Thanks to all my friends around the country who reached out to me and made sure I was nowhere near the tragedy in western KY last weekend. Thankfully, Louisville is 100+ miles away from the impacted area, though Louisville did get some edge-effect lightning, high winds and rain. I can attest that it was a weirdly warm storm in December. But the family in Louisville and eastern KY are all fine.

I haven’t written about the folks who got wiped out by the tornadoes because, what can you say? Awful. Tragic. And that assclown Rand Paul now is asking for Federal relief funds for KY – he should, that’s his job – but after his lobbying to block relief for tragedies in other US regions because “we spend too much money”, it’s a bit much. He’s a hypocrite, an embarrassment and KY voters should dump him. They won’t, but they should.

Had our first tastes of Emmy Squared this trip (weird name; gotta be a story there). Their chicken parm sandwich is simply amazing – a huge serving of tasty breaded/fried/parmed chicken breast on a pretzel bun. Easily in top five sandwiches.

Their pizza, not so much. They desecrated my pepperoni-sausage-jalapeno order by drizzling honey on the pizza. Honey!? Whoever decided that was a good idea needs to find another career. If I wanted honey on my pizza (not likely), I’d order it. The sticky sweet taste was awful.

Con Huevos was great as usual, though they do seem to have trouble with poached eggs. Too well done. Weird flaw for a restaurant built on egg dishes.

Game was fun, but not as good as I remember. It’s been a few years since I was last there. My brothers and I did a sampling of some of their menu on this visit. Their scotch eggs and pork belly, I’d give a B. Just OK. Their Waygu burger, another B. Just wasn’t as rich as expected. Their dry aged burger, a definite A. Had the texture and flavor we were looking for. Finally, the duck fat fries were disappointing – a smallish basket, and hardly discernable from plain old fries. So I’ll go back to Game at some point, but can’t say it was a must-visit.

On Sunday night we were looking for a small dinner after a long day on the road, so we ended up at Joella’s. I broke tradition and tried their kale crunch salad – wow! Winner, winner, chicken dinner (literally). That salad with some hot chicken chunks on top is my new favorite, even better than their classic sandwich. So that was a win.

All in all, a pretty good culinary lap taken around Louisville in just a couple of days. And consistent with my diet.