LEO's Eats with Robin Garr
Rye Not, one of the whiskey flights at Down One Bourbon Bar, offers tastes of Bulleit, Russell’s Reserve and Rittenhouse rye whiskeys.
Thoughts upon an evening of snacking and sipping rye whiskey in Down One Bourbon Bar: Bourbon has been around for well over 200 years, and its history has been tied to Kentucky for all that time.
What’s more, bourbon is booming, with the state’s distillery roster almost quadrupling from 18 to 78 properties in the past 10 years..
So riddle me this: Why do you suppose that Louisville, stuck with a shabby downtown that closed up at night since white flight, expressways and suburban malls shelled it out during the ‘60s, took until now to figure out that bourbon makes a great fuel for tourism and urban development?
For two generations, no one could figure out how to turn downtown into a place that didn’t go dark at the end of the business day … until somebody thought about using bourbon to lure ‘em in.
Wham! Suddenly downtown is bright again, with happy crowds wandering from bars to restaurants to distilleries and a bourbon museum, this traffic in turn fueling restaurants, motels and shops.
Why, you could almost call us the Napa Valley of Booze, with 20 of the Urban Bourbon Trail’s 50 bourbon bars located downtown, many of them along Main Street, where the once dilapidated Whiskey Row’s classy 19th century buildings are starting to look sharp again.
Down One actually got into the game earlier than many of its siblings, opening six years ago this month in space that the Galt House operators, undoubtedly with a keen eye for the bourbon trend, carved out of one corner of a subterranean parking garage. Hence the Down One name, as one must descend a flight of metal stairs to get in from the street. ...
Read the full review on LouisvilleHotBytes,
http://www.louisvillehotbytes.com/down- ... -thumbs-up
You'll also find this review in LEO Weekly's Food & Drink section today.
http://www.leoweekly.com/category/food-drink/
Down One Bourbon Bar
321 W. Main St.
566-3259
http://downonebourbonbar.com
https://facebook.com/DownOneBourbonBar
Robin Garr's rating: 82 points
Noise level: Sound varies significantly with the crowd. With every seat occupied an hour before a concert at the Yum Center next door, conversation was all but impossible. After much of the crowd left, the din diminished to a reasonable buzz. (Average sound level ranged from 75dB, the sound inside a moving car, to 95dB, the roar of a revving motorcycle.)
Accessibility: Down One is down a flight of metal stairs from the street. However, wheelchair access is available from the rear, through the Galt House parking garage.