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This archived review dates from 2007 or before. Use SEARCH above to find all recent reviews. CLOSED. Both the Louisville and Lexington Furlongs closed late in 2005. The renovated Louisville property now houses Sweet Peas Southern Bistro.
With Mardi Gras behind us and the spring meets at Keeneland and Churchill Downs just ahead, the timing couldn't have been better for a visit to Furlongs, a Louisiana-style restaurant with a horse-racing theme that unites the spirits of Kentucky's and Louisiana's racing industries. More than a few horsemen and horses spend their winters at Louisiana's Evangeline Downs and Gulfstream Park before returning to the Bluegrass for spring and autumn racing, and I'd like to think that when they're up this way, they find an amiable home at Furlongs, which has restaurants in both Louisville and Lexington. Four of us dined the other night at the Louisville eatery, a comfortably cozy spot that makes sensitive use of a turn-of-the-century frame dwelling on the city's historic-yet-trendy Frankfort Avenue. Enter through a long, friendly bar room where zydeco music is usually heard pulsing in the background, and you'll be ushered to large, white-draped tables scattered through several rooms of the old house, done up in dark green colors and discreet racing prints. The menu is long and diverse, offering an array of Cajun and Creole dishes (which might be defined, respectively, as country-style Louisiana fare and city-style New Orleans fare). Furlongs also offers a lot of "blackened" dishes, a spicy skillet-seared cooking style that many people think is traditional Cajun but was actually developed in 1983 by Chef Paul Prudhomme and which briefly became such a food fad that for a while there, trendy eateries were blackening everything from tofu to ice cream. Furlongs doesn't go that far, but they will blacken fresh fish ($15.95) or chicken ($11.95) for you, treating them to the screeching-hot sautee in a black-iron skillet that creates the familiar charred and spicy black crust. In addition to a dozen appetizers (including blackened chicken wings for $5.95 and a sampler platter for $8.75 a person), salads (inculding a fried crawfish Caesar for $8.95) and soups (including gumbo, red beans and rice and jambalaya, I gar-on-tee), Furlongs' bill of fare includes nearly four dozen choices, sorted into "specialties," "seafood," "steaks and ribs," "poultry" and "pasta," at generally midrange prices from $10.75 (for roasted garlic pasta or pasta primavera) to $23.95 (for mignon ecrivesse, a 9-ounce filet mignon topped with crawfish etoufee). Lobster tails, king crab legs and soft-shell crabs, when available, are "market price," and daily specials seem to hover around the higher end of the price range. The wine list is fairly short but serviceable, with mostly mass-market labels available by the glass or bottle. I like beer with spicy Cajun fare, though, and Furlongs has an excellent regional specialty on tap, Abita (from Abita Springs, La., across Lake Pontchartrain from the City that Care Forgot). I enjoyed a rich, dark "Turbo Dog" ($4.25), while others in our group of four tried Abita Amber ($5) and Pilsner Urquell from the draft-beer tap ($4.50). It didn't take us long to wipe out two appetizer plates: Fried mushrooms ($6.95), a generous portion of at least 18 cornmeal-breaded and crispy-fried fungi with a horseradish sauce zippy enough to get your attention; and shrimp remoulade ($8.75), a smaller ration of about eight large but rubbery and rather flavorless peeled shrimp with a remoulade sauce somewhat akin to Thousand Island dressing. Biscuit-like rolls painted with honey and butter, a complimentary bread serving, were addictive. Main courses generally met but did not exceed expectations. One friend's Fresh Fish Furlong's dinner ($18.75) brought a perfect grilled salmon fillet topped with a rich sautee of tiny shrimp and crabmeat. Another pal tried BBQ shrimp ($13.75), a toned-down version of the Cajun original, large shrimp swimming in a spicy, dark-brown sauce based on a flour roux, but without the fiery spice or the full armament of heads and antennae that you'd expect in New Orleans, and served with potatoes rather than the usual white steamed rice. My wife declared her blackened chicken over jambalaya ($11.95) a success, with a tender, boneless chicken breast given the Prudhomme treatment served atop a somewhat mushy mound of jambalaya. I chose a special of the day, a pool of somewhat pasty flour-thickened etoufee painted on a plate around a mound of jambalaya, topped with medallions of tuna, salmon and grouper ($23.95). Dinners came with a mixed vegetable medley, a mix of sugar snap peas, zucchini and other veggies; oddly, about half the veggies were long-simmered and soft, the other half barely cooked and crisp-tender. The combination made for more flavor and texture interest than you would expect from a side dish, a nice touch. Two of our friends chose stuffed potato side dishes and got large baker potatoes topped with a massive wad of bright orange cheese, just about a meal in itself. Sticking with the New Orleans theme, we finished with excellent chicory coffee ($2) and beignets ($4.25), a generous portion of somewhat disappointing pastries that lacked the feathery lightness of the original from New Orleans' Cafe du Monde; heavy, smallish and rather greasy, they frankly resembled leftover "donut holes" from Krispy Kreme. Great atmosphere, friendly and efficient service, and respectable Cajun fare. All the ingredients are there, but the food, while certainly good, never quite struck the kind of sparks that made us say, "Oh, boy, I can't wait to go back to Furlongs." Dinner for four came to $133.67, plus a $26.33 tip to round the total up to $160. The share for two would have been about $67, or $80 with tip. $$$ Another location: 735 E. Main St., Lexington, (606) 266-9000
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