Passtime Fish House: The (incredibly) Good (food), the Bad (reputation), and the Ugly (exterior)

Passtime Fish House is on the REALLY far South side of Indy: It's in Jeffersontown, KY (a suburb of Louisville) at Watterson Trail and Locust Road across from Skyview Park.  I've described other places as so small or nondescript that you wouldn't notice them if you weren't looking for them, but you can BE looking for Passtime and not find it-- there's a sign where to turn in, but the place isn't visible from Watterson Trail, and that's probably a good thing because after seeing the outside, many folks  might not want to see the inside.  It's one of those fabled places you often see in movies or on TV but which in reality are quite rare-- a tumbledown shack which conceals a wonderful interior filled with salty waitresses who serve delicious food to lovable regular customers. The first label that you see when you look Passtime up on TripAdvisor is "Hole in the Wall".

It's a little hard to describe and still do it justice: bare, weathered wood exterior walls covered with plywood in some places, metal beer signs nailed to them (maybe to help keep the walls up as much as advertise the beer), and a tin roof.  The parking lot is severely sloped and very roughly paved; it looks like gravel somehow fused together rather than asphalt.  There is a covered (not screened) outdoor deck area that looks rustic but fairly new. It is equipped with picnic-like tables and seems comfortable.  That's good, because on a hot summer day you may have to sit out there due to the inside not being air-conditioned.  That's right, NO AIR CONDITIONING in a functioning 21st Century restaurant!  When The Little Woman and I disembarked from our meat-locker cold vehicle interior into the Kentucky Fried Sunshine and humidity on an 88 degree day, I took one look at the place and figured we'd take our order to go.  

After we'd stumbled across the moonscape parking lot to the inside, however, we found that the darkened interior was tolerably cooler, what with the doors thrown open and a number of floor fans going.  The beating wings of the occasional house fly also contributed to beneficial air movement as well.  A lot of reviews said the waitresses were slow, inattentive, and grumpy, but we were greeted immediately and told to sit wherever we wanted, were waited on promptly and served in a surprisingly short time by an informally clad easy-on-the-eyes waitress. We sat in a comfortable booth which was one of a line of them along one wall.  There is a nice bar on the other side with the usual flat screen TVs and neon beer signs that adorn any decent bar & grill.  Everything was very nice and reasonably clean.  The only thing inside that resembled the rough exterior was the concrete floor which was not level anywhere. sloping in different directions depending on what part of the building you were in.  It would likely make drunken perambulation doubly difficult.

I hope you've read (or skimmed) this far, because here is the really good part: the FOOD! The very worst of the reviews I read nevertheless admitted the food was fantastic.  Their specialty is a Fried Cod sandwich, which TLW had with fries.  I ordered the Passtime Platter, which is a fried cod filet, fried shrimp, and fried oysters, and I added an order of Onion Straws.  You can also get frog legs for $2 more but WHY? The filet was HUGE, but the shrimp were HUGE, in contrast with the oysters which were HUGE, and everything was lightly battered and fried perfectly, which is to say not too much.  The filet was at least an inch thick, the fish moist, tender, and un-fishy. The giant butterflied shrimp and the oysters were tender and seemed extremely fresh. The coating (it was too light and thin to be called breading) had an incredibly flavorful mix of spices, although it was just a tiny little bit salty.  The fries seemed home made and were very tasty. My heaping plate of Onion Straws were the only less than stellar item, having been only lightly fried just like everything else, which in this case made them just a little soggy although they still tasted great: a little time in an oven might have crisped them up some. If you don't like seafood, they do have a HALF-POUND burger that is supposedly very good but takes a while to cook. Finally, Passtime has a wide selection of available beers:   I had a draft Shiner Bock that was ice cold, a welcome relief on a hot Friday afternoon.

I'm going to engage in a bit of sacrilege here....   The most beloved and well-known fish house in the Derby City is, arguably, Mike Linnig's 'way out west on Cane Run Road (although some of the Linnig family actually live nearby in J-town).  I love Mike's fish and its festive park-like ambiance, but-- please don't shoot me-- I love Passtime's fish even more, just sayin'. ...And that's all I'm saying 'cause I have to go before the lightning strikes me.  Order up!

Coals Artisan Pizza-- Best in the Derby City?

I've been told that Coals Artisan Pizza, 3730 Frankfort Avenue in Louisville, KY (or is it in St. Matthews? It's certainly close to downtown St.M) in the upscale shopping complex that has grown up around the old Vogue Theatre, is the closest to true New York style pizza you'll get in that fair city.  I dunno if that's true, since Louisville has a LOT of pizza places, but I do know I love Coals' pizza even if it isn't "Louisville Style", which as I understand it is the piling on of toppings without any extra cheese or sauce. (Bearno's is supposed to be a good example of Louisville style, which I always loved.  There was a Bearno's here in downtown Indy for awhile but I believe it has closed).  

