By Kyle Roberts
Summer road trips always include one of my favorite things: finding signature restaurants in different cities.
Trips to Hot Springs, Ark., are no different. Back in college, I would sometimes take the three-hour drive day trips to see the beautiful Lake Hamilton or the Ouachita mountains. There is so much to do in historic downtown, but a trip would always conclude with dinner at one particularly outstanding Italian eatery.
Today, we have a copy-cat recipe from J & S’s Italian Villa. While I highly recommend that you make your way to the restaurant yourself, allow me to explain why I made this copycat in the first place.
Judith and I, before kids, took one of our trips to Hot Springs with the sole intent to eat at the restaurant, which not only has amazing Italian cuisine but also overlooked the beautiful water at sunset.
Imagine our horror when we arrived only to find that the restaurant had been completely burned and razed to the ground. I think we ended up at a Chicken Express that night, eating our feelings in tenders and rolls.
Thinking we’d never see our favorite Hot Springs locale again, I tried to recreate their signature dish at home: Chicken Verona, and the recipe is included below.
This story has a happy ending, thankfully. A few years later while driving around Hot Springs, we happened to pull over in a shopping center and by sheer serendipity, we saw the marquee sign for J & S.
Nothing changed expect for the view of the lake. The food is still amazing.
And If you don’t want to make the drive, here is a good effort at recreating this feast.
To make this dish, you’ll need to follow a Tasty.co recipe for chicken cordon bleu and swap out a couple of ingredients.
Recipe and ingredients:
Find it here. Swap out the stuffing and replace with a mixture of a half cup of sautéed spinach, and one-fourth cups of shredded mozzarella per stuffed breast.
Make sure after you have fried the stuffed chicken to put into an oven to reach an internal temp of 165 degrees.
I chose to garnish with a simple wilted asparagus, sautéed in olive until tender enough to bend and not break.
Lastly and courtesy of The Tasty Marshmellow, make sure you use this incredibly easy and thick Alfredo recipe and absolutely drench your chicken.
Enjoy!
