Jeremy J wrote:Yes. Louisville desperately needs another southern food restaurant concept.
This ... anonymous ... essay appeared in LEO Weekly's recent April Fool's Day "Fake" Edition ...
Louisville not a ‘Southern City,’ chefs schooled on local geography What do you suppose it would be like if suddenly, just like that, Louisville restaurateurs belatedly discovered that the city is not actually, well, Southern.
Consider these simple, historical realities: Kentucky never seceded from the Union. President Abraham Lincoln was born just a few miles south of the city, in a little log cabin near Hodgenville, Kentucky. Louisville housed a major Union Army fort during the Civil War, and most of the city’s German and Irish population stood staunchly against slavery and for the North.
For many of us who grew up in Louisville, particularly if we’re old enough to remember watching with horror as the civil-rights struggle played out violently in Birmingham, Selma, and across the entire state of Mississippi, the idea that Louisville is “Southern” strikes us as hilarious, but also a bit offensive. Heck, we don’t even have Southern accents, or at least not too much.
But something funny happened as we evolved from a city full of people who loved to eat out into a gastronomic mecca that gets noticed in national food and travel media: A bunch of restaurateurs, realizing that “Southern” cuisine was getting to be a hot thing, decided to jump on that train before it left the station. If Southern is a trend, we can be Southern too.
It’s fake, though. So let’s just imagine what would happen if, in a sudden burst of self-actualization, the city’s faux-Southern eateries suddenly discovered the error of their ways and dropped that shtick.
Ed Lee might declare 610’s new thing “Korean-Midwestern” and would quickly head out on a culinary research visit to Iowa. Doc Crow’s might become Doctor Crow’s, and its owners, rediscovering their heritage, would fuse Southeast Asian flavors into its barbecue-centric cuisine, to critical acclaim. Silver Dollar would point out, truthfully, that its Southern-seeming chow was really California cuisine all along. And Finn’s could rename itself Finn’s Northern Kitchen without missing a beat. Hey, it could happen!