At 35 years of age, Taste of Cincinnati is “the nation’s longest running culinary arts festival”. It started as a one day affair in 1979 but within just a couple of years had grown to two. Since 1988 it has filled the entire three day weekend of Memorial Day with food, drink, and entertainment. When it expanded to three days, it moved from Piatt Park (Garfield Place) to Central Parkway. Since 2007, its home has been several blocks of Fifth Street around Fountain Square.
My attendance has been spotty but when I do go I sort of target the winners and I did a pretty good job of that this year. At left is this year’s Best Entree, a very tasty Honey Sweet & Sour Shrimp from Arloi Dee. It was preceded by the Best Appetizer, Thai Taste’s Crab Rangoon. I’d also try the Best Dessert but that would be later.
Walking between the rows of booths exposed me to all sorts of tantalizing aromas and sights and I yielded to a Third Place Pulled Pork Sandwich from Giminetti’s Bakery. Third place is pretty impressive and it tasted mighty fine but, largely because of what I came to next, I didn’t really need it.
What I came to next was the Taste Experience. New this year, the Experience features some of the area’s top tier restaurants along with Les Chefs de Cuisine, the regional chapter of the American Culinary Federation. The restaurants generally do three hour stints while Les Chefs are there through the full weekend. I decided to try the Rigatoni Bolognese being offered by Palomino for $3 but, when told I could have it and the Pear Bread Pudding for $5, I just said yes. Considering the ladies doing the serving, it’s surprising I didn’t go for ten of each.
Shortly after arriving, I had registered for a Christian Moerlein brewery tour. As tour time neared, I returned to Fountain Square to board the shuttle. On the way to the brewery, we passed Piatt Park, site of the first nine Tastes, which was occupied today by the March Against Monsanto.
I had expected a tour of the rather new Moerlein production facilities so was surprised to learn that the tour involved the lagering cellars beneath the brewery. The building now occupied by Moerlein was home to the Kaufmann Brewery before prohibition did it in. I’ve been here before but it’s always interesting to visit the massive hand dug cellars and see what several decades of use as a trash bin produces.
Though there really wasn’t a tour, someone was on hand in the brewing area to answer questions. The taproom officially opened today and will be in operation regularly on weekends.
It always thought it a little embarrassing to attend a “taste” event in a city that was once a leader in beer production — and consumption — and find nothing but the likes of Budweiser and Miller. Christian Moerlein and owner Greg Hardman have changed that in a big way. Moerlein is a presenting sponsor of this year’s event and Moerlein booths were plentiful but there was no monopoly. Miller and Bud were there and so were folks like Rivertown, Great Lakes, and Bells.
After the tour, I returned to the festival area for two specific reasons. Food trucks have become increasingly popular in the area. Taste of Cincinnati added a Food Truck Alley this year and that’s something I hadn’t yet seen. And then there was that Best of Taste dessert. There were definitely some inviting food trucks in the “alley” but I was saving what little room I had left for the Vanilla Bourbon Bread Pudding at Blue Wisp. A color coded living statue made the place easy to find and the excellent bread pudding was the perfect finish to a day of epicurean delights.
My first attempt at writing this post got all bound up in explaining why I do thumbnails the way I do. As I rearranged the second paragraph for the third or fourth time, I heard my own echo from long ago, “If it’s this hard to write, it’s going to be a bitch to read.” That’s usually a pretty good signal that a basic rethink is in order. When I stepped back, I quickly realized two things. One, some of my reasons are truly arbitrary and naturally hard to explain, and two, nobody cares. There aren’t many who care if I do something, fewer care how, and the number who care why has to be near zero. If someone does want to know why, just ask and I’ll be happy to explain and ‘fess up to the arbitrary bits. For now, I’m just going to talk about how I do them and how Easy Thumbnails fits in.
The Lincoln Highway turns a hundred this year. Brian Butko’s Greetings from the Lincoln Highway turns eight. At first glance, the 2013 Greetings… looks an awful lot like the 2005 Greetings… with a soft cover and a “Centennial Edition” banner on the front and it’s a fact that, in many ways, it is the same. It has the same organization with an introductory chapter and a chapter, with map, for each state the highway passed through and a very high percentage of the words and pictures in those chapters are the same, too. Another thing that remains the same and which accounts for the small in percentage but large in number changes is the care and attention to detail. Butko probably didn’t catch everything in the book that the passage of time has altered but he sure tried and he sure got a lot.
Aside from the occasional new photo, the most visible changes may be in the statistics and maps at the front of each state chapter. Here population numbers from the 2010 census replace those from the 2000 census and the maps get a line for the Proclamation Route. The Lincoln Highway Proclamation Route was a list of cities published by the Lincoln Highway Association on September 14, 1913. Shifts started happening almost immediately and a detailed route was never signed or published that matched the September 14 announcement. But several of the cities dropped in 1913 fought unsuccessfully to return and many have fought more recently and more successfully to be recognized. Butko acknowledges that by including the ephemeral route. All of the quotes from postcards and other period communication that appeared in the margins of the original are still there and a few more have been added.
I’m reading this book for the third time. I read it around 2005 when I was dabbling with short drives on the Lincoln Highway to my east. I reread it in 2009 when I was getting ready to drive the Lincoln from the east edge of Illinois to the west coast. My current read is in anticipation of another long, hopefully full length, drive of what Drake Hokanson calls Main Street across America. I never read the original, only the pictured Tenth Anniversary Edition which is now fifteen years old itself.
If you think this looks like it belongs here, you haven’t been paying attention. No, books about cosmology, quantum physics, and beyond aren’t what I typically read and I’m clearly not qualified to review them. I was given the book as a gift, I read and enjoyed it, and I intend to tell somebody about it.
I started off admitting that this book was really out of place here. I do a lot of my reading over meals in restaurants and it was rather out of place in some of the joints where I eat, too. I quickly worked out a way to carry the book that cut down considerably on the funny looks aimed my way.
Wow!