us back toward, was two things: drinkability and versatility. You don't want something so one-note that it only works one way. You don't want a bourbon where somebody goes, oh, you've got to have this for an Old Fashioned. You want it because it's just flat-out good. You want something where it doesn't matter what you do to it, it's still good. That's what we found with this Old Forester single barrel. Smooth, but it'll kick you in the teeth. In the best way.

Andrew built the entire evening around that one barrel. Every cocktail, the neat pour, the cube, the Old Fashioned, the Whiskey Sour, the Espresso Martini, all of it from the same source. That was his vision, and honestly, when he first pitched it to me I looked at him and said, how the hell am I supposed to build five courses around the same spirit? He said, I'm going to show you five different ways this bourbon is going to wake you up. I said okay. Go.

He absolutely did.

How We Plan a Bourbon Pairing Dinner

Here's the real behind-the-scenes of how this menu came together: Andrew made every cocktail, and I sat there and drank them. We talked about what we'd want to eat in that moment, sip after sip, idea after idea. Sometimes you take a sip and an idea hits and you just know. Write it down immediately, that one's going. And sometimes I've got to sell Andrew on something, because everybody's palate is different, and some of the stuff that comes out of my mouth has him looking at me like, you serious right now?

The man has a Rubik's brain when it comes to bourbon and cocktail pairing. These dinners don't happen the way they do without him. Without having that level of expertise on the other side of the table, pushing things further, challenging ideas, and occasionally saving me from myself, we don't get to where we end up.

The Old Forester Single Barrel Dinner: Course by Course

Course One: Mini Charcuterie + Old Forester Single Barrel, Neat

We opened the evening the only way that made sense: straight up. Nothing added, nothing changed. This is it. This is our barrel pick in its purest form. Before I dress it up, before Andrew transforms it into something, I want you to taste exactly what we chose and understand why we chose it.

The charcuterie I built around it was personal: dried apricot, espresso velvetano, honey roasted almonds. Literally the stuff I'd want to munch on if I was sitting at home sipping a glass of this neat. It's not complicated. It doesn't need to be. The bourbon opens the door, and then we get to show you how we dress it up from there.

Course Two: Seared Scallop Risotto with Foie Gras + "The Cube"

Here's where it gets interesting. You hear scallop risotto and you don't automatically think bourbon, but it worked, and Andrew knew it would. The single large cube is doing something specific: it's slowing the melt, opening up the subtle nuances of the bourbon that the proof can sometimes mask. It softens just enough to let the sweetness of the scallop come through properly.

My job with this dish was to not let it become fat on fat on sweet. So I added citrus, orange zest and lemon zest, because there are floral notes in this Old Forester barrel and I wanted to find them. Then there's the foie gras: I didn't want it just sitting there as richness. I almost burnt it on purpose. I wanted that char, that barrel-char quality on the plate, not just in the glass. Start the risotto with rendered foie, and you've got something a lot of people have never tasted before.

Course Three: Pork Belly Burnt Ends + Old Forester Old Fashioned

I don't have a lot of fancy things to say about this one. It was just right. Andrew made a damn good Old Fashioned with damn good bourbon, and I made the best pork belly I could: skin you could hear crisp, meat that fell apart, caramelization exactly where it needed to be. We've been serving pork belly burnt ends at Second Saturdays and I'm always a little surprised by how many people have never had it before. This bourbon dinner was a great excuse to introduce it to a new audience, done a little differently.

What Andrew's Old Fashioned did was what a great cocktail always does: it opened more doors. If I hand you a keyring with one key, you can open one door. Hand you a keyring with four keys, you can open four. The bitters, the dilution, the muddled sugar, those are three or four additional flavor expansions on profiles that already existed in the bourbon. It just works.

Course Four: Seafood Boil + Old Forester Whiskey Sour

(Side note: the menu says seafood boil, but in my head it was always a crawfish boil. There was a small breakdown in communication, the menus got printed, and we adapted. Added some clams and called it a seafood boil. It worked out fine.)

This was my idea and I know it's weird. Andrew told me he was doing a Whiskey Sour, egg white and everything, and something clicked. Spicy, finger-licking, eat-with-your-hands crawfish boil. Just like that, it was done.

I'll be honest: some people aren't hip to crawfish. They're mud bugs. You either love them or you don't. But I love getting people to try things outside their comfort zone, to put the fork down and immerse themselves in the full experience of a meal. Cork & Bull Chophouse has a southern flair that people don't always expect, and so do I. I'm classically French trained, but I spent real time in the South and in Louisiana, and I can show you both in the same dish: emulsions and technique on one side, Creole soul on the other.

