$$$ Upscale ( $50 - $80), Bistros, Frankfort Ave., Clifton, Crescent Hill

54 bottles of wine on the wall …

Lamb pops
L&N Wine Bar and Bistro’s “lamb pops,” four bite-sized lamb chops over large Israeli couscous. It’s an appetizer that’s substantial enough to serve as a light main course. Photos by Robin Garr.

LEO’s Eat ‘n’ Blog with Louisville HotBytes

I’ve been predisposed to like L&N Wine Bar and Bistro ever since it opened. I’m a wine geek, and the owners are wine geeks. With its majestic wall of wine, a 54-bottle Cruvinet wine-storage facility and dispenser that’s the largest made, it boasts a wine program that’s second to none.

More than 100 wines are available for tasting, from as little as $2.50 for 2-ounce “taste” of several value-priced items to $60 for a bottle of more upscale wine. Connoisseurs may also choose from a short daily list of higher-end wines on the Cruvinet, or peruse the book-length cellar list.

But you don’t have to be a wine geek to enjoy this place: Continue reading 54 bottles of wine on the wall … →

$ Budget (under $30), BBQ, Burgers & Down-Home, Downtown, NuLu and Butchertown

Slugger Field fare is no picnic

Brats on the grill
There’s lots of food options at Slugger Field, including these brats and colorful grilled peppers. Photos by Robin Garr.

LEO’s Eat ‘n’ Blog with Louisville HotBytes
(Slugger Field, Derby weekend dining tips)

Not only is it Derby Week, but the Louisville Bats’ season is under way at Slugger Field, so even sports fans who have been sweating out the long months until the Cards and Cats are back in play have little to complain about.

But food lovers who enjoy a good dinner to go with the baseball game are pretty much out of luck at Slugger Field, where concession quality has dropped off a long way from the splendid fare that the memorable A. Ray Smith provided when he brought the old Redbirds to town at the Fairgrounds’ Cardinal Stadium back in the early ’80s.
Continue reading Slugger Field fare is no picnic →

$$$ Upscale ( $50 - $80), Bistros, Frankfort Ave., Clifton, Crescent Hill

Psst! Try this Derby Daily Double

Shaking beef
Basa Modern Vietnamese’s Shaking Beef, a dish made famous by San Francisco’s Slanted Door. Photos by Robin Garr.

LEO’s Eat ‘n’ Blog with Louisville HotBytes
(Basa Modern Vietnamese, Mojito)

Derby is big in Louisville, not just for racing but for restaurants, too. If you don’t have reservations already for the popular spots, you’re pretty much out of luck unless you’re willing to take a place in line.

Restaurateurs rush to get new eateries open for Derby frenzy, scheduling grand openings to catch the Derby tide. Last year it was Proof on Main, Nio’s and the short-lived Danielle’s. In 2005 we got Blu in the Marriott, 316 Ormsby and that wacky Fourth Street Live.

This year two sophisticated new eateries with ethnic flavors form a winning daily double: Basa Modern Vietnamese in Crescent Hill is named after a Vietnamese fish. Mojito in Holiday Manor is named for a Cuban libation. Both spots are welcome additions, already generating a noisy buzz. You can put them both into an exacta box: They’re sure winners.
Continue reading Psst! Try this Derby Daily Double →

$$$$ Luxury ($80 and up), Downtown, NuLu and Butchertown, White tablecloth, deluxe

Oakroom foams over the top

Culinary foam
“Culinary foam”: A mound of glistening orange white chocolate froth drooling off your Oakroom dessert is airy and succulent, but it’s not so easy to look at on the plate. Photos by Robin Garr.

LEO’s Eat ‘n’ Blog with Louisville HotBytes

“Culinary foam” – trendy for decades in the upper reaches of dining-as-theater – is one of the more striking “molecular gastronomy” inventions of Spanish Chef Ferran Adrià of El Bulli near Barcelona. The flavored foams – aerosol squirted onto food – add subtle tastes, and they signal that the chef is “with it.”

Adrià has been foaming since 1995, and now foams have made it to Louisville, where Chefs Todd Richards and Duane Nutter and Pastry Chef Ethan Ray are making their mark with foams, smears and sauces, dispensed from martini shakers or spread in thin, colorful layers across your plate.

