The headline news: Riot Cafe and The Limbo have closed.
The closings came in stages. I believe the Courier Journal’s Dahlia Ghabour was the first to report The Limbo’s closing on October 28, via Twitter, but Riot Cafe’s demise was revealed only yesterday afternoon at WDRB-41.
Riot Café at 4th and West Chestnut streets is out of business after it opened in the fall of 2020 and was named after the civil unrest from that summer in downtown Louisville. The cafe served coffee and focused on supporting the Black Lives Matter movement and conversation about societal concerns. Next door, a tropically-themed bar called The Limbo also closed.
The Limbo posted a farewell. As of Tuesday morning, the most recent post at Riot Cafe’s page at Facebook dates to October 21.
Granted, these sad small business terminations aren’t always clean and by the book (whatever the “book” is). Still, there’s a surreal aspect to this story given that the announcement actually came on October 21, albeit unofficially.
A post on Twitter by an employee, now an ex-employee, read “Riot Cafe and The Limbo are closing its doors October 31st. November 1st, I will be out of a job.”
And so it came to be.
