Food Archives - Page 5 of 6

Heads up: Lexington, Ky., is fast becoming a terrific restaurant town, Part 1

July 13, 2013 by steve Leave a Comment

The last time I went to downtown Lexington for any other purpose than a rock concert at Rupp Arena was 1989. Velvet Elvis was the band and they played at the Bottom Line. (Great show, by the way.)

If we ate anywhere after that, it was likely Tolly Ho, a good greasy burger stop frequented by University of Kentucky students.

Even though I was a chef in those days, I didn’t imagine making a restaurant stop on purpose in the heart of the city. No one ever talked about dining or just hanging out there. Food in Lexington was for maintenance, not dining, something to get you filled up before you headed back to Louisville.

Now, however, people are talking. A lot.

And eating and drinking. A lot.

In about a five year span, Lexington’s city center has come alive with new bars, brewpubs and restaurants (and about a zillion great retail shops, too) that draw a broad demographic to a once largely dull business district.

Skip fast-food joints at lunch and eat at these four authentic, affordable restaurants

July 10, 2013 by steve Leave a Comment

Sometimes it’s not such a bad thing having carpool duty for your son’s wrestling camp. (Well maybe except for driving those sweaty bodies home after the three-hour practice.)

When it’s easy for a work-at-home type like me to fix a sandwich lunch and get back to my desk, it’s good to be dragged beyond those four walls and forced to find a good lunch.

In those hours between the time I drop off the goons and until I pick them up, I’ve come across four great lunch spots that, much to my chagrin, aren’t nearly as busy as they should be.

Located near each are always busy fast-food places, which confounds me, since, at these great restaurants, prices are comparable.

If lunch for you is all about filling up rather than eating well, then skip the rest of this. Reading on will be a waste of time.

But if you want some truly outstanding grub served up affordably, you’ll want to make note of these places. These are places you’ll want to return to more often than just for lunch.

Trust me, your barbecue doesn’t meet KCBS standards

July 10, 2013 by steve Leave a Comment

You think your barbecue is great, right?

Who doesn’t?

Most everyone who’s ever slow cooked a slab of meat and lacquered it with their “secret sauce” — and it actually came out tasting good — considers themselves (secretly or privately) a Sultan of Smoke.

But whip up a batch of ribs and ask a professional barbecuer’s opinion. Let him or her tell you what’s wrong — and they will, since barbecuers are the most opinionated cooks in the world — and see if yours is still as good as you think.

If you’re the stubborn type, you’ll not believe the expert and push for scrutiny from a certified Kansas City Barbecue Society (KCBS) judge, a truly persnickety patron of smoked meats who critiques barbecue harsher than a rabbi at a kosher dinner.

That person’s interpretation of whether your pulled pork passes muster will likely make the barbecuer’s look slapdash by comparison.

Original Makers Club to ‘curate’ Louisville, celebrate culture at June 28 Foxhollow dinner

July 10, 2013 by steve Leave a Comment

A few years ago, Josh Merideth got the sense that Louisvillians knew too little about the treasures of their own city, especially its independent businesses.

Working in Downtown Louisville, he found himself surrounded by artists, restaurateurs, fashion designers, hoteliers, bakers, architects—an endless supply of creative types whose products were unique to the city yet under-celebrated.

That notion, born of his civic pride, sparked the photographer’s own creativity to form a company that not only would elevate these businesses’ local profiles, but create events at which those owners’ would network in style.

“I believed that a lot of people weren’t being exposed to this fantastic creative energy that’s all over Louisville, and I wanted to do something that summed it all up,” said Merideth, who founded the Original Makers Club of Louisville about two years ago. “I wanted to take the best of the city, curate that and those people, and make it all come to life.”

Heard at Bourbon & Bowties: new restaurants, chefs moving, lawsuit settling, big auction $$

July 9, 2013 by steve Leave a Comment

Get 19 Louisville chefs and at least that many cooks under one roof, and you’ve not only got a lot of terrific food on hand, you hear a lot of fun news about what’s going on in the Louisville restaurant scene.

That group gathered last night at Corbett’s: An American Place, where they cooked for 650 attendees of the fourth-annual Bourbon & Bowties fundraiser for Kosair Children’s Hospital.

Most local restaurateurs are good friends who love to talk with and about each other, and we were on hand was on hand to hear a lot of cool news about changes at their restaurants, new jobs for some, even a possible end in sight to the Louisville Originals embezzlement lawsuit.

* Fernando and Christina Martinez, co-owners with Yaniel Martinez of Guaca Mole and Mussel & Burger Bar, said they plan to open a 42 seat, high-end restaurant in the basement of M&BB.

Fernando said patrons should expect clever and cutting-edge foods much like he produced while working in restaurants in Miami between the time he left Mojito Tapas Bar and Havana Rumba several years ago and returned to Louisville in 2011.