The Oakroom crew does molecular gastronomy very well: The white-chocolate-orange foam on a succulent chocolate trio dessert plate the other night was intensely flavored yet light as air. But much like a raw oyster (and I choose the analogy advisedly), a mound of glistening froth drooling off your food isn’t easy to look at on the plate.
Continue reading Oakroom foams over the top →

$ Budget (under $30), Baxter, Bardstown, Highlands, Chinese, Hurstbourne, Middletown, Jeffersontown, Pacific Rim

Cravin’ Asian at Shah’s Mongolian

Shalimar
Two build-your-own stir-fries at Shah’s Mongolian Grill. Photo by Robin Garr

(Voice-Tribune, April 12, 2006)

I love Italian food and wine and sometimes feel that I can’t get enough of it. But after spending over two weeks in Northern Italy, enjoying the real thing for breakfast, lunch and dinner, I came home last week just about ready for a change of pace.

But what, exactly, would fill the bill? Instinctively, I emulated the Italian nobleman Marco Polo, who headed for the exotic East in 1266 and found all manner of good things: I headed for Louisville’s East End to check out a favorite Asian eatery that I was overdue to visit because of ownership changes and new offerings since my last review.
Continue reading Cravin’ Asian at Shah’s Mongolian →

Baxter, Bardstown, Highlands, QuickBytes

Keeping things balanced on Bardstown

Ballyhoo's Baja Grill
A fish taco (top) and a shrimp taco (with optional jalapeños) at Ballyhoo’s Baja Grill. Photo by Robin Garr.

LEO’s Eat ‘n’ Blog with Louisville HotBytes
(Ballyhoo’s Baja Grill, Just Fresh)

Bardstown Road has been established as Louisville’s primary “restaurant row” for so long now that things seem to have achieved a sort of natural balance: If one eatery closes, chances are something similar will be along soon to fill its niche.

So, when the short-lived Baja Fresh closed after only a few months of vending fast-food-style fresh burritos out of a shiny new glass building, and a similarly ephemeral branch of Bazo’s came and went from the old building that once housed Jupiter Café and is now home to Nio’s, no one really expected that Bardstown would be long bereft of fish tacos. Or, for that matter, that Qdoba and La Bamba would dominate the boulevard’s burrito market without challenge.

Sure enough, now comes Ballyhoo’s Baja Grill, a new spot that looks a lot like a franchised chain operation but that’s actually only the smallest of chains, being the third property of a Nashville-based outfit whose eateries at the other end of the old L&N line bear the trademark name “Chile Burrito Co.”
Continue reading Keeping things balanced on Bardstown →

News announcements

Derby Fest adds wine competition

A competition for commercially produced wines from Kentucky and Indiana joins the roster of Kentucky Derby Festival events this year.

A panel of experienced wine judges (including this writer) will sit in judgment on Tuesday, May 1, on an estimated 50 to 70 locally produced wines in eight categories, following the same 20-point American Wine Society rating scale used in the Kentucky State Fair competition for regional home wine makers.
Continue reading Derby Fest adds wine competition →

Commentary

G3 – A Great Bite: One person’s opinion

Faux CJ front page

(By Jim Murphy. Republished with permission from G3 Illustrated)

Taste and palate are extremely personal and subjective. A restaurant review is simply one person’s opinion – their view, attitude or appraisal of a particular dining experience. It is not, nor should it ever be, a definitive statement of superlative or the death knell of any restaurant.

Unfortunately, that is not always the case in our little burg. Citizens apparently take heed of our locally published restaurant reviews. As a result, La Rouge, which had the possibility of being one of Louisville’s shining dining destinations, was unable to survive in light of one man’s assessment of his meal (which I am given to understand he consumed completely during yet his third dining venture to La Rouge).
Continue reading G3 – A Great Bite: One person’s opinion →

Commentary, QuickBytes

Does wireless come with that shake?

James Browdy
James Browdy, who’s retired from his job at Audubon Hospital, says he visits the Heine Bros. at Eastern Parkway and Bardstown Road four or five days to check out jazz videos through a Wi-Fi connection. Photos by Richard Meadows.

LEO’s Eat ‘n’ Blog with Louisville HotBytes

While I’m over here in Italy checking out the wine and food and trying to find a WiFi hotspot so I can call home, Eat ‘N’ Blog contributor RICHARD MEADOWS has been toting his notebook computer around Louisville, checking out the state of the wireless Internet art at local eateries and watering holes.

Richard, a foodie and computer geek with plenty of opinions about both, has been surfing the WiFi waves since the ‘Net first went wireless. Here’s his irreverent report:

Sitting at Heine Brothers Coffee in the Highlands one cold, blustery evening, I looked up from my laptop and realized that the place was chock full of WiFi users, all gazing at their own laptops. Continue reading Does wireless come with that shake? →

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