Dining What’s cookin’ Sol Food Catering invites vegevores to eat it raw (and cooked) at the 2nd Annual Urban Raw Festival in SoMa (Southside Main Street) on Saturday, Sept. 20. Chefs Marie and Butterfly — you’ve seen them at the Hillcrest Famers Market and elsewhere — will prepare vegan and vegetarian offerings for the day-long festival, which will include showings of the locally filmed dramatic series “Makeda’s Nido (Makedo’s Nest),” live music, a dance troupe, free yoga instruction — all those things you associate with the healthy lifestyle. The event will run 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. on Main between 13th and 16th; tickets ($5 advance, $8 at the gate) will benefit N.A.T.U.R.E.’s Workshop (Nurturing Arkansas Treasures in an Urban Raw Environment). No se olvide: It’s also the second year in a row for another day of eating and celebrating: The 2nd annual Latino Food and Music Festival is coming up Saturday, Sept. 13. The event, at the Argenta Farmers Market at Fifth and Main in North Little Rock, features South American food vendors, music by Calle Soul, dancing and libations, 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. A portion of ticket sales ($15 in advance, $20 at the door) benefit the Argenta Arts District. Find more information at the festival’s Facebook page or at www.arktimes.com/general/ splash/latinofood. Capers Restaurant on Highway 10 won the American Culinary Federation’s Achievement of Excellence Award at its 2014 convention in Kansas City in July. The award goes to restaurants that have been open for at least five years and have shown a “commitment to culinary and service excellence.” Capers is owned by Mary Beth Ringgold, who also operates Cajun’s Wharf and Copper Grill.
dining capsules
Little ROck/North Little Rock
American
1620 SAVOY Fine dining in a swank space. The scallops are especially nice. 1620 Market St. Full bar, All CC. $$-$$$. 501-221-1620. D Mon.-Sat. ADAMS CATFISH & CATERING Catering company with carry-out restaurant in Little Rock and carry-out trailers in Russellville and Perryville. 215 N. Cross St. All CC. $-$$. 501-3744265. LD Tue.-Fri.
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August 21, 2014
ARKANSAS TIMES
CHICKEN AND WAFFLES: Modern eats.
Lulav: phoneless but in business Now ‘modern,’ its menu appeals to any pocketbook.
O
f the few quibbles we might have had about a recent experience with the newest rollout of Lulav, the chief one — and this goes for anybody in restaurant land — is to possess a working phone number. Add to that, in this day of social media and iPhones, is to have an updated website. Lulav had neither. At least this is Little Rock, where one can drive to downtown from nearly anywhere in the city in minutes to determine whether a supposedly new and improved restaurant is, in fact, new and improved and actually open. We’ll set the scene: With a few slices of pizza from lunch still fighting us, we weren’t really enthusiastic about heading back downtown on Friday night to check out Lulav: A Modern Eatery, but bossman said he needed a dining review STAT, so on to our assignment we went. Our accompanying photographer for said review said he’d tried reaching anyone at Lulav and was getting an operator’s recording, line disconnected. Bossman’s wishes aside, we had our fingers crossed that Lulav would indeed be shuttered, at least on this night; but alas
Lulav: A Modern Eatery 220 E. Sixth St. Little Rock 374-5100 (when working)
QUICK BITE Lulav struck us as a nice place to finish up a day after work downtown with one of its $20 bottles of wine from the cellar (a Crane Lake Sangiovese that retails in the $16 range was available) with any of the appetizers or one of three salad choices. Steaks are worth the price. HOURS 11 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. Monday through Friday, 4:30 p.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Saturday. OTHER INFO All CC. Full bar.
the place was serving a hungry few who were headed to “Gridiron” at The Rep. Lulav has been shuttered, or reimagined, what seems like a handful of times since its original incarnation a few short years ago as a restaurant specializing in Sephardic cuisine, and our next question after “Why is your phone line disconnected?” should have been, “Why keep
calling yourself Lulav?” The ownership is new — Herman Lewis, we’re told, has taken over. Lulav was originally the inspiration of Matt Lile, a former insurance executive who later ran into some federal legal problems. The current focus is on the “Modern Eatery” part of the name, and what that apparently means is a widely varied menu both in prices and amount of the food served, as well as specialty drinks and wines. The place has a dark and mysterious mid-20th century Frenchbistro-like ambiance with an impressive-looking bar commanding attention in the main room. Two gentlemen who we guess were employed by the place hung out there most of the night patiently waiting for the night to get cranking. One hostess/waitress worked the main room as well as a smaller one to the side, where we were seated. An eight-top was checking out as we arrived. Another couple came, looked at the menu, and left. A steady stream of visitors headed up a stairway in our dining parlor to a party on the second floor. For a few minutes, at 7 o’clock on a Friday evening, we had a restaurant to ourselves. In moments like these you wonder if you should have stayed home and reported to bossman that it was unlikely this review would beat the permanent closing yet again of Lulav’s doors. All that would be a shame, too, because someone in the kitchen is working awfully hard to prepare especially fine cuisine. Diners can order from a wide sampling of bistro-style appetizers, salads, affordable “small plates” in the $12-$18 range, and high-end steaks or sea bass that cost from $32 to the $49 cowboy rib-eye. Wine is grouped and priced similarly on the backside of the one-page menu — house wines or a handful of familiar names are bunched together in whatever price range you prefer. Even better, you can spend $20 on a bottle from Lulav’s sparsely populated wine cellar, or choose something on the order of Caymus, in that same cellar and inside a china cabinet, for a bit larger fee. The menu’s wording — choose any bottle from the cabinet for $20 — momentarily took us aback. We thought it was some kind of game: Pay $20 for the chance to