Category Archives: St. Matthews, Westport Village, and environs

$ Budget (under $30), Downtown, NuLu and Butchertown, Pubs, Brew Pubs, GastroPubs, QuickBytes, St. Matthews, Westport Village, and environs

We Tappa Keg at BJ’s & The BBC Tap Room

BJ's
BJ’s: a 30-year-old Southern California chain, has expanded to Louisville with the launch of a large and very well capitalized brewhouse at Oxmoor Center. Photos by Robin Garr.

LEO’s Eats with LouisvilleHotBytes.com
(BJ’s Restaurant and Brewhouse; BBC Tap Room)

Inquire about the American Pale Ale (aka “APA”) at Louisville’s BBC Tap Room, and you’ll get a virtual education in this classic American beer style: Made with Special Pale, Caramunich, Flaked Barley, and Special B malts and bittered with Centennial and Willamette hops, it’s a rich, copper colored ale with a full-bodied bitter hops flavor supported by generous amounts of malt.

Ask the same question about the APA at the new BJ’s Restaurant and Brewhouse in Oxmoor, and you may hear something like what a friendly server told me: “It’s a light beer. Well, one of our lighter beers.” She paused, then grinned conspiratorially. “They train us not to tell people it’s ‘bitter’.”
Continue reading We Tappa Keg at BJ’s & The BBC Tap Room →

BY PRICE FOR TWO, Seafood & Water's Edge, St. Matthews, Westport Village, and environs

Mazzoni’s moves east

Mazzoni's
Mazzoni’s will celebrate its 125th anniversary next year in new quarters in Middletown. Inset: Chili, fish sandwich, rolled oysters. Photos by Robin Garr.

(Mazzoni’s, Voice-Tribune, Feb. 14, 2008)

Mazzoni’s, one of Louisville’s oldest restaurants, will celebrate its 125th anniversary next year. It’s also brand-new.

This seeming contradiction is easily explained: Founded in 1884 in downtown Louisville by Philip Mazzoni, a recent arrival from Genoa, Italy, Mazzoni’s remains in family hands a century-and-a-quarter later, ranking it as the city’s second-oldest eatery. (Only Cunningham’s, founded about a decade earlier around the time Aristides won the first Kentucky Derby in 1875, boasts a longer local heritage.)

But Mazzoni’s as also as new as last week, when it reopened in shopping center quarters in suburban Middletown, having moved from the spot across Taylorsville Road from Bowman Field that it had called home since the 1980s.
Continue reading Mazzoni’s moves east →

$ Budget (under $30), Baxter, Bardstown, Highlands, Downtown, NuLu and Butchertown, Seafood & Water's Edge, St. Matthews, Westport Village, and environs

Something fishy this way comes

LEO’s Eats with Louisville HotBytes
(Moby Dick, Cunningham’s, the Fish House, Uptown Café)

Last week in this space we celebrated Carnival, wrapping up the season of winter revelry with a gumbo party, tasty libations and all manner of Mardi Gras beads.

Today it’s Ash Wednesday, the music has stopped, and the repentant Lenten season is here. Even in this secular era when only the most devout observe Lent with fasting and abstinence, one religious ritual remains mighty easy to follow: fish sandwiches on rye!

To hail the season, we checked out four local spots known for fish sandwiches: the fast-food Moby Dick, historic Cunningham’s, the friendly Fish House and, for an upscale touch, Uptown Café.

Fish sandwiches
Continue reading Something fishy this way comes →

$ Budget (under $30), Pubs, Brew Pubs, GastroPubs, St. Matthews, Westport Village, and environs

Urbane renewal in the heart of St. Matthews

BBC
The 15-year-old Bluegrass Brewing Co. emerged from cosmetic surgery last week with a new look and an updated menu, including a hot bacon and spinach salad and fried polenta fingers. Photos by Robin Garr.

LEO’s Eats with Louisville HotBytes
(Bluegrass Brewing Co.)

With a history that dates to 1779 and bragging rights as one of Louisville’s first suburbs, St. Matthews owns a long-standing reputation as a quiet, family-oriented community, a safe and frankly conservative kind of place to bring up the kids.

Indeed, the community signaled its social conservatism way back in 1850, on the fateful day when its upright burghers decided to change the town’s name from “Gilman’s Point” (chosen in honor of the local saloon) to “St. Matthews” (in honor of a more “suitable” namesake, its then-new Episcopal church).

From that day to this, St. Matthews’ churches and watering holes have co-existed in usually comfortable harmony. So it’s no real surprise that you’ll find at least three bars, a brewpub and a martini bar within an easy crawl of the intersection of Shelbyville and Westport roads and Chenoweth Lane, the exact corner where Gilman’s Tavern once stood.
Continue reading Urbane renewal in the heart of St. Matthews →

$$ Modest ($30-$50), Bistros, St. Matthews, Westport Village, and environs

60 West Bistro & Martini Bar

BBC
The 5-year-old Cafe Emilie reinvented itself with a new name and image as 60 West Bistro and Martini Bar.

Cafe Emilie, the comfortable eatery in the Burdorf Center (the former Bacon’s department store in St. Matthews) has won quite a few fans – including me – since it started out as a simple lunch spot just over five years ago. We’ve watched it mature into a cozy neighborhood bistro and bar through a couple of chef and staff changes, and it has earned its popularity the old-fashioned way.
Continue reading 60 West Bistro & Martini Bar →

$ Budget (under $30), St. Matthews, Westport Village, and environs, World Food

Shiraz settles in at Holiday Manor

Ramin and Cheryl Akrami
Ramin and Cheryl Akrami at Shiraz Mediterranean Grill in Holiday Manor. Photo by Robin Garr.

