Discussion of Robin Garr's Riviera Maya review

[Robin Garr]

Can Riviera Maya exorcise a haunted venue?
LEO's Eats with Robin Garr



This may seem a topic better suited for Halloween than the dead of icy winter coming up on Fat Tuesday, but hey, let's talk about "haunted" restaurant locations. Local foodies quickly learn about these venues that seem to labor under a curse, housing one short-lived restaurant failure after another.

For more than a generation, the big old house at the corner of Bardstown Road and Bonnycastle may have been the city's most notorious such location. You can't convince a lot of restaurant-industry people that there wasn't a real ghost in there, a female haunt angry when the beloved 1980s-era Parisian Pantry removed an upstairs wall the ghost apparently wanted left alone. Aggressive haunting ensued; the Pantry soon shut down, and a half-dozen successors filled the place with the stench of failure until Café 360 eventually broke the curse. Maybe the hookah smoke calmed the specter?

This may be the most colorful local restaurant ghost story, but it's certainly not the city's only haunted location. The Butchertown space, once "Dirty" Min's cafeteria, saw a similar string of failures until Sergio's World Beers finally broke its spell.

I've certainly heard people in the business use a broad vocabulary of curse words to describe the Frankfort Avenue storefront that, back in the '70s, housed the original Lynn's, soon followed by a range of eateries from Jamaican to Korean to Chef Alan Rosenberg's short-lived Danielle's and, most recently, the short-lived Cubana.

Walking along the avenue the other day, we noticed there's a new tenant here, a bright and inviting Mexican restaurant called "Riviera Maya."

Say what? The Mayan Riviera, Mexico's answer to Destin, is a place of blue Gulf waters, white-sand beaches, intriguing Mayan temple ruins and affordable vacation packages. Centered on Cozumel, it lies on the tip of the Yucatan, jutting out into the Gulf in the general direction of Cuba.

"Mayan" is also a term of culinary significance in Louisville, where Chef Bruce Ucan's landmark Mayan Café, which started in NuLu before NuLu was even invented, has introduced us to the Mayan cuisine of the Yucatan and Guatemala.

After a quick lunch at Riviera Maya, I can't say it's another Mayan Café. But I'm ready to welcome it as an inviting addition to the Frankfort Avenue strip.


Read the full review on LouisvilleHotBytes,
http://www.louisvillehotbytes.com/can-r ... nted-venue
and in LEO Weekly:
http://leoweekly.com/dining/can-riviera ... nted-venue

Riviera Maya Latin Cuisine
2206 Frankfort Ave.
290-3119
Robin Garr's rating: 86 points

My wife & I made it in for a late lunch, 2:30 or so. She tried to tell me they were closed when we drove by looking for a parking spot as the place needs to get some signs up, a lighted shingle maybe, to communicate the fact farther away. Walking in front you could see they were open but if you were driving by on Frankfort(!) Avenue trying not to rear end the vehicle in front of you, normal driving conditions in that area, you may well not realize you can eat there. The look inside is a lot the same as Cubana but it was very different otherwise. Even at this slow time of day with only a couple of other customers they had staff that greeted us inside the door. The server gave attentive service and delivered food that was prepared in a timely fashion by the kitchen. So it's not Cubana where you were in danger of being forgotten to death, regardless of whether the folks in back could cook well. She had huevos con chorizo, I had a thin skirt steak with chicken enchilada, etc. I thought about something with the marinated pulled pork in the Mayan vein but have had dishes like that the last two or three times at Latin American eateries and so passed this time. We had a good experience and expect to be back.