Category Archives: Commentary

Robin Garr’s musings about food and restaurant matters that don’t fit neatly into the “review” category.

Commentary, underSlideshowEntries, Voice-Tribune review

A Year of Delight in Memorable Dishes

Ho hum, it’s New Year’s Day, or mighty close to it, anyway. Shall we do another boring end-of-the-year wrap-up on the Louisville eats beat?

Hmm. NuLu, NuLu, Nulu, small plates, locavore, snout-to-tail, Food Network, tapas, noisy, trendy, comfort food. Naah. Been there, done that, over and over again.

Let’s try something a little different! To mark the cosmic calendar’s flipping over to 2014, I thought it might be fun to look back at some of the dishes I’ve enjoyed over the past year in restaurant reviews – along with a couple more picked off in casual dining expeditions over the holidays. Continue reading A Year of Delight in Memorable Dishes →

Commentary, LEO's Eats, slideshow

What’s up, Chef? Next year’s food trends are old stuff here

Is this town trendy or what? For foodies, I mean. I understand Louisville has the reputation as a place where the latest fashion trends arrive five years after they’re oh-so dead in New York.

But when it comes to food, if the National Restaurant Association’s 2014 Culinary Forecast is any guide, we’re not only on top of most national eats trends but we also have already seen a few of them crest, surf over the top and fall back. Continue reading What’s up, Chef? Next year’s food trends are old stuff here →

Commentary, Industry Standard, Marsha Lynch, underSlideshowEntries

That’s what I said

January: In an attempt to choose a catchy title for my column about the closing of Lynn’s, I found that each of the fantastic puns I came up with had already been used elsewhere. Note to self: Don’t ever try to fit the word “cornbread” into a Lady Gaga lyric again.

February: Last February, I rambled a bit about the European horsemeat controversy. Continue reading That’s what I said →

Industry Standard, Marsha Lynch, underSlideshowEntries

The hardest part

Waiting for a table: How long is too long?

A recent spirited discussion on the LouisvilleHotBytes.com forum prompted me to think deeply about how long it’s appropriate to wait for a table in Louisville, and what circumstances might change the answer to that question.

The short answer for most people is: It’s complicated. There is a built-in butterfly effect that may consist of traffic patterns, what time of which day of the week it is, how hungry you are, and the current hipness level of the spot where you’re trying to dine.
Continue reading The hardest part →

Commentary, LEO's Eats, underSlideshowEntries

LEO’s Dining Guide 2013: What helps one helps all

Garage Bar in NuLu

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 →

Industry Standard, Marsha Lynch, underSlideshowEntries

Home Truths

Foodies are constantly on the prowl for inspiration, often from the Internet. I have a friend whose disorganized “food bookmarks” folder on her computer is at least a thousand entries long. To qualify for inclusion in the folder, a recipe needs little more than a stunning photograph attached, or even just a title that “sounds good.”
Continue reading Home Truths →

Commentary, Industry Standard, Marsha Lynch, underSlideshowEntries

Critical mass

I can’t be the only one who’s noticed that Louisville keeps making the national and international news lately for its chefs, restaurants and foodie scene. Maybe I’m just noticing more because we cut the cable umbilical at home a couple of months ago, but I don’t really think so – a lot of these recent articles and mentions are in other media besides television. In the last six weeks alone, it’s as if the national culinary media were astronomers discovering Planet Louisville for the first time, orbiting along deliciously at the other end of their telescopes.
Continue reading Critical mass →

Industry Standard, Marsha Lynch

Troubleshootin’

A couple of weeks ago, a new sheriff rode into town: Eric Flack, WAVE 3 Troubleshooter. Mr. Flack spent most of an afternoon (at least!) gathering the information for a regular expose of the seedy underbelly of local food truck sanitation practices. The shocking footage was shot at multiple locations including a three-tub wash station at a temporarily-licensed mobile vendor – not an actual food truck with a permanent annual certification. Again, this was not a food truck; it was a guy with a two-week temporary permit, a travel trailer and a canopy tent.
Continue reading Troubleshootin’ →

Industry Standard, Marsha Lynch

Treat your servers well

In my previous column, I wrote about the bizzaro owners of Amy’s Baking Company in Scottsdale, Ariz. — a couple so weirdly paranoid and self-absorbed, so invested in their own bad behavior, they have totally skewed the spectrum of guest abuse forever. And then I was introduced via the Internet to the creature that is Taylor Chapman.
Continue reading Treat your servers well →