Robin Garr’s musings about food and restaurant matters that don’t fit neatly into the “review” category.
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| Arbor Ridge’s crab cakes |
LEO’s Eats with LouisvilleHotBytes
Arbor Ridge’s menu is extensive and, management attests, “serves a fresh, flavorful and healthy cuisine with Californian and Mediterranean flair.” It is certainly a giant step beyond boring, although I wouldn’t rate it adventurous.
Continue reading We follow the yellow brick road to Arbor Ridge
My dear, departed mom was a housewife in the ’60s and ’70s. In addition to being enamored of all sorts of convenience foods (such as skillet-dinner-in-a-box and instant mashed potatoes), she was a starry-eyed brand-name-foods aficionada.
Continue reading Don’t shun the store brand
The famous Hot Brown — allegedly fashioned as a midnight snack for Roaring Twenties revelers famished after a night of dancing in the Brown Hotel’s Crystal Ballroom — is just an open-faced sandwich of turkey, bacon and cheesy Mornay sauce. Nothing so inventive there, and it’s a cardiologist’s nightmare.
The inventive folks at BoomBozz Taphouse in the Highlands have put a new spin on the old tradition by marrying it in weird but delicious union with a pizza.
Continue reading Perfect pair: Hot Brown, meet pizza
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| Vegan chili dog. Photo: Robin Garr |
LEO’s Eats with LouisvilleHotBytes
Speaking of creative eateries, Conez & Coneyz may be one of the smallest dining venues on Frankfort Avenue, but it’s also one of the most eager to please.
When the owners chose to set up a hot-dog stand last year near the epicenter of an urban neighborhood rich in recovering hippies and seminary students (occasionally both embodied in the same person), they weren’t all that surprised to hear an instant demand for a vegetarian dawg.
Ultimately, they sourced two dogs that weren’t merely vegetarian but vegan: a Loma Linda brand item that turns to textured vegetable prote for almost-sausage flavor; and a Vegi-Dog made by Cedar Lake that’s all-grain protein. One chilly afternoon, I tried the Loma Linda as a chilidog, topped with vegetarian chili and chopped onions.
Continue reading No animals were harmed in making this chili dog
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| Zapata’s Huevos con Chorizos |
LEO’s Eats with LouisvilleHotBytes
How about a little desayuno? Barring the Saturday bowl of menudo at the local taqueria, the regrettable closing of Bueños Dias Café in Jeffersonville left the area bereft of a really good Mexican breakfast … until the happy arrival of Zapata’s Corner in Middletown, refilling the space left vacant by the brief final incarnation of Mazzoni’s with a happy, colorful Latino vibe.
Continue reading Let’s break our fast at Zapata’s Corner
Potstickers closed Jan. 17, 2010, after the Jan. 20 edition of LEO had gone to print. This review appeared in that edition of LEO. We publish it here in memoriam, and to help explain why we think it didn’t last.
When I heard that Chef Edward Lee of 610 Magnolia was behind a new fast-food noodle shop that opened last autumn in the midst of the club zone on Baxter, I was excited. I’ve got a lot of respect for Lee and his work, and 610 has been one of my favorite Louisville restaurants for 25 years, under Lee and his predecessor, Ed Garber.
After a couple visits to Potstickers, though, I’m puzzled and bemused. If Lee is really behind it — and I have no reason to doubt that — it’s got to be a hands-off operation.
Continue reading Potstickers comes unglued
\Walk into Cocos Lokos, and a couple of things are likely to catch your eye.
First, if you think you detect a resemblance to Havana Rumba, that’s not terribly surprising. The manager and several members of the Cocos Lokos team left the popular Cuban spot in St. Matthews a couple of months ago to open this new spot in the Hunnington Place shopping center just off I-64 and Hurstbourne Parkway.
Second, you may be as pleasantly surprised as I was to see what a remarkable job they’ve done of making a shopping center space look, well, like it isn’t in a shopping center.
Continue reading Cocos Lokos brings Cuban and more to Hurstbourne
CLOSED.
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| Lunch at the Chili Pot. Photo: Robin Garr. |
LEO’s Eats with LouisvilleHotBytes
If you think wine-snob dogma like “never drink white wine with red meat” or “never drink white Zinfandel with any meat” or “never drink a wine with a rating under 90” is tough, you’ve obviously never set foot in a room filled with baying chili-heads.
Tomatoes or no tomatoes? Beans or no beans? Chopped meat or ground meat? Chili powder, dried chilies or fresh? It’s like listening to medieval theologians arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
A recent visit to The Chili Pot, a great new spot in Okolona, filled me with the warming potion and prompted me to ponder the chili mystique.
Continue reading Dissertation on chili and a fine new place to enjoy it
OK, people: Those who favor keeping children home and away from restaurant dining rooms, step to this side of the line. Those who maintain that children are people, too, and thereby have a right to go anywhere their parents or guardians accompany them, step to the other side. Now, prepare to dance — because it’s not that black and white.
Continue reading Fed and not heard?
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| The Reuben at Diamond Café |
LEO’s Eats with LouisvilleHotBytes
As a veteran of food and wine online since well before Al Gore played his small role in the invention of the Internet, I’ve been following the development of social media from the start.
But here’s something new: Mark down Diamond Café as the first local spot I’m aware of that went viral on Facebook before word-of-mouth spread news of its arrival in Clifton Heights.
Diamond (“D&C Diamond Café,” per its business card) quietly replaced Taste of Jamaica a few months ago. When I spotted the café’s Facebook fan page the other day, bearing the slogan “fine dining at an affordable price,” it had already gathered more than 900 followers.
Continue reading Diamond Café: A Facebook phenom scores in the real world