Olen and Nancy Capps came to Lexington, Kentucky, for the same reason a great many horse people did in the late 1940s: for the show ring. The couple had made the trip from Camden, New Jersey, for the Junior League Horse Show, the saddlebred spectacle staged each summer on the red-clay oval of the Red Mile, and when the classes were finished they went looking for dinner. Nothing in town suited them. The Cappses were restaurateurs — they owned a place called the Chimney House in Camden, across the Delaware River from Philadelphia, and another down the shore at Ocean City — and they knew a gap in a market when they tasted one. Before they left Lexington they had settled on the building they wanted and found a landlord willing to talk.
It was a stately, two-story brick house at 855 South Broadway, just one door south of Tattersalls Sales Stable, its windows looking out over the Lexington trotting track. It had lived several lives already. For years it had been a private residence — known around town at one point as the Jewell place — and before that a boarding house known as the Tattersall Inn. In 1932 it passed to A. C. Duke, a Maysville tobacco man and horseman, who let it serve as quarters for the manager and caretaker of Tattersalls. Then, in 1948, Tattersalls and the house next door changed hands together, both bought by Robert S. Eddy, Jr., and his son, F. Hathorn Eddy. When the Cappses asked Robert Eddy about leasing the old brick house, he agreed.
The terms were set down in a ten-year lease dated February 10, 1949, between Tattersalls, Inc., and Olen D. Capps — signed by him personally and in the name of the business he was about to bring into being: Capps Coach House. The rent came to $933.62 a month. What followed was a top-to-bottom renovation: the old house was gutted and reworked into a modern restaurant, with two rooms added, that could seat 300 guests in spaces ranging from quiet corners for parties of eight to banquet rooms holding 80. The kitchen was built to be shown off, open to any diner who cared to watch the cooks at work, and a bakery was tucked in behind it. The doors of Capps Coach House opened that spring, with a formal debut on April 17, 1949.
The whole family folded into the enterprise. Olen and Nancy Capps took an apartment on the second floor of the converted house. Their younger son, Robert, and his wife helped run the new establishment; the older son, William, minded the Ocean City restaurant back east, and the Chimney House in Camden they leased out to others. Olen Capps himself was a Pennsylvanian, formerly of Norristown, in the suburbs northwest of Philadelphia, and long devoted to horses of both stripes, thoroughbred and standardbred alike. He and his wife kept their own runners, a thoroughbred string racing under the name Nan-O-Lee Farms, then stabled at North Wales Stud, the storied thoroughbred estate near Warrenton, Virginia, owned in those years by the automotive heir Walter P. Chrysler, Jr.
That devotion became the restaurant’s entire visual language. Paintings and prints of horses crowded the bar, the lounge, and every dining room; a good many of the photographs of horses and riders on the walls were the work of photographer John L. “Johnny” Horst. When Ford Times, the Ford Motor Company’s pocket-sized travel magazine, wrote the place up in 1951, it caught the room exactly, calling it a restaurant with “a definitely ‘horsey’ atmosphere,” open every day but Monday and standing next to the world-famous Tattersalls, where horses had been sold for three-quarters of a century.
The address had earned the description. Tattersalls had been auctioning harness horses in Lexington since the late 19th century, its name borrowed from the great English sales house founded at Hyde Park Corner in 1766. The track the dining room overlooked was the Red Mile, the storied red-clay course whose Grand Circuit meeting, the Lexington Trots, closed the harness season each autumn.
The Coach House had been open barely half a year when it collected its most cinematic guest. That October John Huston, the famous motion-picture director, brought a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer crew into the Bluegrass to shoot the closing scene of The Asphalt Jungle, his hard-boiled heist picture, in which Sterling Hayden’s dying criminal makes it home to a Kentucky horse farm and drops in a pasture among the colts he had dreamed of buying back. (Cast in a small early role as a crooked lawyer’s young mistress was an all-but-unknown actress named Marilyn Monroe.) One evening the Lexington horseman John A. Clark took Huston to Capps Coach House and ordered for him — a plate of lamb fries, the local delicacy of breaded, fried lamb testicles served in cream gravy, a thing local menus listed without translation. Huston ate them, and liked them. “What are these?” he asked at last. “I’ll tell you tomorrow,” Clark said.
In September 1954 Tattersalls — and the Coach House’s lease along with it — passed to Standardbred, Inc., a syndicate of harness breeders led by Frederick Van Lennep, the master of Castleton Farm and one of the two great powers of the American standardbred world. A month later the Cappses sold their Coach House for an undisclosed sum to two men with no restaurant experience whatsoever. Wendell Hall was a horse trainer; Charlie Webb sold cloth for the Fulton Bag and Cotton Company out of Atlanta. They had been circling the deal for some time, they said, and they liked their chances. “We both have been on the road quite a bit,” one of them told a reporter for the Lexington Leader, “and we think we know what the public wants.”
