LEO's Eats with Robin Garr
Before we break to the food, let's devote a moment or two to the appreciation of modern American folk art. Seriously, now, work with me on this. Visualize, if you will, Edward Hopper's 1942 painting "Nighthawks," three anonymous figures and a short-order cook seen through the plate-glass windows of a spartan diner on an empty city street very late at night.
Ha! Gotcha! You're looking at the picture in your mind's eye, all right, but I'll bet a quesadilla you're actually picturing Gottfried Helnwein's "Boulevard of Broken Dreams," a 1984 parody that copies Hopper's urban scene but places Humphrey Bogart, Marilyn Monroe and James Dean on the diner stools and pops Elvis into the soda jerk's outfit.
Whichever rendition of this evocative painting you prefer, I'll bet we can agree on one thing: The diner in these paintings isn't really the kind of eatery that would draw you in. Let's put it simply: The painters' imagined diner lacked what real-estate sales people call "curb appeal." Curb appeal draws you in to a space. Its opposite makes you want to pull away.
So, you want curb appeal in a local dining room? Allow me to point out Ramiro's Cantina. You'll be hard-pressed to find a more inviting facade along Frankfort Avenue's Restaurant Row, with its large, brightly lighted front windows framing crowds of happy diners. We could call it the "Boulevard of Funny Dreams" and populate it with Steve Martin, Chevy Chase and Martin Short, decked out in full mariachi attire and belting out "We are the Three Amigos."
Yeah, it's that kind of place. You could call Ramiro's "son of Sol Aztecas," really, as owner Ramiro Gandara, who was a partner in this outpost of the local Sol Aztecas mini-chain, runs it on his own now, placing his first name over Sol Aztecas' on the sign out front.
OK, fine, you foodies say. But what's changed ...
Read the full review on LouisvilleHotBytes,
http://www.louisvillehotbytes.com/ramir ... xican-chow
And in LEO Weekly:
http://leoweekly.com/dining/ramiro%E2%8 ... xican-chow
Ramiro's Cantina
2350 Frankfort Ave.
895-3333
http://ramiroscantina.com
Rating: 84