The Spring 2024 issue of Food & Dining Magazine is now available in all the familiar places: Louisville area eateries and food shops, newsstands and online.
Donum Dei Brewery, an established New Albany brewery and distillery (3211 Grant Line Road #3) will again be offering a St. Patrick’s Day Drunken Unicorn beer release party in the form of a weekend-long event on the 16th and 17th of March.
Partnering with Donum Dei to provide food for the brewery’s weekend celebration is Bayou Butcher Shop, a new business coming soon to bricks ‘n’ mortar at 1645-2 Veterans Parkway in Jeffersonville — so new, in fact, that Drunken Unicorn 2024 will be the “On Da Geaux” food truck’s first event.
More on the event in a moment.
Know that there’s a twist to this Drunken Cajun Boudin Unicorn tale, because the owners of the new Bayou Butcher Shop, Ellis and Serena Taylor, actually are “old hands” at this business of feeding people, having previously operated their namesake Taylor’s Cajun Meat Company in New Albany, just a few hundred yards from Donum Dei across Grant Line Road.
In fact, the circumstances behind the Taylors’ abrupt departure from what appeared to the public to be their business are as clear as mud bug habitat. However, the broad outlines of the migration have slowly emerged. In food and drink, just like everything else in life, it usually comes down to money and power, or in the case of ownership disputes, both.
In mid-January a handwritten notice appeared on the door of Taylor’s Cajun Meat Company to the effect that the shop, which also serves plate lunches and prepared grab ‘n’ go items, would be closed until further notice. Days passed, then weeks; New Albany is a small town, and the rumorama spun on overdrive.
Eventually a narrative took shape. The Taylors apparently had come out on the short end of a disagreement with absentee business partners, with the latter electing to assume control of the business, keeping the signature Taylor name, and vowing to restore the shop’s Cajun daily commerce. Meanwhile the ousted Taylors took stock of their options and launched Bayou Butcher Shop.
And so, here we are.
The Drunken Unicorn 2024/St. Patrick’s “Weekend” at Donum Dei will have an in-house breakfast, with lunch and dinner from the Bayou Butcher Shop’s food truck.
The text:
We are less than a week from the release of Drunken Unicorn 2024. We will be opening at 7am Saturday March 16 and will serve breakfast until 10. Bayou Butcher Shop will be serving lunch and dinner. We will close at 11pm. Sunday March 17 we will do it all again except we will close at 9pm!!
The itinerary:
- Breakfast: biscuits and gravy, both days.
- Lunch and dinner: Bayou Butcher Shop’s food truck.
- Beer: Drunken Unicorn is a limited bottling of Donum Dei’s strong Scotch Ale/Wee Heavy (circa 10% abv). Previous editions were bourbon barrel-aged, but for 2024 owner/brewer Rick Otey mixed it up and aged the ale in a freshly dumped rye barrel. The “brewstillery’s” other beers and spirits will be available for consumption, too.
As a side note, the author’s (Roger) recent group podcast project — The Pubcast — will be recording an episode live from Donum Dei on Saturday morning (the 16th) at 9:00 a.m., so if you’re by, stop and say hi.
