That happened the other day when I was out on my weekly random drive around town, searching out new and exciting places to eat. My sidekick Ramón and I drove down Bardstown Road and at the Spanish Cove shopping center in Fern Creek we found an interesting place, to say the least. A hand-painted sign mounted on the roof of the little building at 5412 Del Maria Court identified it as El Gallo de Oro, or the Golden Cock in English, and it appeared to be abandoned. A closer look through the grimy windows that hadn’t been broken out and papered-over, however, revealed a lone server inside. What the heck? we thought to ourselves. I yanked open the door and walked though.

The walls of the Golden Cock are painted an electric blue and a bar flanks the rear of the one large room with three pool tables and a large TV on the left-hand side and eight or so tables of four on the right. All in all, it’s not a bad set up, and it appeared much cleaner than I had anticipated. But the waiter just looked at us like we were crazy. I’ve experienced this phenomenon at other hole-in-the-wall kinds of Mexican places before, and I think it has something to do with the fact that I’m blond and well over six feet tall and must weigh at least twice as much as the average patron there. But other than the two of us, there wasn’t a single patron in the joint. And it was lunchtime.

Read the rest after the jump…

What the heck? We resisted the urge to flee in the hopes that the food would be worth it.

“This is a restaurant, isn’t it?” asked Ramón in Spanish, approaching the waiter who now stood behind the bar. “Yes,” he answered, somewhat hesitantly. “And what’s that gringo want over there?” he added, pointing at me.

“How about a couple of menus?” I responded in Spanish. I don’t like being called a gringo, by the way. And I always get a kick out of the way rude Mexican waiters react when they find out I speak Spanish with a characteristically non-gringo accent. “We don’t have a menu,” he replied sheepishly, wiping down the bar.

Now, behind the beat-up television set there’s a huge red-and-yellow hand-painted sign that has to be at least five, six feet long. It is covered with all kinds of nice words like “taco” and “torta” and “tostada” and many of them even have prices listed nearby. In my language, we call it a menu. “Is that the menu?” I inquired, pointing at the enticing collection of tasty-sounding dishes artfully arranged before us. “No,” he answered, looking at me like I was coo coo for Cocoa Puffs again.

Ookaay… This was going to be an interesting experience. I suppose the fact that the large menu in question touted goodies from “La Marimba Restaurant” might have explained it all away, but who hangs the menu from another restaurant in their restaurant?

What the heck? I thought to myself. Maybe it could still be fun.

“Okay, so what do you have then?” Ramón had stepped in to speed things up. We had already been there for five minutes and had accomplished very little.

“Whatever you want,” the surly waiter responded. “We’ve got it all.”

“How about some chips and salsa to start off with then?” I sat down at the table, glad to see that we were finally getting somewhere.

“No, we don’t have that,” said the waiter.

“How about some guacamole?”

“Nope.”

“Well, what do you have then?”

“We’ve got tacos, we’ve got menudo…”

I quickly nudged Ramón, a known menudo fan – Who wouldn’t love spicy tripe soup with its pleasantly fecal aroma? – but he quickly shook his head, confiding later that he didn’t trust the menudo “in places like that.”

“…we’ve got shrimp soup…”

“Ah, caldo de camarón! Yes, we’ll take the shrimp soup!” we told him. Finally, we were getting somewhere. After digging a Coke and a Corona out of the cooler behind the bar, the waiter dropped them off at our table and then trotted the order back to the kitchen. What I was really craving was a simple plate of scrambled eggs with refried beans, but beggars shouldn’t be choosers, so I just kept my mouth shut.

After a swig on our drinks, it occurred to us that they not might take plastic in a place like that, so we asked, just to be on the safe side, and sure enough, they only took cash. While Ramón valiantly scurried off in search of the next ATM, I just sat there, enjoying the uneasy silence despite the blaring reguetón from Spanish MTV.

“So…” I ventured, in an attempt to break the ice. “What happened to all the windows?” I pointed to the front of the room.

“Ah…” He smiled a bit. (Was he warming up? Maybe my speaking Spanish was doing the trick.) “At night we’re more like a club, and this weekend there was another fight. Police came and everything.”

“Ah…” I nodded my understanding – and sympathy – and headed off to the bathroom. It must have been some fight because a large chunk of wall was missing in the bathroom, and the urinal had been knocked askew on its mount. Back at the table, I decided to continue chipping away at the ice and asked how long the restaurant had been around.

“Since 2000.” He was smiling now, but I think it had more to do with the buxom dancers prancing around on Spanish MTV.

