LEO's Eats with Robin Garr
I like to think I'm a bit of a beer geek, but our friend Don puts me in the shade when it comes to knowledge of things malty and hoppy. I'll bet he could recite the rules of the ancient Reinheitsgebot beer laws forwards and backwards, and our multilingual pal Anne could help us do it in the original German.
Naturally Anne and Don were eager to join Mary and me on a dinner excursion to The Brewery on Baxter. With a name like that, it had to be a haven for lovers of things beerish.
And it was, sort of, at least as a well-chosen sampler of eight draught taps and six bottle choices all devoted to American craft beers. ("Good picks, but it seems a little short for a place that calls itself 'The Brewery,'" Don muttered, and I couldn't disagree. The wine list is on the brief side, also, but the bar appears well stocked with liquor.)
We consoled ourselves with pints of Bell's Oberon, Southern Tier 2xIPA and, closer to home, Lexington's Country Boy Peckerhead Wheat and "Hipster Repellent," a hoppy, fruity ale from Louisville's Falls City.
So that's the beer. But what about the food? And the mood, and all that good stuff?
Let's say a lot of eyes have been watching this place. The local foodie blogosphere has been all atwitter as an all-star cast of Louisville restaurant-industry pros - incorporated as Louisville Eats Good - has taken over this old Baxter-strip landmark and is reworking it as a fancier, foodie-er operation. It's something like those food-television shows where a mean chef comes in cussin' to turn a greasy spoon into a four-star spa, only kinder and gentler and a lot less obnoxious.
The mere presence of such culinary luminaries as Chef Shawn Ward, who came over from Jack Fry's bearing the shrimp and grits recipe he imported from the South Carolina Low Country in 1995, and local eats paterfamilias Dean Corbett, who can make everything better, has seemed sufficient to inspire paroxysms of praise.
And The Brewery is good, make no mistake about that.
Read the full review on LouisvilleHotBytes,
http://www.louisvillehotbytes.com/we-st ... he-brewery
And in LEO Weekly:
http://leoweekly.com/dining/we-study-re ... ts-brewery
The Brewery Bar and Restaurant
426 Baxter Ave.
365-2505
http://thebrewerylouisville.com
Robin Garr's rating: 85 points