True Grits

The Friday Cookbook considers local ingredients and an imagined place defined by food.

Food can shape your view of a place.

When my wife and I first considered a move from New York City, where we’d lived for the previous decade, to Louisville, Kentucky, one of the first things that helped me feel good about the move was the food; on our first exploratory weekend trip to town, I ate very well. The city offered a small but robust collection of restaurants using local and “Southern” ingredients in new and interesting ways, and it helped me paint a mental picture—whether grounded in any reality or not—of a place both traditional and progressive, a place where the two could meet.

That image, six years on, is of course much more complicated and conflicted. Louisville has a lot of problems to reckon with as a city, something I’ve written about either directly or indirectly a few times recently.

Some of the restaurants that helped define this place in my mind have closed this year, part of the still-cresting wave of destruction sadly facing the restaurant industry, something I l…