The Bard’s Town plays to the crowd

Pasta Diablo at The Bardstown

LEO’s Eats with LouisvilleHotBytes
Eve Bohakel Lee
Bardstown Road. Bard’s Town. The Bard. Bill Shakespeare! It’s surprising no one has seized the opportunity to pun upon the name of the Highlands’ main corridor until now.
With the Bard above the door and the promise of grand entertainment within, expectations run high for this new establishment at the corner of Speed Avenue.
“Curst be he who moves my bones,” warns the tombstone of Billy Shakes, and forsooth, the bones of previous occupants Big Dave’s, Judge Roy Bean’s and others back to Fat Cats remain perceptible here. However, owners Doug Schutte, Jon DeSalvo and Scot Atkinson have put a new, solid flesh on those bones. Their bottom-up renovation delivers an urbane, artsy feel that is laid-back and accessibly upscale. Local art will rotate in like scene changes. A performance space will open upstairs this month, offering live theater and more.
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Wasabiya serves creative sushi, but not without a few flaws

A roll at Wasabiya

LEO’s Eats with LouisvilleHotBytes

All right, who ordered all this raw fish? At the rate things are going, the city’s Bardstown-Baxter strip is going to have to change its nickname from restaurant row to something like … well, how does “The Boulevard of Bistros and Sushi Bars” sound?

The strip’s bubbling demographic stew of hipsters, punks, tattoo’d and pierced people with a healthy dose of aging hippies, slow-food types and upscale LEO-reading liberals brings it about as close as Louisville can get to the Upper West Side.
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Breakfast is finger food at Queen of Sheba

Breakfast plate at Queen of Sheba

LEO’s Eats with LouisvilleHotBytes

Let’s face it: Breakfast can be as boring as, well, a bowl of oatmeal. Even such treats as ham and eggs and crispy bacon just don’t get one’s motor running in the morning anymore. Mexican desayuno at Zapata’s Corner or migas and breakfast tacos at North End Café? Been there, done that. Even the rolling carts of Chinese snacks at Jade Palace’s dim sum seem so familiar now.

Not that any of these breakfast or brunch options are bad, mind you, but if they no longer bring the exciting shock of the new, perhaps it’s time to wheel over to Queen of Sheba on a Sunday to check out an Ethiopian breakfast.
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Baxter Station: Everyone’s neighborhood bistro

Voice-Tribune review by LouisvilleHotBytes
(published March 11, 2010)

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Baxter Station’s proprietor Andrew Hutto is one of the moving forces behind the Louisville Originals restaurant group, and his eatery – a popular local spot to eat and drink since 1989 – fits the “Originals” description to a T.

No franchised chain operation this, its cozy storefront setting is one-of-a-kind, with a railroad theme, a friendly bar up front, a comfy dining room with a warm fireplace, and a rear deck with curtain walls that roll up to allow alfresco dining in good weather and roll down to hold in the heat from powerful overhead warmers on wintry days.
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Best pizza? Can you define that?

A Papalinos pizza slice

LEO’s Eats with LouisvilleHotBytes

“Who’s got the best pizza?” Ask this question among a bunch of foodies and you’re bound to ignite an active debate.

Unfortunately, this question is stupid.

Pizza, an immigrant American dish like chop suey or tacos, has evolved into such a broad range of variations that it’s impossible — or at least not particularly sensible — to declare one “best” without narrowing the question as to type.
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We get scrod, and haddock too, at The Fish House

Scrod and Haddock sandwiches at The Fish House

Voice-Tribune review by LouisvilleHotBytes
(published 2/11/2010)

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So what’s a scrod? I’ll spare you the notorious Boston cabbie joke (although if you’re desperate to hear it, email me.) Anyway … scrod – or “schrod,” an older variation that’s dying out – is a foodie term that’s hard to pin down. Its definition varies depending on where you look it up.
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Perfect pair: Hot Brown, meet pizza

BoomBozz’s Hot Brown Pizza

LEO’s Eats with LouisvilleHotBytes

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.