Coals has a coal-fired brick oven that supposedly operates at almost 1000 degrees, which produces a delicious toasty, crispy crust in about four minutes.  It's thicker than the cracker-thin crust you get at Donato's or with Pizza Hut's Thin 'n Crispy, yet it is every bit as toasty and crisp.  The array of gourmet toppings you can get in both red and white pizza is quite varied, and several combinations of toppings are named after Louisville neighborhoods.  We had lunch there and I had the Clifton, which is a red pizza with a combination of onions, peppers and cheeses as well as Italian sausage that had me singing its praises, much to the dismay of other diners because I don't sing very well.  Some of the user reviews in TripAdvisor said this place is pricey, but the lunch deal was really decent-- a 10" personal pizza and a large side salad for $8.95  The salad was extremely fresh, and it was showered with diced cubes of mozzarella cheese.  Some reviews said the tables were too close together, but I didn't find it to be any worse than Cracker Barrel!  The orgasmic climax to this, my dream pizza experience was that they have a FULL BAR!  Woohoo!  What's not to like?  Huh?  Huh?  Mangia!

The Galt House Hotel: A Grand Deal on a Grand Hotel

The Galt House, 144 N. 4th Street in Louisville, KY right on the Ohio River, garners more respect and admiration from me every time we stay there.  It's listed in most directories as a 3.5 star hotel, which baffles me because it has every amenity you could want except for an indoor pool.  The nearby Hyatt is listed as 4 stars, and it is nowhere near as nice the the GH, as far as I'm concerned.  If you're ever planning a weekend visit to the Derby City, the Galt House is really the place to stay.  It is older but impeccably maintained and several areas have recently been renovated.  Because GH caters primarily to business travelers and convention visitors, you can really get a deal there during holiday periods when neither of those groups travel much.  The last time we stayed there was during the week between Christmas and New Year's Day, and this time we checked in on New Year's Day for two days.  Both times, we got a really great price ($53 per day + $13/day in taxes and fees this last time through Priceline.com vs. the advertised price of $114/day) and both times they upgraded us to a suite at no extra charge, which had a sitting room w/TV, a big bedroom with TV, and an elegant glass-door shower big enough for 4 people! The only drawback to being there New Year's Day was that the place seemed virtually empty except for that boy riding his big wheel and the two little twin sisters in matching dresses, whom we passed often in the hallway....  I thought at first we had no warm water, but it turns out there were so few guests that it just took a long time for the hot stuff to be drawn up to our 3rd floor room from the boiler! After running the shower for about ten minutes we finally had all the steamy goodness we needed.  

GH has 2 bars:  Al J's, which is inside the huge glass conservatory which serves as the 3rd floor bridge between the hotel's two towers, and Jockey Silks, an intimate little place on the 2nd floor of the East(?) Tower.  Al J's has a view of downtown and the river, and the bar is actually a saltwater fish tank with several varieties of fish that swim back and forth under your drink.  Jockey Silks is low-ceilinged, wood-paneled, and has an impressive array of Bourbons.  They're not cheap, but they're reasonable considering their convenient location in the hotel.  We always stop in at one or the other for a nightcap before retiring to our room.

There are three restaurants, four if you count Jeff Ruby's Steakhouse, which is not part of the hotel but is directly accessible from it.  Rivue is the $$$$ upscale penthouse restaurant that has relaxing live music and two parts of the dining area that rotate, giving you an alternatiing view of the river and the skyline.  The food there is excellent, too.  The other restaurant is on the Third Floor and is $$ for us cheapskates-- we've never eaten there, but the food looked and smelled delicious as we walked by.  Fnally, there is Thelma's, a 24/7 snack bar in the conservatory next to Al J's, which has coffee, soft drinks, pastries, and sandwiches.  If you go down to Thelma's in the wee hours, you might see an old, only slightly disheveled homeless man sitting in one of the unoccupied chairs tucked away in a corner.  He wears a once-grand trenchcoat and sits quietly, sipping his cup of Thelma's coffee or dozing. They never run him off and he never makes a sound, an unwritten charitable agreement between them, a mark of true Southern Hospitality.  God bless y'all!.

Louisville, Kentucky-- The Hungry Drunk's Paradise.