The Whiskey Sour was doing a different job than every other pairing that night. It wasn't about flavor marriage; it was about palate work. A deliberate reset heading into the final two courses. But I didn't want to just hand you a palate cleanser. Andrew made sure you actually enjoyed it.

Course Five: Coffee-Rubbed Tomahawk + Bourbon Espresso Martini

This was the moment. Three 37-ounce tomahawks walked into that room and the energy shifted immediately. Full flex, I won't pretend otherwise.

When Andrew told me he was pairing the tomahawk with a Bourbon Espresso Martini, my first reaction was what are you doing? Then he put one in front of me and I said, I know exactly what I'm doing. He changed my life with that cocktail. I will never have an espresso martini without bourbon again.

The coffee rub, and shout out to Mike Runkle who threw that dry rub together and absolutely nailed it, had espresso, ancho chili, coriander, brown sugar, black pepper, and salt. I smoked the tomahawk first, then finished it under the broiler for the crispiest, most perfect char I could get. Coffee is an aggressive flavor. It needs something that can stand up to it and balance it back, and that's where the steak came in. The goal was to execute that rub so perfectly that you stopped thinking about coffee and just thought about the perfect slice of meat.

And then you'd take a sip of that espresso martini and go right back for another bite.

I also hit the steaks with a touch of espresso right on top during the final rest. That move really tied everything together.

Running a special dinner event while regular service is going on in the same building is a chess match. We've got two separate lines at Cork & Bull, which helps, but the night of this dinner we were genuinely slammed on the restaurant side. I'd already been outside since 6am running the smoker for Second Saturdays, thirteen hours in before this dinner even started. There is no practice run on a tomahawk. No trial rub, no test sear. You have faith in your training, your team, and your instincts. Over a decade in the kitchen, and what I know is this: if one person in that room takes a bite and has the exact same feeling I had when I first thought of the dish, that's the win.

Course Six: Chef's Grazing Table + Bourbon Bacon Chocolate Chip Cookie

I believe food brings people together. That's not a tagline; that's genuinely how I think about what we do. And one of my favorite expressions of that belief is communal eating. Bumping elbows with your neighbor reaching for the perfect slice of tomahawk, having to tussle a little for the last piece of something good. That's humanity at the table, and that's what I wanted to close the night with.

No plated dessert. A grazing table. And at the center of it, a bourbon bacon chocolate chip cookie that I have to give full credit to Sean for. Sean is one of my up-and-coming kitchen trainees, under 21, found a home here at Cork & Bull, and he is going to be a damn good chef. He made the cookie dough and it was perfect.

There was no listed cocktail pairing for dessert. Sometimes you don't need one. Sometimes you just need a great cookie and the conversation that's already happening around the table.

The Team That Made It Happen

Andrew Lewis doesn't get enough credit, so let me be as clear as I can: these dinners don't happen the way they do without him. Not even close. He organized the barrel selection process, led us through six different brand tastings to find the right bourbon, designed every cocktail pairing from that single barrel, and set the tone for the room all night. He's a mad scientist when it comes to this stuff, and he genuinely cares. We're not doing these events to wave something impressive around and say look what we have. We're doing them to grow people's knowledge, to give our guests access to something real, exclusive, and memorable. That's Andrew's ethos as much as it's mine.

Mike Runkle saved my life that night. I was on hour thirteen when the dinner started, and Mike was the set of hands I needed. That coffee rub? His. That dinner probably doesn't happen the way it did without him stepping up.

To Gemma and Eric, our Brown-Forman reps: you two always bring the most fun and you never come empty-handed. You know how to make a chef happy. Get him a hat. Our GM Shannon holds everything together so that we can do this. To our kitchen crew, our front line, and our servers: they do their jobs so that we can do ours. Every single night.

Why You Can't Replicate This Anywhere Else

You can take this menu home. You can hunt down a bottle of Old Forester and try to get close to what people in that room experienced that night. You could try. But it will never be that. There's not an Andrew and a Dallas anywhere else. And that barrel? It only lives here, at Cork & Bull Chophouse in Chesapeake, Virginia. When it's gone, it's gone forever.

If you want to be in the room for the next one, keep an eye on our Events page. These bourbon dinners and wine dinners sell out fast, and you won't want to miss what we've got coming.

Until next time, 
Chef Dallas