Robin Garr's LOUISVILLE Restaurant Reviews

*** Crescent Moon
978 Barret Ave.
(502) 681-8555
Two months after its doors were shut and windows shuttered with the closing of its neighborhood grocery home on Stilz Avenue in Crescent Hill, it's a pleasure to welcome Crescent Moon back to the city's community of eateries at a new location.

Although the name no longer fits the neighborhood, the friendly folks behind the counter told us recently that they expect to reinstall the familiar Crescent Moon sign over the new Inner Highlands spot.

No longer in the grocery business, the restaurant now stands alone as a deli and caterer, featuring name-brand Boar's Head meats and furnished with several tables and stools for those who wish to eat in.

And best of all, just as before, the food here transcends simple deli food with touches of creativity and flashes of soul that make it special.

The dining room is bright and clean, functional and spartan. Sunny lemon-yellow walls are trimmed in blue and gray, with a knotty-pine serving counter and deli case at the back. High black tables are furnished with bar stools, and a glass-topped patio table and porch furniture fill the middle of the small room. A few art prints under plastic add minimal decoration, and a floor-to-ceiling map of Louisville makes one wall look a bit like a delivery firm's dispatch center.

The bill of fare still features deli sandwiches and good, old-fashioned comfort food. Deli sandwiches are $2.50 (for PB&J or bologna, er, baloney) to $4 (for country ham). Whatever your choice, you can build your own variation with a choice of a half-dozen breads, three kinds of cheeses and an array of condiments. Grilled sandwiches are $3 (for grilled cheese or fried baloney to $4.50 for a Reuben), and specialty sandwiches are $4.50 (for a meatless selection of veggies and cheese on your choice of bread) to $6.99 (for my lunch choice, "The Giggler," a Dagwood-style stack featuring just about everything they've got in the fridge.

There's a variety of soups and salads, and filling daily plate-lunch specials, one of which - a grilled pork chop - caught my wife's eye. A truly filling repast, it featured a tender, savory chop, grilled to perfection with appetizing criss-cross sear marks. It was accompanied by a mound of baby red potatoes covered with butter and parsley and a generous ration of excellent butterbeans, tender and creamy and soooo good.

My "Giggler" sandwich was so thick that it needed tiny plastic swords to hold it together. Just as the menu described it, it was a seven-layer "Dagwood" with spicy Cajun-style roast beef, pastrami and roast turkey layered with Swiss and pepper jack cheeses, slathered with mayo and a horseradish sauce that was strong enough to make me sit up and take notice, all squeezed into a Pepperidge Farm hero bun that took two hands to eat. It was served on wax paper in a yellow oval lunch-counter-style plastic basket, with a crunchy pickle spear and a single-serving bag of potato chips on the side.

An excellent lunch was $13.75, plus a last-minute impulse buy, a good-size brownie ($1) that went home with us and proved to be a treat, heavy and dense, more like cake than fudge. $

(October 2001)