Any discussion of Louisville’s oldest and most iconic restaurants can’t reasonably overlook Twig & Leaf. Founded in 1962, this Douglass Loop neighborhood landmark with its iconic leaf-shaped neon sign has been a local go-to spot for diner fare for a long, long time.
Sure, this place has had its ups and downs. Passing though many ownership hands over the years, it’s been cherished at times, avoided at others: Favored by ‘60s hippies with the late-night munchies, later hailed by the Highlands lunch set, sometimes widely ignored, the Twig endures.
Wait! What? There’s a Thai restaurant in the space that housed the German restaurant Gasthaus for nearly 30 years!?
Yep, and the new arrival, All Thai’d Up, is a good Thai eatery, too. Still, it came as a surprise when Gasthaus announced its departure in a social media post in May 2022.
Restaurant food is delicious. We all know that. This is why we love to eat out. But is it healthy? Well …Chances are that your wondrous repast is loaded with butter, weighed down with carbs, blown up into portion sizes big enough for three. Hell, that’s what makes it so good!
But sometimes, perhaps after looking at the scales or eyeing our next health checkup, we wonder: Is there any way to enjoy restaurant fare without setting out on a slow path to an early demise?
Napa River Grill enjoyed a very good run before it renovated and rebranded as Osteria Italian Seafood last month.
Its name recently foreshortened to just-plain Napa, the upscale Northern California-style eatery had endured for 24 years, a long life for a restaurant.
Homelessness – or houselessness, as many advocates prefer to call it since even a tent is still a person’s home – is an ongoing crisis.
The Coalition for the Homeless declared homelessness “one of the most pressing crises facing Louisville today” in a 2021 report that found 10,640 people without housing in the city in 2021.
I’m going to come right out and say it: Meesh Meesh is one of the best new restaurants to come along in Louisville lately.
But wait! What’s with that repetitive rhyming name? The restaurant’s website explains it all for us: MeeshMeesh means “apricot” in both Arabic and Hebrew.
With the sad fighting going on in Israel and Palestinian Gaza right now, a restaurant that celebrates both of those cultures seems like a good place to be. Continue reading Meesh Meesh is good good→
The abrupt recent closing of the beloved local restaurant Come Back Inn came as another worrisome note in what feels like an ongoing dirge for our fretful food-loving community: Who’s next? Is Louisville’s fame as a dining destination fading away in the post-pandemic age’s hard times? Continue reading Hard times come a’knockin’ at our door→
Here’s an existential question about the art of the food critic: Should a restaurant review stick to the simple basics of food, mood, and service? Or does a review gain texture and meaning by bringing in a broader range of history, culture, culinary arts and other trips down fascinating rabbit holes?
If you follow my food writing at all, you won’t have much trouble finding me sitting unobtrusively at a dinner table behind Door No. Two. I love those culinary rabbit holes, and I suspect it shows. Continue reading More thoughts from the critic’s table→
I’m not great at small talk, but I love chaat. Okay, I can hear the chorus of boos from here. I’ll just show myself out.
Seriously, though, the Indian street food delight known as chaat appeals to me, so much so that a search on the word in the Louisville HotBytes archives brought up references at a dozen different local Indian eateries. I’ve eaten plenty of chaat, and I’ve spent plenty of words trying to describe it. Continue reading We chaat it up at Shreeji Indian→
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