We went there for a little weekend getaway, so I thought I'd give you the skinny (I'm not cool enough to say 4-1-1) on the Derby City's gastronomy and libations.  Think of it as Indy's reeeeally Far South Side.  Val Kilmer's character Doc Holliday in the Kevin Costner movie about Wyatt Earp (was the title Wyatt Earp?  Hell, I can't remember) says something like "Suh, I am NOT an acoholic, I am a drunk.  There is a difference!" 

Doc would love Louisville, which is a GREAT town in which to eat and drink until you CAIN'T take NO more.  Louisville is reputed (by the book 1000 Places in the US & Canada to See Before You Die) to have more restaurants per capita than any other city in the USA, and I believe it-- I dunno if it's because there is a semi-famous culinary school there or what, but there seem to be bistros on every corner downtown and in several other areas, and most of them are individually owned, not chain stores.  We got a reduced-rate room at the Seelbach Hilton (Priceline.com, baby!) and walked to Eddie Merlot's for a snack and a glass of vino.  I always feel you should get the local flavor when traveling, which generally means avoiding chain franchises, but we had a coupon and I wanted to see how the 'Ville's Eddie's compares to the EM's in Indy.  The place seemed comparatively small, but it has the Wall O' Wine like in Indy, and I was unable to see all of the main dining room from the bar, so maybe I was mistaken.  The artisanal cheese & fruit appetizer we had was THE BOMB.  It had the smokiest Jarlsberg and the freshest Roquefort I've ever eaten ("What's that smell? It's either really bad meat or really good cheese!")  The cheapest wine there is like $7.50/glass, but even that is O-so good!

Friday evening we hit Fourth Street Live! in the early afternoon.  It's a downtown collection of bars and eateries (and a bowling alley?) that line the street (which is closed to vehicles) with a large roof over the street, kinda like The Strip in Las Vegas, maybe? The places are trendy and many are chain franchises, like Ri Ra Irish Pub, TGI Friday's, J. Gumbo's, Red Star, and Maker's Mark Bar & Grille,  to name but a few.  One place, Tengo Sed Cantina, is the most in-your-face tribute to combat nightlife I've ever seen.  It is primarily a large room that has NO CHAIRS, just bolted-down stand-up height tables, a bar, and a bare concrete floor, I guess so there's no furniture to break and you can just hose down the mud, the the blood, and the beer after the night or the fight is over. 

We ate at Maker's Mark, which of course has a giant selection of bourbons.  They have what looks like an Ikea-inspired decor and serve what appears to be "nouvelle" quisine, which to a simpleton like me means "expensive, tiny portions" in English.  We did have a great night drinking there a couple years ago, though.  Every so often they have Distillers' Tastings, where for something like $10 a person you can sample from six or eight tables manned by representatives of the distilleries themselves, and they don't skimp on the samples.  The President of Wild Turkey was there to introduce Russell's Reserve (his name is Russell, duh!), and a member of the Van Winkle family handed out samples of Pappy Van Winkle's bourbons.  The Maker's Mark guy was just a salesman, but he was the nicest of 'em all, even let us take home some of the cool glassware (with their trademark wax on the bottom of the glasses).

I'm trying to remember where we ate brunch on Saturday (we never rise before 10:00 on vacation)....   Oh! It was Dish on Market, in the 400 block of W. Market St.  It's one of the myriad trendy bistros downtown, but they serve breakfast until 3:00 PM and the prices were unexpectedly reasonable.  They have outdoor tables in front, but it was already too darned hot for that. I had a western omelet with a side of REAL country ham (if you're not from the South you may not know what that is, and if you aren't from the South but DO know what that is, you probably don't like it) and they were both deeelicious.

Our first beer of the day was supposed to be at Sergio's on Story Avenue, which supposedly has some outrageous selection of beers from all over the World, but DANG, he wasn't open at 1:00 in the afternoon, so we went next door to Johnson's.  The sign doesn't say Pub, or Bar, or Tavern, just Johnson's, and when we got inside I still couldn't tell what kind of place it was.  The sign outside did say "NEWLY REMODELED" , but that was some kind of fortune-telling sign, I tell you what.  The front door was standing open, there was NO air conditioning on on a 90-degree day, and there was one old man at the bar drinking a can of Coke and wondering why he was sweating. There were junk furnishings and nick-knacks sitting around everywhere, as well as crates of stuff like dish soap with prices of $1.89 EACH on 'em.  A box on the bar displayed unwrapped glue sticks, 8 for a Dollar.... My wife read my mind and asked the grizzled lady behind the bar if they were open, in reply to which she displayed great coordination by grunting and nodding simultaneously.  I swear I thought I heard "Dueling Banjoes" playing in the back somewhere....  I will say that, true to most Louisville establishments, they had very, very cold bottled beer.  With the oppressive heat, however, I was sweating more than the bottles, and looking up at the ceiling I prayed for the motionless ceiling fans to begin spinning on their own to give us relief, no matter what amount of dust or dead insects cascaded down upon us as a result.  We skedaddled after one beer.

