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.
YachtSea: “A nautical-themed bar and restaurant … set to open in Butchertown this summer.” As such, score an assist for Wikipedia, which initiates the process of unraveling a forthcoming local food ‘n’ drink pun.
Yahtzee is a dice game made by Milton Bradley (a company that has since been acquired and assimilated by Hasbro). It was first marketed under the name of Yahtzee by game entrepreneur Edwin S. Lowe in 1956. The game is a development of earlier dice games such as Poker Dice, Yacht and Generala. It is also similar to Yatzy, which is popular in Scandinavia.
“Yachts” are entirely unrelated to dice.
1550s, yeaghe “a light, fast-sailing ship,” from Norwegian jaght or early Dutch jaght, both from Middle Low German jacht, shortened form of jachtschip “fast pirate ship,” literally “ship for chasing,” from jacht “chase,” from jagen “to chase, hunt,” from Old High German jagon, from Proto-Germanic *yago-, from PIE root *yek- (2) “to hunt” (source also of Hittite ekt- “hunting net”).
Alas, dice-laden nautical word play is utterly exhausting on a Monday morning, so we turn to the prolific Michael L. Jones at Louisville Business First for the preview of a new place (111 N. Wenzel in Butcher Block) to consume “boat drinks, hot dogs, and oysters.”
Exclusive: Merryweather owner to open nautical-themed bar in Butchertown
YachtSea is owned by J.C. Denison, co-owner of the Merryweather in Germantown, and Leslee Macpherson, former director of operations at Holly Hill in Lexington, Kentucky.
“It’s just something I have had in the back of my mind for a while having visited a few places like the Sunken Harbor Club in New York. Then my partner Leslee and I have both been separately to a place called Sea Wolf on Tybee Island,” Denison explained.
However, there’ll be no seafood apart from oysters.
“That is sort of a secondary focus,” he said. “The biggest thing, our sort of mission statement from Day One, is that we want it to be fun. We want it to be a fun, laid-back place. We’re going to have at least two pinball machines. We’re going to have a nice patio. I feel like we’re going to be really good complement to that little area.”
Cover photo credit: The author; it’s the small port in Nice, France where yachts and other smaller vessels dock.