Oh, Kentucky! Spirits Journal picks Angel’s Envy Cask Strength as world’s top spirit

July 9, 2013 by steve Leave a Comment

Angel’s Envy Bourbon’s super premium “Cask Strength” has been rated the world’s top spirit by “Spirits Journal,” an esteemed distilled spirits publication penned by respected booze wonk Paul Pacult.

Cask Strength tied for the 2013 top spot with Highland Park 25 Year Old Orkney Islands Single Malt Whisky ($250).

Cask Strength, which costs $149 per bottle, spends the last of its years aging in port barrels, and is 121 proof. Yet at less than 10 years old, Cask Strength not only got Pacult’s highest marks, he called it an “equivalent of the mythical Black Bowmore 1964 Sherry Oak Islay Single Malt,” which is a rare and nearly priceless Scotch.

“For him to say that about a spirit that was bottled in from 1964 just floored me,” said Wes Henderson, chief operating officer of Angel’s Envy, which is close to announcing where its Louisville distillery will officially be located. “If you could even find that Bowmore it would cost up to $10,000. It’s one of the most iconic spirits ever produced.”

In just three years, Angel’s Envy has drawn an amazing share of heavenly attention. A darling of the liquor press, the bourbon even drew a rating of 98 out of 100 points from Wine Enthusiast.

Emergency landing on one engine leaves Chef Dean Corbett scared but grateful

July 9, 2013 by steve Leave a Comment

So this festival is unreal. You can’t believe the houses, the money these people have. It’s gorgeous up there.

My buddy is Ted Steinbock, a physician in town, and he had a friend who invited me to work at the festival. I’d always wanted to do that one, and he made it happen.

On the main day, Saturday, there were 22 events, wine tastings every two hours, and culinary demos.

On the Friday night before, we did private dinners with the wine makers. Eight chefs in eight houses. Surely my house was $10 million.

We had the only 100-point-rated Chateau-Neuf Du Pape going — at my dinner. That was pretty cool.

The meal was six courses, but the owner was on a diet. With every course, he would get up and go to the kitchen and get some high-fiber crackers. It was the craziest thing.

And yeah, the wine was good.

Ay caramba! Yum! Brands plans to double Taco Bell sales to $14 billion by 2021

July 9, 2013 by steve Leave a Comment

Yum! Brands believes it can double Taco Bell’s U.S. annual sales to $14 billion by 2021.

Such a gordita-size expansion goal is uncommonly ambitious for the Louisville-based company which owns two other mature restaurant brands in Pizza Hut and KFC (all three are 51 years or older).

According trade magazine Nation’s Restaurant News, Yum execs said on Tuesday that to do so, the Taco Bell system would have to grow from 5,700 units to 8,000 units and boost annual per-store revenues from $1.3 million to about $1.8 million, to arrive at a total of $14 billion — all in eight years.

To provide some pespective, for even a buttoned-up restaurant startup, to go from zero to two stores in one year is tough. To add 10 in the following year is a great achievement.

If the brand is just smokin’ red hot, it could grow to 50 by year five, and swell at about a 25 percent growth rate — if it’s on fire — over the next several years to get to 100 in about the span that Taco Bell will add 2,300 units.

After Sandy: Ripple effect of storm damage spreads impact far through the seafood supply chain

February 6, 2013 by steve Leave a Comment

Parsons Seafood wasn’t built in a day, but Superstorm Sandy nearly destroyed the century-old shellfish farming and wholesaler in less than 24 hours. With its relentless one-two, water-and-wind punches, the largest Atlantic hurricane on record pummeled the New Jersey shore at Tuckerton on Oct. 29, leveling the business’s oyster hatchery and sending a surge of sea water 4 feet high into its wholesale storefront.

“We lost about 15 to 20 percent of our field-grow operations, but it didn’t take everything,” says Dale Parsons, who oversees the family’s now-battered $4 million aquaculture busin
Like many shellfish operations on the Jersey shore, Parsons’ harvesting is at a standstill — not as a result of infrastructure damage, but because of contaminants found in Tuckerton Bay’s waters by U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) inspectors. As of late December, that technical knockout had Parsons and his crews working without pay since Sandy blew ashore.ess. “A hatchery is like a musical instrument that anyone can put together to make it work, but fine tuning it for the right result takes a long time. We’ll lose at least a year getting it back.”

At these manly gatherings, the game is plated

December 26, 2012 by steve Leave a Comment

Several times each summer, when temperatures are favorable, anywhere from a few guys to as many as 20 will gather at a rustic Spencer County farm for Man Camp. Named thusly by one of the men’s wives because only dudes are invited, the gettogethers are outdoor feasts — pot lucks — cooked by veteran fishermen and hunters sharing the prior year’s quarry, the bulk of which is taken from Bluegrass lands and waters.

These are leisurely picnics where conversations rarely get serious, unless talk drifts toward gathering game and cooking it. “Oh, we’ll talk about politics now and then — family, too,” says Steve Taxes, an investment banker who, in a past career, spent two decades on the hog killing floor at Fischer Packing Co. “But mostly we like to talk about hunting. And maybe we’ll give each other a hard time.”

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