(Shiraz Mediterranean Grill, Voice-Tribune, Dec. 13, 2007)

If you love a good success story, consider Shiraz Mediterranean Grill. It would be hard to find another modest restaurant in Louisville that started so small and grew so fast.

It seems much longer than just a year and a half since Ramin Akrami opened the first Shiraz, a tiny, four-table eatery almost hidden in a row of frame huts on lower Brownsboro Road. It quickly outgrew those quarters, and within six months Akrami moved to more spacious modern facilities in the new Clifton Lofts complex on Frankfort Avenue. Now Shiraz has come to the East End, with a shiny new branch in Holiday Manor Walk, an expansion that Akrami hopes will be a link in a growing chain.
Continue reading Shiraz settles in at Holiday Manor →

$ Budget (under $30), St. Matthews, Westport Village, and environs, World Food

And still more cheap eats: Breakfast at the Meridian Cafe

LEO’s Eats with Louisville HotBytes

The metro area is blessed with a surprising number of first-rate spots for a casual, comfortable soup, salad or sandwich lunch, and I try to make my way around to all of them regularly. One of my favorites is Meridian Café, and I’m apparently not the only person thus smitten – this place almost always has a big crowd.

Continue reading And still more cheap eats: Breakfast at the Meridian Cafe →

$ Budget (under $30), St. Matthews, Westport Village, and environs, World Food

South India to West China: two hot new ethnic spots

Royal India's masala dosa
Indian brunch: Masala Dosa, a South Indian vegetarian treat, is the large lentil crepe at lower left, folded around curried potatoes; also pictured are three white rice-based idlys, a cup of spicy sambar lentil soup, and a pool of green coconut chutney. Photos by Robin Garr.

LEO’s Eats with Louisville HotBytes
(Royal India; Red Pepper Chinese Cuisine)

You don’t have to be as old as the (Tuscan) hills to remember the days when “Northern” Italian fare first became a local craze, serving dishes like fettuccine alfredo and veal piccata. Before long, “Northern” was in, “Southern” was out, and to this day, as much as we may still love pizza and spaghetti with meatballs and other hearty red-sauced Italian comfort food, we don’t think of it as, well, upscale anymore.

Now get ready to broaden your culinary horizons with a couple more ethnic compass points. Two fine new restaurants are breaking new ground for Louisville with exotic, spicy South Indian and West Chinese cuisine.
Continue reading South India to West China: two hot new ethnic spots →

St. Matthews, Westport Village, and environs, World Food

Rising trend for ’07: fine dining comes to suburbia

Veal at Corbett's
Plated on a seductive, creamy puree of house-smoked sweet potatoes, the butter-tender Sonoma veal cutlets at Corbett’s “An American Place” are a work of culinary art. Photo by Robin Garr.

LEO’s Eats with Louisville HotBytes
(Seviche – A Latin Bistro; Corbett’s “An American Place”)

Here’s a vignette that captures the year 2007 on the local dining scene for me: I’m enjoying lunch in the new Seviche – A Latin Bistro on Goose Creek Road. The room is packed, but I’m the only male in sight, and I’m the youngest person in the place except for the servers. I’m enjoying a wonderful Chinese-Latino “fusion” seviche … and all the ladies lunching around me are having guacamole and quesadillas and talking about what a marvelous new Mexican place this is.

In fact, the year 2007 has seen a lot of action on the Louisville restaurant scene, including some disappointing closings (Bistro New Albany, Azalea, Diamante, Harper’s) and some exciting openings (Mojito, Basa, Varanese, Wild Eggs, Original Impellizzeri’s), not to mention a closing-but-reopening (Nio’s at 917) and even a closing-opening-closing-opening-again-then-really-and-truly-closing (the ill-fated Oscar Brown’s/La Rouge/Bobby J’s).

Perhaps the most intriguing developing local restaurant trend, though, is the first shaking of a seismic shift: The arrival of Seviche and other top-echelon, locally owned and independent white-tablecloth restaurants in the chain-rich East End.
Continue reading Rising trend for ’07: fine dining comes to suburbia →

$$ Modest ($30-$50), St. Matthews, Westport Village, and environs, World Food

Seviche comes to the East End

Crispy fish at Seviche
Seviche’s crispy fish was a deep-fried red snapper about a foot long, served head and tail on, set in swimming position atop a bed of subtly flavored macadamia-nut rice. Photo by Robin Garr.

(Seviche – A Latin Bistro, Voice-Tribune, Nov. 29, 2007)

When Anthony Lamas’s son, Ethan Diego, turned 4, Lamas and his wife, Samantha, made the same decision as a lot of young parents before them: They moved from the Highlands to the East End, seeking a quiet, suburban setting with good schools for the youngsters.

It wasn’t long before Lamas made another important decision: With the strong encouragement of his wife and his father-in-law, Dr. Bruce Gaddie – longtime Oldham County residents – he brought his workplace out to the suburbs, too.

Lamas, chef and owner of Louisville’s immensely popular Seviche – A Latin Restaurant – now presides over two restaurants, having opened Seviche – A Latin Bistro last month in the quarters vacated by the short-lived Cutting Board on Goose Creek Road.

With the exception of locally owned and operated Limestone on North Hurstbourne, Lamas said he was startled to discover how much the East End’s fine-dining scene has been dominated by corporate chain eateries.

The arrival of the new Seviche, though, coupled with Equus chef-owner Dean Corbett’s planned opening of Corbett’s An American Place in Brownsboro Crossing on Dec. 15 and Napa River Grill’s planned move from Dupont Circle to Westport Village early next year, may signal a coming tide.
Continue reading Seviche comes to the East End →