Good eats make good neighbors in ‘restaurant clusters’
Birds of a feather flock together, it is said. And now it appears that maybe restaurants do, too. For many generations, after all, the dining scene that our parents and grandparents knew required a trip downtown for that special dining-out occasion. Neighborhood dining was largely limited to your friendly corner bar and grill, a diner or cafeteria or maybe a Woolworth’s lunch counter, or perhaps one of the city’s early pizzerias or chop-suey joints.
But then the Baby Boomers grew up and things changed. The ’70s and ’80s brought us Bardstown Road as the city’s first “Restaurant Row.” A decade later, the Frankfort Avenue renaissance took off. And now there’s an even newer trend, not only in Louisville but around the nation. “Restaurant Row” is so ’90s now. Say hello to the “Restaurant Cluster.” Continue reading LEO’s Dining Guide 2013: What helps one helps all→
“Je vais avoir le canard,” said my friend Anne, summoning a French teacher and one-time expat’s easy fluency.
Our server looked puzzled, though. “Maybe you could point it out on the menu,” he said, blushing a little. “I’m still learning the dishes.”
I’m not picking on the guy, though. He showed Hemingway-esque grace under fire as our party of four spent the evening on a lavish meal at Brasserie Provence. We enjoyed his service, a fine Loire Cabernet Franc and an excellent, mostly authentic Provencal meal while allowing plenty of slack for a kitchen slammed by capacity crowds on its first full weekend. Continue reading Brasserie Provence shows grace and good eats in dinner rush→
Somewhere out there in this wonderfully diverse world, there is bound to be at least one human who truly loves, loves, loves brussels sprouts.
I have not yet met this person. Let’s face it, a brussels sprout is nothing but a tiny cabbage, with all of the faults that its bigger sibling is heir to, but – in my opinion, at least, and apparently that of many others – few of the virtues. Overcook them and they get stenchy. Undercook them and they stay hard, without the saving grace of crunch. And no matter what you do with them, it seems, they remain, well, tiny cabbages. Continue reading Rye will make you eat your brussels sprouts and beg for more→
I’d like to sing the praises of Shady Lane Café, but I expect that café owner Susi Smith, an outstanding professional singer, could warble it far better than I; and her husband and co-owner Bill Smith, who’s not only a mean hand on the short-order grill but also a poet of some repute, could probably sling some better verses on the topic than I, iambic pentameter or free verse, either way. Continue reading We sing the praises of Shady Lane Café→
Okay, I am just going to come right out and say it: I am so over Food Network. Have been for years, really.
She’s like an old flame, full of bad memories of a romance that I try to suppress now that I’m no longer quite so young and stupid. Oh, I loved her back then, I truly did. It was late coming to Louisville, and I lusted after it in my heart when I read my friends’ stories online about her seductive wiles. And when she finally came to town, sometime around the turn of the millennium, as I recall, I was smitten, so smitten. Continue reading Food Network loves The Coach Lamp, but who loves Food Network?→
“Degrees Brix (symbol °Bx) is the sugar content of an aqueous solution. One degree Brix is 1 gram of sucrose in 100 grams of solution and represents the strength of the solution as percentage by weight (% w/w). If the solution contains dissolved solids other than pure sucrose, then the °Bx only approximates the dissolved solid content.”
Right! I knew that! Well, I knew the gist of it, anyway. You see, “brix” is wine-geek talk of the highest order, viticultural trade jargon you don’t really need to know at all, unless you’re the boss of a vineyard. It’s the kind of word that separates insiders (who know it’s pronounced “bricks”) from the rest of us, who probably think it’s French and would say it “bree” if we thought about it at all. Continue reading What’s a Brix? Good chow and libations in the ‘burbs→
Little things mean a lot. Even something as little as a grain of rice can mean a lot. Of course, it takes 7,200 grains of rice to fill a cup, or so sayeth the Google, but that’s not important right now.
Let’s talk about rice, and in particular the spectacular rice at Taj Palace. Trust me on this, folks. I love Indian food, and I’m a fan of Taj, which has survived a journey around three East End locations. I go there fairly often. But the other night, sampling a bite of simple, extra-long-grain basmati rice from a side platter, I suddenly experienced what philosophers call an epiphany, a sudden, almost spiritual insight into the deeper meaning of things. Specifically, rice. And Taj Palace. Continue reading It’s the rice, but not just the rice, at Taj Palace→
As I write this, I am still faintly aquiver with the sensory memory of a childhood pleasure, the s’more — that classic combination of crisp, slightly sweet graham cracker set with a couple squares of Hershey bar, topped with the melty, sugary, caramelized joy of a fire-roasted marshmallow just hot enough to melt the milky chocolate … and then, the pièce de résistance, the crème de la crème, all this goodness squished between halves of a sizzling, seductively greasy grilled donut. Mmmmm, dooooonuts.
Maybe this is just my wacky imagination talking, but I’ve always thought Dragon King’s Daughter sounded like a good name for a really intense online role-playing game.
It would be a game full of samurai warrior avatars, of course, but it would have to have moustachio’d bandidos too, as DKD (as its fans abbreviate it) manages to fit both Japanese and Mexican flavors — and a lot more, too — into a single menu, and somehow it works. Continue reading Pick your avatar at Dragon King’s Daughter→
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