LEO's Eats with LouisvilleHotBytes.com
Welcome to Louisville, Ryder Cup fans, and please excuse us if we accidentally misspell the name of your event. After all, in Louisville for the last 140 years or so, "Rider" has meant one of the little guys who captain those big horses around the track at Churchill Downs.
But we're trying to get on board with the idea of folks who use long sticks to knock small white balls into tiny holes, and we truly do want to make you feel welcome.
Ryder Cup may attract more than 200,000 spectators (and another 1,500 reporters and photographers) to the Valhalla Golf Club during the five-day event (Sept. 16-21), and that puts it on par with Kentucky Derby season as a gathering likely to pack the town and make it mighty hard to get a table in some of our hottest eateries.
Valhalla, a gated, guarded greensward, is surrounded by endless suburbia, a scene that you may find a lot like home, whether you're visiting from Atlanta, Ann Arbor or Greenwich. It would be all too easy for you to enjoy a pasteurized and homogenized dining experience, too, should you choose to take your meals at Olive Garden, Red Lobster or any of the many other corporate chains that dot that quadrant of our map.
But what a shame that would be! Louisville, a city where the locals allegedly dine out more often per capita than any other U.S. metropolis, is rich with fine, independently owned and operated eateries at a broad range of prices, styles and ethnic origins.
We hope you'll make it a point to spend some time - and yes, some of your tourist dollars - getting to know our locals. We think you'll see just why it is that we eat out so much.
Read the complete report, with Forumite Stephen Dennison joining me to provide his well-thought-out list of recommendatins, in LEO and on LouisvilleHotBytes.