Lots going on in the Louisville restaurant scene
* We don’t know officially if Baxter Station is closed, but a Kentucky Revenue Cabinet sign on the door says the facility says operations have ceased due to delinquent payment of taxes. Despite multiple requests for interviews, owner Andrew Hutto isn’t commenting, so assume for yourselves whether the legendary Highlands restaurant is finished.
* The Seafood Connection is definitely closed and for the same reasons Baxter Station is idled: failure to stay current on taxes.
Quoting one of our favorite movies, “Raising Arizona,” “Gubment do take a bite, don’t she?”
* If you liked Colin Shearn’s drinks at St. Charles Exchange, hopefully you’ll like him in his role as the future general manager at El Camino (in the former Avalon space), which is scheduled to open in September. Food & Dining publisher John White says the overhauled space is looking beautiful.
* Word on the street is that Meat isn’t beat. Its owners keep telling former employees they intend to reopen the craft cocktail bar, once located above The Blind Pig in Butchertown. Will it be in that same site? Who knows? Given the nasty battle that shuttered Meat, one would think that if Robert Frost’s claim that “good fences make good neighbors,” an electrified razor wire model would need to be strung between those two entities.
* Cheers to a potential Tequila Trail … at least that’s what Senor Iguana’s owner, Juan Segoviano, a native of Jalisco, Mexico—the state where tequila is made—is considering doing in his five restaurants. Much like the Urban Bourbon Trail, you’d get a passport that would be stamped as you visited each Senor Iguana’s stops and sipped some fab agave juice.
* If you didn’t know—and we admit we didn’t, but are sad to say—Jeremy Hunt isn’t brewing beer at Bluegrass Brewing Co.’s St. Matthews brewery. Hunt was an incredibly nice guy—good gosh, what microbrewer isn’t, right?—and we’ll miss him in the city. A couple of months ago he moved his family of six to Texas, where he’s head brewer at Deep Ellum Brewing, a commercial craft brewer in Dallas.