Monthly Archives: December 2007

St. Matthews, Westport Village, and environs, World Food

Rising trend for ’07: fine dining comes to suburbia

Veal at Corbett's
Plated on a seductive, creamy puree of house-smoked sweet potatoes, the butter-tender Sonoma veal cutlets at Corbett’s “An American Place” are a work of culinary art. Photo by Robin Garr.

LEO’s Eats with Louisville HotBytes
(Seviche – A Latin Bistro; Corbett’s “An American Place”)

Here’s a vignette that captures the year 2007 on the local dining scene for me: I’m enjoying lunch in the new Seviche – A Latin Bistro on Goose Creek Road. The room is packed, but I’m the only male in sight, and I’m the youngest person in the place except for the servers. I’m enjoying a wonderful Chinese-Latino “fusion” seviche … and all the ladies lunching around me are having guacamole and quesadillas and talking about what a marvelous new Mexican place this is.

In fact, the year 2007 has seen a lot of action on the Louisville restaurant scene, including some disappointing closings (Bistro New Albany, Azalea, Diamante, Harper’s) and some exciting openings (Mojito, Basa, Varanese, Wild Eggs, Original Impellizzeri’s), not to mention a closing-but-reopening (Nio’s at 917) and even a closing-opening-closing-opening-again-then-really-and-truly-closing (the ill-fated Oscar Brown’s/La Rouge/Bobby J’s).

Perhaps the most intriguing developing local restaurant trend, though, is the first shaking of a seismic shift: The arrival of Seviche and other top-echelon, locally owned and independent white-tablecloth restaurants in the chain-rich East End.
Continue reading Rising trend for ’07: fine dining comes to suburbia →

$$ Modest ($30-$50), Italian (and Pizza), Southern Indiana

Take that short drive to Stratto’s

Jerome Pope
Jerome Pope is now the chef at Stratto’s in Clarksville. Look for his new menu after the first of the year. LEO Photo by Nicole Pullen.

LEO’s Eats with Louisville HotBytes

If you’ve been meaning to check out some Southern Indiana dining spots but worried that it’s a little too far, consider this: It took me just 11 minutes to drive from my house in Crescent Hill to Stratto’s in Clarksville on a rainy Saturday night.

OK, maybe I couldn’t have made it that fast during a weekday rush hour, but it’s still a quicker trip for me than a ride out to The Summit or Brownsboro Crossing in endless suburbia.

What’s more, the comfortable historic-house setting and hearty Italian-accented comfort food at Stratto’s makes it well worth the short trip across the finally repainted Kennedy Bridge.
Continue reading Take that short drive to Stratto’s →

$ Budget (under $30), Italian (and Pizza), Southern Indiana

No Hoosier joke: Pie are square

Pizza King
Like most pizza in Southern Indiana, Pizza King’s classic pie is cut in squares, not wedges. LEO Photo by Nicole Pullen.

LEO’s Eats with Louisville HotBytes
(Pizza King, Arni’s Pizza, Uncle Tubby’s)

It happens anywhere that a state line crosses through a metro area: Folks on one side of the border tell rude jokes about the other, and vice-versa.

So there’s no use pretending that Kentuckians don’t tell Hoosier jokes. We laugh at their rumored penchant for turning left from the right lane and we’re still kicking around Coach Bobby Knight after all these years. And we can’t resist keeping alive the memory of the embarrassing moment in the Indiana State Legislature in 1897, when a few wacky Hoosiers tried to redefine the mathematical constant pi as a simpler number.

But here’s a Hoosier culinary constant that is no joke: Over there, pie are square.
Continue reading No Hoosier joke: Pie are square →

$$$ Upscale ( $50 - $80), Baxter, Bardstown, Highlands, Bistros

Eat the veggies first at Club Grotto

Club Grotto
Club Grotto head chef Mike Driskell doesn’t give the humble vegetable short shrift. And you don’t even have to be a vegetarian to appreciate their trademark all-vegetable dinner course, the aptly named “Vegetable Orgy.” LEO Photo by Nicole Pullen.

LEO’s Eats with Louisville HotBytes
(Club Grotto; Old Town wine totes)

Eat your vegetables!

This exhortation, so often directed at children, for many of us leaves lingering psychic echoes that ring down the years into adulthood. Veggies? Who needs them? Real men eat meat and potatoes … don’t they?

I count myself among the willing but vaguely reluctant vegetable eaters: I’ll force down a portion, knowing that I should, but rarely get the same kind of excitement out of it that I naturally derive from a great steak, shellfish or even a cheese or pasta dish.

Frankly, I think some of Louisville’s top chefs share this aversion. Too often, even at the city’s finest restaurants, I’ll get a great meal with a careless blob of reheated frozen veggies right out of the bag, tossed on the side of my dinner plate as an obvious afterthought.

This doesn’t happen at Club Grotto. Continue reading Eat the veggies first at Club Grotto →