Then I committed my biggest faux pas. I like to try to identify accents, and I said, “So, where are you from?”

The smile disappeared from his face and he went back to the bar and starting wiping. “North Carolina,” he said. Then he clammed up for the rest of the visit.

By then, Ramón had returned – cash in hand – and a woman – I’ll call her Rosa – padded out of the kitchen in a pair of slippers and deposited small condiment bowls with chili, chopped onion and wedges of lime on the table. She padded back to the kitchen and emerged with a large bowl of dark red broth that she placed before Ramón. A quick stir with the spoon revealed a plethora of whole, unshelled shrimp swimming in the spicy broth, their still-attached feelers reaching up and out of the soup to dangle frighteningly and alien-like over the sides of the bowl. Then Rosa emerged with my bowl of swaying antennae and a covered container of steaming, hand-made corn tortillas. After serving me, she padded back to the kitchen and emerged with a delicious-smelling plate of scrambled eggs and refried beans. Ignoring the crestfallen look on my face, she sat down at the table next to us and dug in.

Not fair – I wanted scrambled eggs and refried beans! But, I decided – for once – not to pout. After all, the tentacle soup did look good, sort of. In any case, I was entirely prepared to enjoy it.

But, we don’t always get what we want in life, do we?

A slurp of the broth revealed a bland, chalky soup with little seasoning other than the vague piquancy derived from the large chunks of reconstituted chiles as the bottom of the bowl. Several kinds of different sliced vegetables had all assumed the same taste and texture and I was hard-pressed to identify them as potentials for zucchini, potato and carrot. The saving grace could have been the large and multitudinous shrimp – apparently juicy – however they turned out to be dried shrimp that had been brought back to life in the soupy morass.

After fighting my way around the shell and feelers I finally located a shrimp-like morsel and bit in. Remotely redolent of a crustacean, the flesh was mealy and incapable of providing me with gustatory satisfaction. I tried a couple more shrimp and several more spoonfuls of soup and decided on the spot it was the worst thing I had ever tasted at a Latin restaurant in Louisville; Ramón, on the other hand – although not overly impressed with its flavor – had no problem finishing the soup, something that only served to prolong our stay at the Golden Cock. I was ready to leave hours ago. The tortillas, though visibly enticing and possessing a pleasantly doughy texture, had a flavor like that of damp paper towels. I don’t think a single grain of salt had made its way to the soup or the tortilla masa.

Since no amount of chopped onion or lime was able to render the soup edible for me, I decided to return to the bathroom with my camera and surreptitiously snap a shot of el mayhemo en el baño, but just as I was getting ready to rise from the table, a shiny flicker of light on the bar caught my attention. I stopped and turned my gaze on a bit of chestnut-brown shellacking that had apparently loosened itself from the surface of the bar and raced over to the edge and down the side. Transfixed, I could not believe my eyes.

“Oh, my god!” I whispered under my breath, trying not to move my lips and draw attention to our table. The surly waiter had sat down with Rosa, and the two of them were laughing over the contents of a registered letter the mail carrier had just delivered. “Oh, my god! Turn around slowly and look at the bar!” I told Ramón. “But, don’t do it too fast so they see what we see…” But, of course, he whipped his head around (Why do they always do that?) and just rolled his eyes when he beheld the object of my fascination: a real, live cockroach. An actual cockroach of the musical species cucuracha mexicana that we all sang about in Spanish class in high school.

“Oh, my god! Oh, my god!” I fairly squealed in sotto voce glee. “The perfect end to the worst meal I’ve had in ages. Nobody’s going to believe this! This will make the best blog ever.” Fighting the urge to dance around, I started to slowly raise my camera. Granted, it was only a small cucaracha, not one of those huge, terrifying granddaddy roaches that have been known to carry away an entire infant and then come back for the family dog, but the joy I was experiencing could only be described as perverse. “La cucaracha…la cucaracha…ya no quiere caminar.” I kept hearing the song in my head.

Pretending to take another picture of the soup, I had just focused in on the bit of bar behind Ramón’s shoulder where the roach frolicked merrily on the edge of the counter, when Ramón shot me a trenchant glare. I know that look, and I feebly lowered the camera. “But…” I stammered. “La cucaracha para mi blogo…” He motioned with his head, and I saw Rosa and the surly waiter eyeing us warily. The previously unnoticed camera had aroused suspicion.

“La cuenta!” I smiled at Rosa and made that writing motion on the palm of my hand. I left Ramón to deal with the tab and headed for the door, attempting a very amateurish hip shot of the bar as I bolted. The door slamming behind me, I turned around and waited for Ramón to come out. “Porque no tiene, porque le falta…marijuana que fumar.”  The song was back.

