Welcome to the Louisville Restaurants Forum, a civil place for the intelligent discussion of the local restaurant scene and just about any other topic related to food and drink in and around Louisville.
Those three stories certainly sound very believable! I'm sure the "Pastry" was extremely tough although the "French Toast" probably was very delicious since everything is better with bacon!
When I worked at park place on main the owner of a steak house chain in Cincinnati was in for dinner , came out of are bath room and said : the nuts u got in the bath room are bad or stale . ?! I was like ahh we dont have nuts or any other food in are restrooms sir .?? On further inspection we discovered he had eaten the scented bowl of herbs we had for decoration by the sink !! We both had a good laugh about and so did his employees he had brought in for dinner !
Worked a catering gig when I was a kid and had one of the guests kept lingering to the side of the buffet chatting up ladies. He was snacking and talking. I came up to take a drink order from him and he pulled me aside to politely ask what this dish was he was chowing down on. I told him that it was potpourri and I wasn't sure he should eat it.
My mom had a business client in for lunch from the midwest once and took him to... I want to say Kingfish in the early 90's. He had never had shrimp before so ordered it. On the ride back to the office with a group of executive types in the car my mom asked what he thought of the shrimp. The guy said they tasted great, but didn't know why they were so popular since they had just torn his mouth to pieces to eat. No one had bothered to inform him that he needed to peel them...
I once watched, from across a large room, as a child at a bar mitzvah ate an entire cinnamon stick (bark of the cinnamon tree that was there for the coffee buffet) before I could get through the crowd to stop her. She and her parents probably had an interesting couple of days after the party.
Marsha Lynch LEO columnist, free range cook/food writer/food stylist
At the reopening of the Seelbach hotel, Roger Davis came in the tiny kitchen of the downstairs cafe where I was the lone cook, almost every night. He would look around and usually taste something I was preparing. One night he came in, looked around and grabbed a hunk of what he presumed to be cheese and chomped down on it. BUTTER. He was more careful in his ensuing trips. He came in the Shady Lane a couple of years ago on a secret stealth trip to Louisville and I did not mention that evening.
Years ago I worked at a restaurant that took a display tray of desserts around to each table after the entree to try and upsell. When there was a dessert served with ice cream we would sometimes up a scoop of Sweetex (a type of shortening used for icings) to represent the ice cream since it wouldn't melt at room temperature. Apparently one night a somewhat intoxicated guest decided to eat a big spoonful of ice cream off the tray as the server was going through the descriptions of the desserts.