Category Archives: underSlideshowEntries

$ Budget (under $30), Italian (and Pizza), QuickBytes, St. Matthews, Westport Village, and environs, underSlideshowEntries, Voice-Tribune review

Fried pie? Boombozz fried pizza wins our applause

When I was a kid, I looked forward to road trips as an occasion for fried pie, a rare culinary treat that seemed to exist only in those exotic places where people lived among cornfields and tobacco patches and spoke in a slow drawl.

Fried pie! We never had anything like that at home. It was a pie-crust turnover, loaded with fruit filling – apple was as popular as Mom or the Flag – folded over, sealed into a fat half-moon and deep-fried until it sizzled. Hot and crisp, juicy and sweet, it was just the right size for eating out of hand. Yum!

A single fried pie probably packed 1,000 calories, but at that age I didn’t mind. Now I do, and I haven’t indulged for years, maybe decades. The other day, though, I ran across an even more tempting take on fried pie that I just couldn’t resist.
Continue reading Fried pie? Boombozz fried pizza wins our applause →

$$$ Upscale ( $50 - $80), Baxter, Bardstown, Highlands, LEO's Eats, Mexican, Cuban, Caribbean, New and noteworthy, underSlideshowEntries

No, Bar Belle! El Camino is surfin’ good

My pal the Bar Belle is also the boss of me when it comes to this column, but that sure doesn’t stop me from calling Bullwinkle when I just have to. So, yo, Bar Belle! You’ve got it all wrong when you go hatin’ on El Camino! How did this debate work out? Well, our conversation went something like this:

Your Humble Critic: We checked out El Camino the other night. It’s the new place with the Cali-Mex surfer/tiki-bar vibe that’s run by the Silver Dollar peeps in the old Avalon space on Bardstown. It is truly awesome.

The Bar Belle: I went the other night and wasn’t impressed.

Critic: Whaaa? Continue reading No, Bar Belle! El Camino is surfin’ good →

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 →

$$ Modest ($30-$50), Bistros, Breakfast and lunch spots, sandwich spots, Downtown, NuLu and Butchertown, Frankfort Ave., Clifton, Crescent Hill, underSlideshowEntries, Voice-Tribune review

Make Mine Grilled Cheese, Pleese!

Ahh, it finally feels like autumn, and I’m thinking of comfort food.

This nostalgic meme rarely attaches itself to the light, low-calorie and cooling dishes of summer. “Comfort” means stews and hearty soups, spaghetti and meatballs or maybe a thick pan of lasagna – the kinds of warming, stick-to-your-ribs dishes that Mom used to make, or at least you wish she had. Nor need comfort food be complicated or hard to cook.
Continue reading Make Mine Grilled Cheese, Pleese! →

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 →

$ Budget (under $30), Pacific Rim, QuickBytes, South End, underSlideshowEntries, Voice-Tribune review

Vietnam Kitchen: 50,000 K8’s Sold?

Okay, let’s run the numbers here. Vietnam Kitchen has been open for about 20.5 years, six days a week. That’s roughly 6,500 days of serving the public since Alex and Kim Lam brought this lovable institution to town in 1993.

Thinking out loud, that means that if every day they sell five orders of “K8,” the menu shorthand for H? ti?u Saté, a delectable rice-noodle dish that’s surely one of Vietnam Kitchen’s top hot-and-spicy dishes, they must have stir-fried way more than 30,000 orders of it by now.

If the Lams were more boastful types, they could put out a flashing sign that boasts, “Nearly 50,000 K8’s sold!” (Yeah, I know I guesstimated 30,000, but hey, nobody fact-checks Mickey D’s “billions and billions” either, right?)
Continue reading Vietnam Kitchen: 50,000 K8’s Sold? →

$$$$ Luxury ($80 and up), Bistros, Hurstbourne, Middletown, Jeffersontown, LEO's Eats, New and noteworthy, underSlideshowEntries, White tablecloth, deluxe

Brasserie Provence shows grace and good eats in dinner rush

“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 →

$$$ Upscale ( $50 - $80), Bistros, Downtown, NuLu and Butchertown, LEO's Eats, underSlideshowEntries

Rye will make you eat your brussels sprouts and beg for more

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 →

$ Budget (under $30), Breakfast and lunch spots, sandwich spots, LEO's Eats, QuickBytes, St. Matthews, Westport Village, and environs, underSlideshowEntries

We sing the praises of Shady Lane Café

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 →

$$ Modest ($30-$50), Mexican, Cuban, Caribbean, QuickBytes, St. Matthews, Westport Village, and environs, underSlideshowEntries, Voice-Tribune review

Don’t judge the name. Try Hay!! Chi Wa Waa

Hey, Chihuahua? What kind of a name for a restaurant is that? With a wacky Señor Gonzales accent? Really? Are they talking about the state of Chihuahua in Mexico, or calling a little dog? Or maybe, just possibly, poking a thumb in the eye of “Yo quiero Taco Bell“?
Continue reading Don’t judge the name. Try Hay!! Chi Wa Waa →