When El Camino restaurant opens near Thanksgiving, it’s likely to show few if any traces of Avalon, the restaurant that operated in the 1314 Bardstown Road space for a decade before closing in July.

Shawn Cantley, one of three partners in the venture, is a California native who has long envisioned a restaurant straight out of that state’s surf towns.

“It’ll have a beach hangout vibe … what surfers call shredquarters,” said Cantley, who created the restaurant with his wife, Vanessa, and Larry Rice, operating manager at The Silver Dollar, also owned by the trio. “There are three pillars to El Camino that come from that experience: a Tiki-style bar program, Mexican street food like you’d find in East Lost Angeles or Mexico City, and California surf music.”

Read more … 

Did you see the news? Proof on Main has been named one of the 101 Best Hotel Restaurants in the world by the website The Daily Meal.

Now, before you get all excited for Proof, our first-rate home team homies, think for a second about that statement: 101 best in the world.

Is it really possible to make such a statement?

I’m no scientist, but I’d estimate the number of hotel restaurants to be somewhere in the millions.

So can any single group of people ever say with solid evidence that they’ve picked out the 101 best hotel eateries—or of anything at all—in the world?

Read  more …

UPDATED 1 p.m.: Matthew Antonovich, chef, co-creator and co-owner of Mozzaria, has been forced out of that partnership, while his partnership in Mozz Enoteca & Wine Bar, a business he cofounded in 2010, is in jeopardy.

According to Michael Cooper, who cofounded both concepts with Antonovich, ongoing concerns about Antonovich’s management of Mozzaria led to a July lawsuit and subsequent Aug. 27 ouster by Pallas Partners.

At Mozz, questions about that restaurant’s operational performance have led majority-owner Dr. Mushtaque Juneja to consider Antonovich’s future with the company.

A call placed to Antonovich’s phone last night indicated he is not accepting calls or messages.

Read  more …

Compared to wine dinners, beer dinners are virtually non-existent.

In the past 12 months, I doubt I could recall writing about even eight suds and supper events.

Yet if you look around any restaurant, especially casual ones, you’ll see far more people drinking beer with dinner than wine. So it’s odd more restaurateurs don’t see the potential of pairing beer with food in the traditional course-by-course format silently reserved for wine.

Harvest is aiming to change that, albeit slowly.

On Aug. 7, it had its second beer dinner of the year (which, if you do the math, is exponentially higher than any other restaurant of its caliber), partnering this time with Bluegrass Brewing Co.’s production brewer, Eileen Martin. (The production company is not affiliated with the brewery-restaurant company, though its bottled beer is sold at those sites.)

Read more …

Though it’s likely no one reading this knows Jodi Aufdencamp, odds are you know a restaurateur like her.

Married, mother of two, co-owner of five Mama Mimi’s Take ‘N Bake Pizza shops in and around Columbus, Ohio.

Died Aug 17 after a protracted battle with cancer. She’ll be buried this moring.

A friend of mine since 2002, Jodi was no ordinary woman. She was a life force, a hard-working, creative firecracker whose determination to succeed in business was shared by her husband, Jeff.

She was 46 when she died in his arms last Friday, with their kids at her bedside.

The couple’s business is a buttoned up enterprise, so I’m assuming she had life insurance.

Read more …

I like my beer on draft. No brew served from bottle or can compares to a fresh draw.

And while living in Goshen brings the blessings of quiet surroundings, it delivers the curse of being nowhere near a good draft beer.

So to address the problem, my wife and I have for the past few years used growlers, filled at stores or brewpubs: a good idea both from a cost savings and freshness standpoint. For around $10, you can get a growler that will yield four American pints (16 ounces) for $2.50 a pour—$2 to $3 less than what you pay at local microbrewery.

Problem is, once you’ve opened that growler, you’re committed to either drinking those four beers or wasting them—a sin indeed!—or drinking more than one, which we don’t like to do on “school nights” anyway. Weekends are a different story.

Read more …

Since Insider Louisville reported last week that Susan Seiller, former owner of Jack Fry’s, was creating a new restaurant named Relish Café, we’ve received numerous emails, calls, texts and Tweets asking, basically, “Why is she getting into it again? She’s already knocked it out of the park once.”

It appears stopping for good isn’t good enough for a fertile mind like Seiller’s, especially when she sees a great opportunity to do good things with food.

“We are creative in the culinary arts, and I’m an entrepreneur. So when the vision comes, you act on it,” said Seiller, who also owned La Paloma, a terrific Mediterranean restaurant she sold to the owners of Azalea in the early 1990s. “The truth is I like creating and actualizing these concepts. I’ve kind of had this idea for about 10 years … and I couldn’t shake it.”

Read  more …

(Editor’s note: Steve Coomes and Terry Boyd contributed to this post.)

Major meltdown underway at Mozzaria restaurant.

Despite its owners’ sunny predictions and far-reaching ambitions for Mozzaria on Fourth Street Live!, it appears the Italian concept is in crisis.

Mozzaria was announced in an April 24 press release as “the first locally owned full service Italian restaurant to Fourth Street Live” that would have “a retail department (that) will sell house signature coffee as well as souvenirs,” as well as a “New York style delicatessen” … “the likes of Katz’s and Carnegie Deli” that would sell “sandwiches, salads and soups starting at New York deli 1960’s prices … .”

Problem was, the concept appears to have run into trouble in about a New York minute.

Read more …

Here’s a tangy piece of industry chatter: Susan Seiler, former owner of Jack Fry’s, has a new concept, Relish.

Confirming that with her has been impossible, however. She’s been as elusive as a politician in a high-profile pickle.

Like an adult game of “Where’s Waldo?” gone on far too long, we can’t find her to confirm that she’s the mind behind the 1346 River Road restaurant supposed to open this fall. (Note to Al Qaeda: You should have consulted Seiler when trying to hide Bin Laden.)

Read more …

I just glanced at the menu for tonight’s El Bulli “dinner and a movie” at Seviche, and 12 hours ahead of time, I’m already salivating.

This is the lineup chef-owner Anthony Lamas posted on his Facebook page:

• nuevo mojito
• nitro caipirinha
• gazpacho in textures
• orange, olive, ice
• oyster, yuzu air, seaweed
• summer water, evo, herb
• albacore, smoke, heat
• fungi, compressed, juice
• beef, potato marrow, fried yolk
• sweet potato, pine nut, manchego espuma
• avocado, chocolate, bourbon

As a former chef, I can’t imagine I or any other chef in town in the 1980s had the skills required to do such a meal, or the notion that those ingredients would blend favorably.

Read more …