From the Editor

In 2003, when our publisher, John Carlos White, first invited me to become a contributing writer for F&D, his ambitions for the magazine struck me as both audacious and preposterous. Back then, The CourierJournal and LEO Weekly (where I was already contributing) and Louisville Magazine all offered strong dining coverage, and I knew how much of an editorial investment was involved in assembling any attempt at a comprehensive dining guide — even on an annual basis, with full-time staff, let alone on a quarterly basis with a handful of freelancers. It seemed to me an inconceivable task to gather the necessary info and then physically vet, verify, describe, classify — and then map! — every restaurant in the Metro.

But John and his Vice-President, the late Danny Boyle, assembled information from every possible source, got into their cars and drove the streets of the Metro for 10 hours a day until they had personally put their eyes on, and mapped every one of the 718 restaurants we listed in the premiere issue (bear in mind that Google Maps did not exist back then).

As far as I can tell, no other food-related publication in the country has ever undertaken such a project, let alone maintained it for two decades.

By 2003. Louisville’s national profile as a culinary center was wellestablished. Media around the country were aware that the city was home to established and emerging generations of talented chefs who were taking advantage of the region’s agricultural bounty. And I’d been writing dining reviews for LEO Weekly off and on for a few years — long enough that eventually I noticed a pattern that was already glaringly evident to everyone who followed the dining scene.

In every sector of Louisville dining you could discern the legacy of one single establishment that had closed more than a decade earlier: Casa Grisanti.

I found that 17 notable restaurants, ranging from elite fine dining to casual delicatessen cuisine, traced their origins to Casa — so I pitched that story, expecting I might get the go-ahead to write a standard 1500-word feature with a few interviews and some photos.

Instead, I got enthusiastic clearance to go as deeply as I wanted. That support — like the ambitious approach to building the initial guide and maps — persuaded me that F&D was a seriously ambitious undertaking.

For weeks I conducted interviews. In the end, I filed a story that ran an astonishing 6,400 words (three times as long as a typical feature).

That legacy endures and remains influential in today’s dining scene. (If you’re interested, use the QR code above to see that article in our online archive).

But for a more timely read, start turning the pages of this twentiethanniversary issue, where two excellent writers update parts of that story. Roger Baylor went back to the source and interviewed Vincenzo and Agostino Gabriele, who were the driving forces at Casa Grisanti, and still uphold that legacy of excellence at Vincenzo’s Italian Restaurant.

Cary Stemle visits three other Chefs who were part of the Grisanti generation and have shaped Louisville cuisine in the years since: Frank Yang and Dominic Serratore of Ditto’s Grill and Susan Stevens of Stevens Deli.

Elsewhere in this issue you’ll find our outstanding corps of regular contributors looking back at various aspects of the last two decades. Of course, Louisville’s bar scene has changed over these two decades, and who knows that better than the intrepid Bar Belle herself, Sara Havens, who — yes — remembers it well!

In case you don’t quite remember (or are trying to forget) what cocktails you were drinking back then, our Cocktail Contessa offers some updated versions of favorites from that era. And for when you prefer to entertain your guests at home, we have collected some of the most popular recipes that Tim and Lori Laird garnered from guest chefs for their Easy Entertaining column.

For me, our archives now comprise a unique historical record that documents not just the restaurants we list, but a rich cluster of social, cultural, economic, and geographic trends that foodways reflect.

In our listings and maps you can track the Metro’s geographic development, you can discern patterns of immigration — and acculturation as cuisines once marginalized proliferate across the community. Each listing and every point on our maps stands for the hopes and dreams of someone constructing a community around food.

And that’s what John Carlos White understood and set out to document back in 2003.

From the beginning, we documented and reported on every restaurant opening and closing in the Metro. Until his death earlier this year, that was the work of Ron Mikulak. These days, that beat is in the hands of a worthy successor, Roger Baylor. His overview of the Comings & Goings column is an essential read.

In this issue, we have taken a look back, year-by-year, and chronicled how the local restaurant scene has changed. For the record, our listings (which do not include the major national chains) have grown from 718 in 2003 to 1528 today. Over these two decades, of course, restaurants have come and gone. In total, over the last 20 years, we have chronicled 3,416 restaurants in our guide.

Years ago, when I first interviewed Chef Frank Yang, he told me that every dinner and every meal has its own specific purpose. Sometimes the primary goal is as simple as nutrition, of course. But most meals are about more than that. When we eat in company the purpose may be business; family; special events, happy and sad; curiosity; ostentation; mourning; romance, or a host of other things.

Meals are as complex as their context, and for all of us who have had the opportunity to experience the Louisville dining scene — readers, writers, diners, front-of-house, back-of-house — I hope that looking back over these twenty years will bring back memories, not just of a dish, a dessert, a beverage, but of a moment “when.”