Garr: 'Manny & Merle Looks Like It Might Be a Keeper'

For Tracy Blue's vanity press, The Voice-Tribune, Robin Garr reviewed Manny & Merle. In a wonderful bit of serendipity, that's the very same restaurant that's hosting The Voice-Tribune's August Third Thursday After-Work Party. (After seeing Blue flaunt her gams in her publisher's note and on billboards around town, this party might be your chance to behold them in person and eat a taco too.) Here are highlights of Garr's thoughts on Tony Palombino's Main Street Bakersfield knockoff:
·"Manny & Merle looks like it might be a keeper though."
·"The carnitas taco ($3) was good enough to make us yell 'Whoopee!'"
·The fish taco, featuring mild white fish crisply fried in PBR batter was pretty good but could have used a ki-yi-yi flavor touch. [Voice-Tribune]

Marty Rosen checked out the WayCool Cafe, the restaurant at Hotel Louisville (a dual downtown hotel and transitional residential facility that's part of the Wayside Christian Mission) for the Louisville Courier-Journal this week:

Prices at WayCool Cafe represent extraordinary value. And the restaurant's mission is an important one. But setting those considerations aside, the food is just plain good. Not fancy, not trendy, but prepared and served with professional competence and integrity...A lunch buffet (Monday-Friday, 11 a.m.-2:30 p.m.; $5 for a single trip; $8 if you want to keep going back) has to be among the best lunch values in the city — not least because it always seems to include fried chicken that is pretty darned good; it's grease-free and crunchy and has just the right Southern balance of salt and pepper. Featured selections can be ordered a la carte — like a Hot Brown ($6), fried shrimp ($6), a 6-ounce rib eye ($7) or WayCool's take on surf and turf, a shrimp and rib-eye combo that in context feels like a splurge at $9. [Louisville Courier-Journal]

364. That's the number of words into his article before Garr identified the restaurant he was reviewing for LEO Weekly. The restaurant's name is Four Sisters. What preceded the review itself was the celebrate-diversity-through-food pho Garr seemingly serves up in all his reviews of non-Western restaurants.

Four Sisters' marinated grilled pork banh mi ($6.50) hit the spot. The whole-wheat roll was slightly hollowed to make room for plenty of tender "pulled" roasted pork, lightly home-pickled julienne carrots and daikon radish, chopped cucumber and onions, fresh cilantro and a light schmear of sweet pork liver and pork paté. A savory avocado, mushroom, fresh spinach and crumbled feta cheese crêpe ($8.50) struck me as another East-West combo, but it worked, all the veggie goodies stuffed inside a paper-thin, eggy crepe shell served with four sides turned over to make an open-face square. One of the four sisters dropped by. "Want some Sriracha sauce?" Don't mind if I do! [LEO Weekly]

Louisville Magazine is out of the restaurant-reviewing business. But its August 2013 issue included "The Cookie Off" (p. 129, yet to make an online appearance), in which eight staffers scored cookies from eight venues on a scale of 1-5 and published the rankings along with comments. The magazine's consensus best cookie: Please & Thank You's ("It's a little undercooked, but it's perfect."). Eater Louisville's choice for best Louisville Magazinecomment: editor Kane Webb on Heitzman Bakery's cookie, which finished in last place, so far behind the nearest competitor, that if it were a horse, it would have been vanned off, "As a parent, this is the cookie I would buy in bulk and give to 10-year-olds at a birthday party." Why does Webb hate children? [Louisville Magazine]

·All Week in Reviews [~ELOU~]
[Photos: Courtesy Facebook/Manny & Merle]