The door opened and Ramón emerged into the sunlight. That’s when I noticed we both had bright rings of red chile stains around our mouths. His was more pronounced than mine. “How much was it?” I asked as we rushed to the car.

“27 bucks!”

“27 dollars?” I screeched. “For that?”

“And that was before the tip…”

“Oh, my god!” I could only shake my head in disbelief as we jumped into the car. “We just got ripped off and had the worst caldo de camarón ever.” I turned on the camera and examined the four photos I had taken. With bated breath I went to the hip shot of the bar. Drat it! I had missed la cucaracha by a good foot or so.

But when I examined the first picture I had snapped, the one of the front of El Gallo de Oro, right before we had gone in, I had to let out a hearty laugh. Practically in stitches, I leaned over and showed Ramón the screen of the digital camera as he navigated the lanes of Bardstown Road. He joined in the laughter when he saw, proudly displayed in the one big window that hadn’t been shattered in the brouhaha over the weekend, the familiar capital letter A in green on a white background, that most coveted of restaurant inspection scores awarded by the local health department.

I went home and checked on the LouisvilleKy.gov web site, and sure enough, El Gallo de Oro was awarded a 93% on October 20 of 2008. Go figure. Not that I would let something like a bad score keep me away anyway. I’m actually planning a return trip to the Golden Cock. I’ll probably try to go in disguise – or maybe at night? – and hopefully they will have the windows fixed. I want those scrambled eggs and refried beans.

by David Dominé, The Bluegrass Peasant

What do you know? Dan Borsch saw the post and started looking into the business, and closed on his purchase of the business and building in mid-July.

Borsch and his brother R.J. plan to continue operating the business, investing in some remodeling and boosting the 24-hour diner’s business. “We plan to update it and keep the basic conept — cheap, good food,” he said.

The Borsch brothers have a history of working in the restaurant business, and Dan said it was a “good fit” for them as a project.

It was a hot and muggy day in the ‘Ville, the kind of afternoon that feels so humid you know you won’t have to moisturize again till sometime next January. Sitting there, reading my Dashiell Hammett, I was suddenly overcome by an urge that could only be described as disconcerting: I don’t eat meat, yet the craving for a hamburger seized me, causing my gallbladder to jump in delight. Determined to resist the carnivorous urges that wracked my body, I decided to do the next best thing and seek out a greasy spoon where I could at least be in the same room as some ground beef.

I hopped into the divemobile, cranked up the air and headed off to Old Louisville, my old stomping grounds. I had always wondered about the unassuming white brick building at the corner of Fourth and Gaulbert with the sign above the door touting the famous Knocker Burger, and it seemed as good a time as any to check it out.

The black leather of the car seats was finally cooling off when I pulled up in front of the Tavern at 1532 South Fourth Street. A white sign with red lettering boasted that the bar stayed open “22 hours a day” and it warmed the cockles of my hard-boiled heart to find a watering hole that took full advantage of state liquor laws. Not only that, they served “plate lunches daily” and “breakfast anytime.” “Since 1933.” Red neon letters in tiny horizontal slits that doubled as windows cheerily flaunted the three main virtues of the Tavern: BEER. WHISKY. FOOD. The three things I like most to put in my body. I had come to the right place.

A man in jeans and a baseball hat was sweeping the pavement in front of the place, and my friend and I breezed past him into the dim interior. Before the door slammed shut behind us, I heard a strange putt-putt noise and turned around to see an odd little man on a miniature motorcycle speed by on the sidewalk. Old Louisville. It’s a neighborhood with colorful characters to say the least. Undaunted, I entered the dimly lit interior of one of the Derby City’s most famous dives.

Somewhat taken aback at first, I resisted the urge to turn around and hightail it out of there faster than a Southern Baptist running toward the final judgment; the place was clean, almost a little too clean for my liking, if you ask me. Wooden tables and shiny booths gleamed under the polish of a fresh scrubbing, and it was only the aroma of fried food that kept me in my place and guided me to a row of booths to the left. I think I smelled a bit of sauerkraut in the air to boot.

We sat down and a dame they called “Candy” dropped off our menus and brought us our drinks. She seemed nice enough, but I was disappointed that there was no cigarette hanging from her bottom lip. I’ve always had a thing for no-nonsense broads who know how to dangle a cig from their bottom lips. Not that kind of thing, trust me. I just think they’re a riot.

