All posts by Robin Garr

$ Budget (under $30), BBQ, Burgers & Down-Home, Breakfast and lunch spots, sandwich spots, Commentary, St. Matthews, Westport Village, and environs

Burger vs Burger: It’s a win-win at Shady Lane Cafe

By Robin Garr
LouisvilleHotBytes.com

Ahh, Shady Lane Cafe! This lovable little East End diner-style cafe has been a popular lunch (and weekend dinner) spot since Bill Smith and Susi Wood opened it around 2004. It earned deserved popularity for its iconic Brownsboro burger and much more.

All good things eventually move on, though, and in August 2019 Bill, short-order chef and poet, and his wife Susi, amiable host and professional singer, turned the business over to another couple – Carol Reeves and Satbir “Shan” Singh – in August 2019.

The new owners have maintained the same high level of quality and popularity. When I dropped in to pick up a takeout lunch on a recent Saturday, every table in the little space was filled with apparently happy diners, and the line to the counter extended all the way back to the door. Continue reading Burger vs Burger: It’s a win-win at Shady Lane Cafe →

Commentary

The Language of Food: This book helps us interpret the menu and more

By Robin Garr
LouisvilleHotBytes.com

“Can you figure out how much your dinner will cost by counting the words on the menu? Food, and how we describe it, can tell us a lot about what it’s going to cost us when we go out to eat tonight.”

The Louisville Free Public Library’s e-book blurb about Stanford University professor and MacArthur Fellow Dan Jurafsky’s 2014 book, The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu, got my attention fast. I knew a book that dives into culinary linguistics and statistics too would be a great read for a word nerd and food geek like me. Continue reading The Language of Food: This book helps us interpret the menu and more →

$$ Modest ($30-$50), Baxter, Bardstown, Highlands, Pacific Rim, Vegetarian/Vegan

Delicious tofu takeout at Heart & Soy

By Robin Garr
LouisvilleHotBytes.com

I’m pretty sure I unleashed a small rant last autumn when the Delta variant was coming on, threatening to retreat into takeout dining until things blew over a bit.

I didn’t actually do that. I’m vaccinated, and now boosted too, so what, me worry?

But the other day, eyeing news reports about the Omicron variant and rising positivity tolls, I started thinking about takeout again. Continue reading Delicious tofu takeout at Heart & Soy →

Commentary, Vegetarian/Vegan

When KFC gets faux chik’n, plant-based meat’s time has come

By Robin Garr
LouisvilleHotBytes.com

If you still think the recent wave of faux meats made from plants is just a passing fad that won’t last, consider this: On Monday, KFC rolled out Beyond Meat’s new plant-based chicken nuggets for a short-term test at all 4,000 U.S. shops, boxed not in the traditional red but a tasteful environmental green. Continue reading When KFC gets faux chik’n, plant-based meat’s time has come →

$$ Modest ($30-$50), Frankfort Ave., Clifton, Crescent Hill, Mediterranean

Simply Mediterranean brings Lebanese flavor

By Robin Garr
LouisvilleHotBytes.com

Back in the late winter of 1984, I did my first restaurant review for The Louisville Times. I enjoyed a great dinner at a short-lived Lebanese restaurant on Bardstown Road with a Lebanese-American friend who spent a short time at the city’s afternoon paper before moving on to bigger things.

Here we are, almost too many years later to count, and I’ve just finished a tasty repast from Simply Mediterranean, which I believe is the city’s first ethnic Lebanese restaurant since then. Continue reading Simply Mediterranean brings Lebanese flavor →

Commentary

Two more closings end a bleak 2021

By Robin Garr
LouisvilleHotBytes.com

And the hits just keep on coming. It seems appropriate, in a meta kind of way, to quote a hit by the musician and songwriter Michael Nesmith, who died this month, to mark the passing of two more Louisville restaurants as the year nears its close.

Both spots – Faces Bar/Bistro at 1604 Bardstown Road, and The Fuelery Restaurant and Cafe at 2011 Frankfort Avenue – were born, lived, and died during the pandemic. Faces opened in June 2020, pushed back by the looming pandemic from a planned March opening. The Fuelery opened at the beginning of 2021. Continue reading Two more closings end a bleak 2021 →

Commentary

Why leave? Local chef becomes a full-time Dad

By Robin Garr
LouisvilleHotBytes.com

Just about a year ago, sadly listing about 30 favorite restaurants that had closed forever during the first full year of Covid-19, I wrote, “the arrival of a pandemic that none of us saw coming at this time last year turned 2020 into a swirling black whirlpool that didn’t make anyone happy.”

Would 2021 be better? With a vaccine on the near horizon, a new national administration coming in, we dared to hope so, even while caseloads and positivity levels remained high.

So here we are, almost at the end of 2021. Most of us are doubly vaccinated now, and many are boosted. That’s good, right? Continue reading Why leave? Local chef becomes a full-time Dad →

$ Budget (under $30), Hurstbourne, Middletown, Jeffersontown, Indian

Eggholic lights up egg dishes with Indian flavors

By Robin Garr
LouisvilleHotBytes.com

Eggs are popular. Most people love them for breakfast, lunch, and even breakfast-for-dinner. So it’s no surprise that egg-centric eateries draw crowds in Louisville. Wild Eggs landed some 15 years ago; Con Huevos brought its Mexican flavors to our world of eggs in 2015.

Now Eggholic has come to town to tantalize us with delicious egg dishes in the style of the Gujurat region of Northwestern India. Continue reading Eggholic lights up egg dishes with Indian flavors →

Commentary

The Great Resignation: Why a CIA-trained chef quit

By Robin Garr
LouisvilleHotBytes.com

If I was asked to name a local chef most likely to join the Great Resignation, I would never have thought of Meghan Levins. Yet now she’s a full-time webinar monitor for a national virtual education firm.

Look at Levins’ biography, you might think, “There’s a chef for life.” She’s been working in restaurants since she was 15, when her Mom told her that if she wanted a car she was going to have to earn it. She took the challenge, grabbed an after-school job at the Molly Stark Tavern in her home town in New Hampshire.

Her job was bussing tables, she said, but she quickly fell in love with working in the kitchen. Management nurtured her, created a pantry chef job for her, and by her senior year in high school, gave her the recommendation that got her into CIA, the Culinary Institute of America. Continue reading The Great Resignation: Why a CIA-trained chef quit →

$ Budget (under $30), Frankfort Ave., Clifton, Crescent Hill, Italian (and Pizza)

Derby City Pizza scores with pizza and pasta

By Robin Garr
LouisvilleHotBytes.com

Everybody knows that I’m a huge fan of pizza, but I have my standards! I like pizza best the way they make it in New York City, or even Italy: It’s good bread, flatbread, with toppings added proportionately, not overloaded.

You want a thin but substantive crust, and you want a puffy browned edge – the “bones” – dotted with plenty of browned leopard spots.

Or that’s what I thought until I picked up a pizza to go from Derby City Pizza in Clifton the other day. Continue reading Derby City Pizza scores with pizza and pasta →