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Potstickers comes unglued

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.
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Bosna-Mak: A trip to Bosnia without leaving town

Goulash and Mushroom Soups  Photo: Robin Garr

Voice-Tribune review by LouisvilleHotBytes

I’m not saying that I’m old, mind you, but I’m not the only one around here who can remember when Louisville’s idea of Mexican food was chili con carne, our take on Italian cuisine was pizza, we judged chow mein as the pinnacle of Chinese cuisine, and – except maybe for bratwurst – that was about it as far as ethnic fare was concerned.

But times have changed, and Louisville’s increasingly diverse urban family has been a good thing for us culturally, spiritually and, of course, in terms of a much wider variety of good things to eat.

Thanks to the work of organizations including Kentucky Refugee Ministries and others, Louisville has become one of the nation’s most welcoming cities for international newcomers. Since the 1990s, says the city’s Office for International Affairs, fully half of Louisville’s population growth has been counted in international residents. More than 80 languages are spoken by students in the Jefferson County Public Schools.

Quite a few of our new neighbors have opened restaurants, ranging from Mexico to countries farther south of the Rio; the Near East, Southeast Asia, China and Japan; more from Africa, and plenty of new arrivals from Europe.

Perhaps one of the most unexpected new ethnic communities comes from war-torn Bosnia, one of the many tiny Balkan countries that got back their independence when the Iron Curtain fell and took Yugoslavia with it. Fierce ethnic and religious rivalries brought Bosnia under the gun of “ethnic cleansing.” The United Nations eventually intervened, but only after a small flood of refugees headed toward the U.S., many of them bound for Louisville.

Which brings us around to a short review of Bosna-Mak, an interesting little Bosnian eatery in a short strip of Bosnian stores that lies perpendicular to the old Bardstown Road in Buechel.
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Comfort with Cajun accent at Coach Lamp

Coach Lamp’s fried chicken.

LEO’s Eats with LouisvilleHotBytes

The sturdy brown-painted brick building near the top of the hill where Vine Street rises from Broadway toward Breckenridge Street has been an east-of-downtown landmark since 1872. It has served as a saloon, a general store and then a saloon again.

Since around the time of Louisville’s 1937 flood, it has been a neighborly eatery and pub, known for cold beer and a signature roast beef-and-mashed-potato plate.

In 2000, under the guidance of new owners Gail and Billy Darling, it added an upscale component: Enter and stay on the right and you’ll enjoy the friendly bar, which really hasn’t changed much since the 1937 floodwaters receded. But walk to the back of the room, turn left, go down a small slope and you’ll pass — like Dorothy entering Oz — into a much more stylish room where the scene is casually artful and the fare upscale.
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Café Mimosa returns

By Kevin Gibson
LEO’s Eats with LouisvilleHotBytes

The familiar logo on the former Lentini’s reads “Café Mimosa,” but the sandwich board out front says it all: “We open now!”

A fire destroyed Café Mimosa’s former location — along with its partner Egg Roll Machine — in January. Owner Phat Le vowed to reopen; the former Lentini’s made sense since, well, he already owned it.

The new Mimosa, replacing recent tenant Jarfi’s, seems more upscale than the old, but food and prices are much the same.
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Tequila Factory manufactures fine Mexican chow

LEO’s Eats with LouisvilleHotBytes
(By Guest Critic Kevin Gibson)

Thank goodness it’s not another faux Irish pub.

Tequila Factory Bar and Grill is the latest tenant in the revolving-door location at 917 Baxter Ave., the former home of @tmosphere, Bazo’s and two or three iterations of Nio’s, among other short-lived concepts.

It’s all but surrounded by Irish-style pubs, where you’ll pay $6 for a pint of Guinness and enjoy such dubiously “Irish” staples as Jamaican jerk chicken and shrimp Alfredo pizza. This concept seems to be springing up everywhere in the Highlands and other neighborhoods around town (I’m looking at you, Fourth Street Live). But there’s been an unfortunate lack of new and interesting Mexican concepts.

Enter the Tequila Factory. (more…)

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