When the time came to order our food, that’s when Candy’s train made an abrupt stop at the Crankytown Depot. Resisting the Knocker Burger urge, I asked for the ham-cheese-pepper-onion-and-mushroom-loaded Texas omelet “without the ham.” The look she gave me could have stopped a charging wildebeest dead in its tracks. Fortunately, I’ve never had to face a wildebeest head on myself, but I did ride a water buffalo in the Philippines once. Large things with four legs tend to scare me. So do strange things in pickling jars on the bar.

“I suppose,” the grumpy waitress said, none too happy that I had disrupted the delicate balance of her daily routine. I saw a ketchup stain on the plaid shirt she wore with the faded blue jeans that apparently sufficed as a stand-in for the much preferred pink-nylon get-ups with the frilly white lace aprons of my youth. At least, I hope it was ketchup.

“And, I’ll have a tomato stuffed with cottage cheese, as well,” I said.

“We don’t have cottage cheese!” She looked at me like I was two cans short of a six-pack.

But, the menu said they had cottage cheese. Luscious cottage cheese packed inside a fresh tomato, as a matter of fact. I adore cottage cheese.

But I decided to drop it.

“OK, I’ll do the tomato with tuna salad instead.” I looked at her for approval.

Candy just stared at me like I was speaking a foreign language. Had one of my polyglot splinter personalities surfaced again? I feared I would become another stain on the front of her plaid outfit. I pointed at the menu and grunted. “Tomato. Tuna salad. Good?”

Candy eyed me suspiciously and said, “OK. I suppose we can do that.” She scribbled something onto her little green pad with the thin blue lines. “You want I should slice it or chunk it, that tomato?”

“How you stuff a tomato that’s sliced or chunked?” I fired it back at her and she ignored me, turning her attention to my companion.

“I’ll have the Knocker Burger and fries,” he said, ingratiating himself no end in the annals of Candy. That’s the way he is, my buddy Ramón; when the chips are down, I can always count on him for support. Insufferable meat-eater…

“Sounds good, be right with ya.” As she said it, I could almost see a bit of a smile turn up the corners of her mouth. Candy disappeared behind the refrigerator case and started banging on some old pots and pans. Behind the condensation of the glass, I noticed several large piles of cheese. Sliced American cheese, that processed-beyond-recognition-yet-oh-so-delicious perversion of dairy justice that causes any self-respecting lover of grilled cheese sandwiches to swoon and fall, incoherent, into a drooling slump on the floor. A linoleum-clad floor, that is.

Candy knows how to work a stove, that’s for sure, because within five minutes we had our food laid out in front of us. My tomato was chunked, a glob of tuna salad draped over large pieces of slightly under-ripe fruit. I knew Candy wouldn’t tolerate any lip about the distinctly unstuffed nature of my tomato, so I just bit my tongue and dug in.

My taste buds hadn’t experienced anything like that in a long time; it reminded me of my Aunt Doris’ cooking. She’s the only one in the family that couldn’t cook her way out of a paper bag, and her tuna salad was always heavy on the goop element. Other than cheap mayonnaise, the only other identifiable flavor was the tangy bite of canned tuna with a couple feeble attempts at celery crunch. Nonetheless, I ate the whole thing. It was your standard American tuna salad. Even though I don’t like it, I can eat goop when it comes down to swallowing it or else getting hit upside the head with a skillet of cast iron. Candy had a whole rack of skillets hanging over the stove, and she knew how to use them.

My unstuffed tomato polished off, I tucked into the omelet. Eggs and cheese are my kind of thing. Candy, however, had obviously divined the penchant of my cheese-head ways, and, in a fit of sadistic, vengeful ecstasy, bestowed my meager three-egg creation with a paltry single slice of American cheese draped flaccidly over the top of the omelet. Although tasty, the interior proved dry and void of excitement. I knew I should have kept the ham. Maybe I would have gotten more cheese that way.

Ramón, on the other hand, was in hog (I guess I should say “beef”) heaven. Barely encapsulated in a fresh, white bun dressed with tomato, lettuce and pickle, his half pound of Knocker Burger sizzled with glistening fat, sending up wisps of aromatic, meat-laden steam that tickled my nostrils and tempted me back to the flesh-eating lifestyle. From the moans I heard from the other side of the table, it seemed that Candy knew how to cook a mean burger. I snagged up a tiny bit of the grease-soaked bun and popped it into my mouth, my carnal urges momentarily satiated in the process. The thick-cut French fries nested alongside Ramon’s burger had been fried to a golden brown and were so perfectly salted that several of them managed to kill off the last of my nasty cravings.

