Watch World Cup with a posse
June 17, 2010
LEO’s Eats with LouisvilleHotBytes
Soccer, the sport the rest of the world calls “football,” is celebrating its quadrennial World Cup (the real World Series) this month as the teams of 32 nations do battle in South Africa.
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Who’s not a po-boy in this economy?
November 20, 2009
Café Lou Lou Chef Clay Wallace will celebrate that New Orleans cultural icon, the po-boy sandwich, on Saturday, Nov. 21 and Sunday, Nov. 22. Both the St. Matthews (106 Sears Ave.) and Highlands (2216 Dundee Road) locations will serve fried shrimp, fried oysters, blackened red fish, and roast beef and gravy po-boys. Traditional side dishes of potato salad and french fries will also be on the menu.
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Café Mimosa returns
October 21, 2009
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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Jarfi’s leaving Lentini’s, going back downtown as fancy diner
June 3, 2009
This report combines an Email discussion and phone conversation with Jeff Jarfi, who says he’s excited about this new venture, having been involved with the opening of Atlanta’s Buckhead Diner. He’s regretful about leaving Bardstown Road, but says the combination of a slow economy and $10,000-a-month lease payments for the old Lentini’s building made it a no-brainer to move quickly on the diner program, which has been on the drawing board for a while.
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Welcome Ryder Cup fans! Now, let’s have dinner
September 10, 2008
LEO’s Eats with LouisvilleHotBytes.com
Welcome to Louisville, Ryder Cup fans, and please excuse us if we accidentally misspell the name of your event. After all, in Louisville for the last 140 years or so, “Rider” has meant one of the little guys who captain those big horses around the track at Churchill Downs.
But we’re trying to get on board with the idea of folks who use long sticks to knock small white balls into tiny holes, and we truly do want to make you feel welcome.
Ryder Cup may attract more than 200,000 spectators (and another 1,500 reporters and photographers) to the Valhalla Golf Club during the five-day event (Sept. 16-21), and that puts it on par with Kentucky Derby season as a gathering likely to pack the town and make it mighty hard to get a table in some of our hottest eateries.
Valhalla, a gated, guarded greensward, is surrounded by endless suburbia, a scene that you may find a lot like home, whether you’re visiting from Atlanta, Ann Arbor or Greenwich. It would be all too easy for you to enjoy a pasteurized and homogenized dining experience, too, should you choose to take your meals at Olive Garden, Red Lobster or any of the many other corporate chains that dot that quadrant of our map.
But what a shame that would be! Louisville, a city where the locals allegedly dine out more often per capita than any other U.S. metropolis, is rich with fine, independently owned and operated eateries at a broad range of prices, styles and ethnic origins.
We hope you’ll make it a point to spend some time – and yes, some of your tourist dollars – getting to know our locals. We think you’ll see just why it is that we eat out so much.
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Peng Looi is BCA’s Jefferson Evans honoree
March 15, 2008
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| Chef Peng Looi. |
Chef Peng Looi, of Asiatique and August Moon, has won this year’s Jefferson Evans Award, presented annually by the Black Culinarian Alliance to honor individuals “of color” who have shown excellence in the food-service industry. Peng Looi is of Malaysian heritage.
The award is named after chef Jefferson Evans, the first black graduate of the Culinary Institute of America.
Benefits aid Lava House survivors
January 31, 2008
A devastating fire destroyed Louisville’s Lava House (Louisville Assembly of Vanguard Art) on Jan. 26, taking the lives of resident Bill Christie and one of the house’s dogs.
Friends of Lava House are organizing benefits to help the three surviving residents and tenant studio artists. A major event at the Barret Bar, 1012 Barret Ave., kicked off a series of fund-raisers that continue through the month.
Fund-raising events and other information will be listed on the Website at http://www.thelavahouse.org/events.htm.
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In Memory of Danny Boyle
November 3, 2007
Click here to post your remembrances of Danny on the LouisvilleHotBytes forum
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The Food & Dining and LouisvilleHotBytes family has suffered a devastating loss this week with the sudden death of co-worker and friend Danny Boyle, a kind and gentle man who was taken from us way too soon. To share our bad news with you all, here’s a brief memorial from Danny’s old and dear friend, John C. White, the publisher of Food & Dining:
For Danny:
“It is with the greatest of sorrow that I bring this news to the forum. Thursday was, and will remain, one of the saddest days of my life. Daniel F. Boyle, my best friend for as long as I can remember and my right-hand-man for Food & Dining Magazine, died suddenly of heart failure Thursday night.
“He leaves behind his loving and devoted wife Sara and two small boys: Jordan, 12, and Matthew, 6.
“I cannot begin to tell you what he has meant to me in my life, but I can tell you that he has touched so many more lives than mine.
“Most every restaurant owner and chef, hotel manager and purveyor of our humble magazine knew him in some way. Many counted him as a friend, and most all thought of him as he was, a kind, generous and loving man.
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Food & Dining Summer issue!
August 8, 2007
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| The sprawling riverside decks at Captain’s Quarters. Food & Dining photo by Dan Dry |
The Summer 2007 issue of Food & Dining is now available, loaded with useful articles and stunning photos. You’ll find full-length articles on alfresco dining and the Southern Indiana restaurant renaissance … original reports on beer, wine, spirits and coffee … recipes, tips, humor, road trip reports, and much more.
You can pick up Food & Dining in area hotel rooms or at many shops and news stands (here’s a list), or subscribe at our special rate that, with free gift certificates for local restaurants, gives you a full year of Food & Dining for free! (Subscribe here!)
The full Summer 2007 Table of Contents is now online. You can view it here. Or read on for this excerpt from Food & Dining’s quarterly report on local restaurant openings, closings and changes:
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Naked chefs calendar now just $5!
July 9, 2007
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| Mrs. February, Brandy Allgeier, formerly chef at Westport General Store, sports a pair of chocolate paw prints. |
What a deal for six more months! Buy it, take it to the restaurant, get the chefs to sign it for a fun foodie collectible!
When a local family with long ties to the restaurant community faced catastrophic medical expenses, a dozen local chefs took it all off, or most of it anyway, posing for a tongue-in-cheek wall calendar, a PG-13 12-pager in which they display just about everything but artfully concealed naughty bits.
The resulting full-color calendar, “Louisville Chefs’ Best Kept Secrets,” now on sale for just $5 (plus $2 postage), is “very tasteful but very naughty.” It seeks to raise money for Christina Bayens, 26, a graduate student at Spalding University finishing her doctoral degree as a clinical physchologist. Bayens, who has had cystic fibrosis since birth, received a double-lung transplant in St. Louis last summer, a costly venture that her parents, Mark and Linda Bayens, said “was too much for us to bear alone.”
Derby Fest adds wine competition
April 6, 2007
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.
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Oakroom chefs play with their food. Lucky us
March 2, 2007
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| Oakroom chef Duane Nutter: Photos courtesy of the Oakroom. |
LEO’s Eat ‘n’ Blog with Louisville HotBytes
The writer Calvin Trillin once famously observed that the quality of the food in restaurants tends to be inversely proportional to the elevation of the eatery. In other words, stay away from building-top restaurants with a view.
Many traveling foodies in the United States would propose another reliable rule: Steer clear of hotel restaurants, where you’ll likely get boring, overpriced food fashioned to take advantage of a captive audience of tourist families who’d really rather not go out.
But this simple rule – the one about hotels, I mean – doesn’t work in Louisville, where for a quarter of a century now, the Seelbach Hotel’s Oakroom has gone from strength to strength. (more…)