Hall and Webb took charge November 1. Olen Capps, meanwhile, announced that he was going home to Philadelphia; by 1956 he and Nancy were running Nanolen Farm at Collegeville, Pennsylvania, tending standardbreds instead of tables. Under Hall and Webb the restaurant kept its coach and dropped its Capps: it became, simply, The Coach House. The partnership held until 1960, when Webb bought out Hall’s interest and carried the dining room on alone.
That long run ended in the summer of 1967, when Webb sold the restaurant to Mr. and Mrs. Howard Melvin, the owners of the Heritage Restaurant in Cincinnati, who promptly branded their new acquisition with the same name. The horses stayed on the walls — the old Johnny Horst photographs of riders and mounts, donated years before, were simply left hanging — but the Coach House name, and the era it had carried since the spring of 1949, was finished.
In 1969 the building was taken over by restaurateur Stanley Demos, who revived the Coach House name and, over the next three decades, made it the grandest fine-dining room in Lexington: crystal chandeliers, gold-framed oils, a continental menu leaning French with Greek and Italian touches, and a lunch trade that read like a roll call of the Bluegrass. A fire early one morning in 1971 gutted the interior and consumed some 3,000 cookbooks; Demos rebuilt. His Coach House served its last dinner on April 7, 2001, and the building was pulled down in 2013. Demos himself lived to age 104, dying in 2024 — long enough to have outlasted, by better than half a century, the horse-show couple who first hung a coach lamp over the door of 855 South Broadway.
Famous Patrons of Capps Coach House
- John Huston
Coach House Hot Brown
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Loading...Created in 1926 by Fred K. Schmidt, the chef of Louisville’s Brown Hotel, the original Hot Brown was an open-faced turkey-and-bacon sandwich covered with Mornay sauce and browned under the broiler. Schmidt devised it as a late-night alternative to ham and eggs for guests attending the hotel’s popular dinner dances. This riff on the classic Hot Brown was a fixture on the menu of Capps Coach House in Lexington, Kentucky. Its recipe allowed for either chicken or turkey and added fresh mushrooms, tomato, and paprika. A version of the restaurant's recipe designed for home cooks, published in 1951, listed "your favorite medium cream sauce" as an ingredient; this adaptation includes a classic preparation of the sauce.
Ingredients
- For the medium cream sauce
- 3 tablespoons unsalted butter
- 3 tablespoons all-purpose flour
- 2 cups whole milk, warmed
- 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt, plus more to taste
- 1/4 teaspoon black pepper
- For the Hot Browns
- 8 slices bacon
- 4 large slices sturdy white sandwich bread
- 12 ounces thinly sliced cooked chicken or turkey
- 4 ounces white mushrooms, thinly sliced
- 3/4 cup finely grated Parmesan, plus more for sprinkling
- 1 medium ripe tomato, seeded and cut into 1/2-inch cubes
- Sweet paprika, for sprinkling
- 4 small parsley sprigs, for serving
Instructions
Heat the oven to 400 degrees. Arrange the bacon in a single layer on a rimmed baking sheet and bake until browned and nearly crisp, 12 to 16 minutes. Transfer to a paper towel-lined plate. Heat the broiler with a rack about 6 inches from the heat source.
Meanwhile, toast the bread until golden and firm. Trim off the crusts and cut each slice diagonally into 2 triangles. Arrange the toast in a single layer in a broiler-safe 9-by-13-inch baking dish or on a rimmed sheet pan.
Prepare the cream sauce: Melt the butter in a medium saucepan over medium heat. Add the flour and cook, whisking constantly, until smooth and bubbling but not browned, about 1 minute.
Gradually whisk in the warm milk. Bring to a gentle simmer and cook, whisking frequently, until the sauce has thickened enough to coat the back of a spoon, 4 to 6 minutes. Stir in the salt and pepper. Taste and add more salt as needed. The sauce should be thick but pourable; whisk in a little more milk if necessary.
Divide the chicken or turkey among the pieces of toast, covering them completely. Spoon the cream sauce evenly over the meat. Scatter the mushrooms on top, then sprinkle generously with Parmesan and lightly with paprika. Arrange the tomato pieces around the edges of the sandwiches.
Broil, watching closely, until the sauce is bubbling and the Parmesan is browned in spots, 2 to 4 minutes. Arrange 2 strips of bacon crosswise over each portion and broil until the bacon is crisp and the dish is very hot, about 1 minute more.
Garnish with parsley and serve immediately, taking care when handling the hot baking dish.
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