LEO/LHB Eats: Trend for '07: fine dining comes to suburbia

[Robin Garr]

<table border="0" align="right" width="310"><tr><td><img src="http://www.louisvillehotbytes.com/corbetts_veal.jpg" border="1" align="right"></td></tr><tr><td>Plated on a seductive, creamy puree of house-smoked sweet potatoes, the butter-tender Sonoma veal cutlets at Corbett's "An American Place" are a work of culinary art. Photo by Robin Garr.</td></tr></table>LEO's Eats with Louisville HotBytes
Rising trend for '07: fine dining comes to suburbia
(Seviche - A Latin Bistro; Corbett's "An American Place")

Here's a vignette that captures the year 2007 on the local dining scene for me: I'm enjoying lunch in the new <b>Seviche - A Latin Bistro</b> on Goose Creek Road. The room is packed, but I'm the only male in sight, and I'm the youngest person in the place except for the servers. I'm enjoying a wonderful Chinese-Latino "fusion" seviche ... and all the ladies lunching around me are having guacamole and quesadillas and talking about what a marvelous new <i>Mexican</i> place this is.

In fact, the year 2007 has seen a lot of action on the Louisville restaurant scene, including some disappointing closings (<b>Bistro New Albany, Azalea, Diamante, Harper's</b>) and some exciting openings (<b>Mojito, Basa, Varanese, Wild Eggs, Original Impellizzeri's</b>), not to mention a closing-but-reopening (<b>Nio's at 917</b>) and even a closing-opening-closing-opening-again-then-really-and-truly-closing (the ill-fated <b>Oscar Brown's/La Rouge/Bobby J's</b>).

Perhaps the most intriguing developing local restaurant trend, though, is the first shaking of a seismic shift: The arrival of Seviche and other top-echelon, locally owned and independent white-tablecloth restaurants in the chain-rich East End.

While the mostly affluent acres east of the Watterson have already grown into a virtual second city, many of whose denizens venture into Louisville's urban quarters only with trepidation, the East End's restaurant scene has been dominated by the likes of <b>Olive Garden</b> and <b>Red Lobster</b>, with gastronomic temples such as <b>P.F. Chang's</b> and <b>Cheesecake Factory</b> for special occasions.

<b>Seviche - A Latin Bistro</b>
2929 Goose Creek Road
425-1000
http://www.SevicheRestaurant.com

<b>Corbett's "An American Place"</b>
5050 Norton Healthcare Blvd.
327-5058

Full reports in LEO and on LouisvilleHotBytes.

Robin, the same trend has been going strong in Chicago for a while now. People in the burbs don't want to make the trip downtown to get a good meal - particularly when that means fighting horrible traffic and paying through the nose to park. Lots of city restaurants have opened one or more suburban branches. Some of them are in strip malls, but a lot of suburbs have redeveloped their downtowns and now feature solid restaurants as part of the mix. The downside is that it can be as hard to park there as in the city sometime.