In the background, a wall-mounted television set flashed scenes from a 1950s detective show across its screen, and within 40 minutes of entering, we had finished our food and asked for the check. When it came time to pay, the man who had been sweeping out front looked at the credit card we offered him and said, “We don’t take cards here.” He pointed to an ATM in the corner, and after withdrawing several bills, we paid the man and left. We made sure to leave a few dollars for Candy on our table, too. She kept a close eye on us we left, and I noticed she never strayed very far from her assortment of hanging skillets.

Including the tip, we hadn’t spent near 20 dollars for a Knocker Burger and fries, Texas omelet, pseudo-stuffed tomato, Bud Lite and Coke. Now, that’s what a dive is all about.

As we returned to the divemobile and lowered the windows to release the sauna-like air, I heard the strange putt-putt noise again. Just as I snapped a picture of the front of the Tavern, the weird little guy on the goofy miniature motorcycle veered into sight and shook his finger as me as he squealed his tires and spun around back to the street. “I got a picture of this place in the 1937 flood!” He croaked it and tried to raise his voice above the buzz of the motor. Who knows? He might have been around for the big flood.

“Oh, really?” I said. “That’s nice. Real nice.”

I looked over at Ramon, basking in his fresh burger buzz behind the wheel of the divemobile. I said: “Let’s get the hell out of here before Candy comes outside with one of those skillets.” We still had dives to explore and places to go.

I’ve been eating high on the hog lately. Monday night was a Bastille dinner at the Bristol in Jeffersonville, and yesterday I had lunch at Napa River Grill. Last week I did dinner at Morton‘s and at Avalon. I think I might be developing a goiter. Maybe it’s time to change my eating habits.

At least for the time being I’ve decided to stop eating at all those fancy places, but I doubt it will help my goiter. In a project I’ve dubbed “The Dive Diaries,” I’m going to devote some time exploring the dark underbelly of the local food world. Yes, I’ll start going to the greasy spoons, patronizing the pits, hunkering down in the honky-tonks, hiding out in the holes in the wall, all in search of those diamonds in the rough we call dives.

According to Merrian-Webster OnLine, a dive is “a shabby and disreputable establishment (as a bar or nightclub).” I found another place that defines it as “a cheap disreputable nightclub or dance hall.” The disreputable part sounds especially enticing, so this should be a fun project. Of course, I’ll be concentrating on the victuals at the places we affectionately call dives, but as I come down off my culinary high horse, please feel free to chime in with your recommendations. I’d like to find out where the best dives in the ‘Ville really are, so I’ll be counting on you all for your comments.

But, before I set off and start spelunking the culinary catacombs of the ‘Ville and its environs in search of those locales most worthy of mention, allow me to elucidate my own personal requirements for a dive. For me, a true dive is a place where:

1) Food must be relatively cheap, and generally good. It doesn’t necessarily have to be good for you, though;

2) You must feel slightly out of place when you walk through the front door;

3) It must be dark on the inside. Preferably, there are no windows at all. If there are windows, they should be dirty;

4) When you leave, you should feel a little dirty yourself;

5) Alcohol must be served. (Since there are many dive-worthy lunch counters and diners that do not serve hootch, however, I will create an ancillary category to make sure these places get their fair mention alongside their boozey cousins. They will be called Southern Baptist dives.)

And, although not requisite, the presence of any of the following makes the dive all the more memorable in my book:

1) Grumpy waitresses, preferably the ones who have done a lot of livin’

2) The lingering smell of fried food in the air, mingling freely with the aromas of stale cigarette smoke and beer

3) Leatherette booths with random missing chunks that expose the soft yellow of foam rubber, its jagged edges inviting us to ponder the dubious past events that resulted in the production of said missing chunks

4) A preponderance of linoleum, Formica or cheap wooden paneling

5) Blatant disregard for the concept of interior décor

6) Large jars of scary pickled things such as pig’s feet and Pepto-Bismol-colored eggs

7) Customers who actually eat scary pickled things

8) Deep-fried pork rinds

9) A juke box

10) At least one drunk at the bar

(Once again, feel free to chime in and add your criteria to the list.)

And, although the dictionary definition for a dive seems to cast a bit of aspersion on the moral character of the establishment in question, I by no means wish to impugn the gastronomic merits of a good dive. Dives have some of the best food out there, so any place mentioned in my culinary chronicles should wear this distinction as a badge of honor.

Now, with the groundwork laid, it’s off to the seedier side of the Louisville dining scene.

Watch tomorrow’s post for the first installment in The Dive Diaries. And, make sure you share your recommendations with the rest of us.