by John LaFollette
Ville Voice Eats Correspondent

The Von Allmen Dairy Farm House was probably easier to get to before the construction of the Gene Snyder Freeway.  I was half-lost in Crestwood, scanning the hyper-developed landscape for a hundred-year-old building I know to be on the National Register of Historic Places.  When you finally make the turn off Brownsboro Road (US 22) the 1912 house that is now home to Corbett’s “An American Place” pops out like, well, a beautifully restored historic landmark situated in front of a Costco.

Preservation Louisville announced this week that the restoration of the Von Allmen Dairy Farm property was one of its top-10 preservation success stories, and a tour of the restaurant from Chef Dean Corbett made it pretty clear why.

Corbett charged architect Ben Palmer-Ball and builder Pat Durham with preserving the historical and aesthetic integrity of the original space, while creating a fully functional modern restaurant.

The ceilings in the dining room, sitting room, and parlor were lowered to 11-feet, from 14, and enclose recessed lighting.  A bead-board ceiling was duplicated.  Original doors and molding profiles were retained, and copied when necessary.

For all the beauty of its first floor, Corbett’s is most breathtaking in its basement.  Private tables are available in the Wine Skeller (as in ‘rathskeller;’ the Von Allmen’s were Swiss) and adjacent dining room, which feature two-foot-thick limestone walls and an original brick floor.  My favorite detail?  Dining chairs with feet that self-adjust to the different bumps and grades of the brick.

Updates to the building were an obvious must, but they are largely unnoticeable.  Inconspicuous lighting makes the downstairs rooms pretty incredible, and a modern dumbwaiter that delivers food and drinks to the basement from the kitchen is hidden from view.  One exception: an interactive screen in the reserve-able Chef’s Room that keeps the table in live communication with the kitchen.

The restaurant, which has been open for about a year and a half, shares Chef Corbett’s time with Equus, the St. Matthews mainstay that he opened with his father in 1985.  While the Equus menu has become more modest in the last year, the menus at Corbett’s feature decadences like salmon with a cucumber-honeydew terrine, bourbon-barrel smoked pork tenderloin and chocolate Woodford ice cream, with expense-account prices.

John LaFollette is a Louisville-based writer.