We had dinner reservations for 4:30 (we're middle-aged, don'tchaknow), so we had time to visit two other little jewels in the Butchertown area:  Big Al's Beeritaville and the Rush Inn, both on Mellwood Avenue.  Big Al's looks kind of dive-like from the outside, but inside it was nice varnished wood (think Hooters') with lots of University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Green Bay Packers (huh?) memorabilia lining the walls. The staff was friendly and the regulars sitting around early on a Saturday afternoon were of the middle-middleclass type.  Louisville seems chock-full of these true almost British-style neighborhood pubs, and that ambiance is furthered by the fact that you often will see children in them, at least during the day. (I guess the ABC laws are different there than in Indy).  A neatly dressed 15-year old boy came in with his pool cue and drank a Coke while he shot a few games with one of the regulars before he left.  Big Al's has a nice big outdoor beer garden, too, but we'd just come from Johnson's and knew that it was just too danged hot for that.  The beer made up for the hot day though, being ice cold and reasonably priced.  I had a Kentucky Ale Light, made by a microbrewery in Lexington (I think).  The "Light" kind of reminded me of the Johnson's "Newly Remodeled" sign, as the nutrition info on the bottle was closer to the composition of Guinness than Bud Light.

The Rush Inn is an old but well-maintained little place in a grey stone building with lighted awnings, located at the corner of Mellwood and Brownsboro Road.  It has tons of New York Yankees memorabilia (I say again: huh?) all over the place.  The manager/bartender/cook made me a bourbon and Coke using Maker's Mark without even asking me, and if I read the ticket right he charged what I would consider to be a well drink price.  The juke box is, get this-- FREE!  Incredible!  We've never eaten there, but every time we go, he is cooking a burger that smells so good I have to get a napkin to wipe the drool from my chin.  Next time,come hell or high water or high cholesterol, I'm gettin' me one o' them burgers.  What a place!

At 4:15 we sadly waved farewell to the Rush Inn and headed for Pat's Steak House, about a mile away on Brownsboro Road.  To summarize Pat's for an Indianapolite, it is a little like St. Elmo's but not as expensive and it has a distintive Irish atmosphere.  The place is all thick carpet and old wood, and the waiters wear green sport coats and carry a towel over their arm to dust off your seat.  The steaks are hand-aged right on the premises, and they are to die for!  My wife and I shared the biggest filet mignon I've ever seen, 18 ounces worth, for something like $53.  The only drawback to Pat's is they accept cash only-- we sat near the cash register and saw several bills over $500 rung up.  No wonder we saw an armored car show up later on.  The do have an ATM machine right there, though.

As we started for home on Sunday, we ate a late lunch at Clarksville Seafood on Eastern Boulevard in (duh) Clarksville, Indiana.  I dunno why, but Kentuckiana has a large number of seafood places, and Clarksville Seafood is one of the best, if you like good cheap fried seafood in a relaxed casual dining room, or to go.  You can get a heapin' paper basket of nicely seasoned fried fish, clams, or oysters with fries for a little over seven bucks, and don't forget the fried onions-- they're not just rings, or strings, but kind of a combination of both, and you get enough for two folks for like $3.  Apparently a deep fryer is the only cooking apparatus the place owns-- for something different, try their deep fried hamburger.

For some reason everyone I know in Indy has eaten at Kingfish (four or so locations, but the one on River Road is the chain's flagship restaurant), which is good food at a reasonable price, although the service can be spotty at times.  My favorite (actually a photo finish ahead of Clarksville) is Mike Linnig's on Cane Run Road on the far southwest side of the Derby City, a family business open since 1925.  Mike's used to be a bare-bones casual place like Clarksville, but some years ago they remodeled, with a nice indoor dining room in addition to the outdoor picnic tables and little screen houses. They have a big selection of fish and other seafood, and the food & beer prices are really reasonable.  If you eat outside, you generally go up to the inside front counter to put in your order and then they call your name out on the PA when it's ready.  Years ago the PA system was so bad that you had to give them a name that was really distinctive, like "Maximillian" or "Heathcliff" so you could recognize it when they made the announcement.  They finally got a new PA system a few years back after they announced a tornado warning and six people stood up to get their orders.  BA DUM BUM, I'll be here all week, folks....