Edibles & Potables is a Sunday potpourri of food and dining topics.
The Louisville dining community fondly recalls Chef Levon Wallace for his lengthy tenure as executive chef at Proof on Main (702 W. Main Street). In early 2015 Wallace departed for new culinary horizons in Nashville, Tennessee.
However, Wallace was set to make another transition in 2020. At Nashville Scene, writer Chris Chamberlain picks up the story: “Chef Levon Wallace Starts Up New Pretzel Venture.”
We all thought that Levon Wallace, the former chef at Cochon Butcher, Gray & Dudley and Strategic Hospitality had returned to Louisville, Ky., for his next gig working with the team behind The Silver Dollar and El Camino, but we were wrong. Thanks to the pandemic, that opportunity fell through, and the talented chef found himself doing what a whole lot of people were doing: looking for a job.
COVID-19 proved to be a serendipitous fork in the road professionally for Wallace, who began conjuring pretzels while spending pandemic time at home with his family.
The result of his pretzel experiments has morphed into Wallace’s latest venture, FatBelly Pretzel. He explains, “I had played around with making pretzels at the Downtown Sporting Club, and now I’m totally obsessed with pretzels. I came up with sort of a hybrid Bavarian-style pretzel, with crispy arms and a nice chewy fat belly. Every single person who has received one so far has a story associated with a pretzel, a trip to a ballpark, a pretzel in a beer garden somewhere or the perfect late-night treat; there’s never a bummer story. Especially right now, we all need the love and the smiles, and I have a passion for making people happy.”
The time is right for feel-good snacks, and Wallace already has expanded his range of pretzel offerings to include chocolate-chip-pretzel-crunch cookies. Currently FatBelly Pretzel’s output is small, and distribution limited primarily to East Nashville, Hendersonville and environs.
Learn more by reading Chamberlain’s essay in its entirety, and visiting these portals: FatBelly Pretzel web site and FatBelly Pretzel at Facebook.
