Zen Garden (Louisville-Jefferson County, Kentucky)

USA / Kentucky / Mockingbird Valley / Louisville-Jefferson County, Kentucky
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For an omnivore like me, a vegetarian restaurant must pass one simple test: At the end of the meal, I must not miss meat. Too often, much as I try to like it, an all-vegetable meal leaves me feeling vaguely dissatisfied.

Please be assured that Zen Garden, the latest venture of longtime local restaurateur Huong Tran, passes this test with flying wok and chopsticks. I would defy anyone to tuck into a dish as savory and filling as Zen's Eggplant in Curry Sauce, to choose just one example, and even think about whether any animals were sacrificed to fashion this delight.

Tran makes good use of tofu as an analogue for meat, variously pressing, sauteeing, fermenting, marinating and otherwise chopping, slicing and dicing the healthful but bland-to-Westerners soybean "curd" product of Asia to turn it into almost credible imitations of chicken or even beef. But culinary fakery is not really what Zen Garden is all about. Delicacy, subtlety and balance are the names of the game, as a short poem by 14th Century Zen Master Muso Soseki on the menu's front cover attests:

All worries and troubles
have gone from my breast
and I play joyfully
far from the world
For a person of Zen
no limits exist
The blue sky must feel
ashamed to be so small
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Coordinates:   38°15'11"N   85°42'15"W

Comments

  • Terrific Place!
This article was last modified 12 years ago