Kentucky's Restaurant Review Site

Lexeat

Covering The State Since 1995

Welcome to Lexeat.com, Kentucky's very own state wide restaurant review web site. Here you will find restaurants from every region of the state, grouped by geographical location and food type. We appreciate the 41,353 patrons per month who frequent this site and those who visit our Facebook page. But we especially appreciate the 210 Lexington restaurants and 527 Kentucky restaurants who provide us with our rich blend of different foods.

We grieve for our restaurants, who suffered great losses through the year long COVID pandemic. In Lexington alone, we lost 57 restaurants, and many were long time favorites, such as The Chop House, Nick Ryan's and even national chain outlets like Johnny Carrino's. It's not over, either. Many of the surviving restaurants have been so weakened financially that they may still fold during the next year or so.

Lexeat is a Lexington based website. We do our own photos and reviews. It's a common scam on national sites for restaurant owners to offer employees bonuses to use fictitious names and post positive reviews of their own places and negative reviews of their rivals. You thus do not know who to believe. We avoid this by doing all our own reviews and taking all our own photographs.

The restaurant business has a tremendous "churn." That is, restaurants open and close every week. Covering the restaurant scene is like photographing clouds --- the picture is constantly changing. Since we're covering an entire state, it's almost impossible to keep up with this day to day opening and closing. So we may be late in listing a new restaurant or we may still have a restaurant listed which has closed. Chefs are hard to keep up with. They keep moving from restaurant to restaurant. The restaurants keep changing menus, to keep up with seasonal ingredients and to reflect chefs' new ideas. Existing restaurants change locations, redecorate, add on or remodel. In Lexington, Texas Roadhouse recently moved across Richmond Road and First Watch moved across town. Lee's closed five locations and is now reopening three of them. Especially during the Pandemic restaurants added outdoor dining areas, using tents or patios or in some cases parking lots. Since we include photographs with each review, we have to keep revisiting restaurants just to keep our photos up to date.

All food critics have their own biases. We'll tell you ours up front so you can read the reviews with understanding.

We don't like fried foods (they're not healthy and destroy the flavor).

We do like fresh, locally sourced ingredients. We don't like national chains; we prefer locally owned, family run restaurants. We appreciate a good Soup and Salad.

We like Authentic and dislike the idea of distorting nationality food to conform to American tastes (for examples, village Mexican is better than TexMex and Monosodium Glutamate has never been used in China, only in Chinese restaurants in America).

We dislike unnecessary salt, spices or heat because they cover up the natural taste of the food. We think far too many kitchens believe diners want their food highly spiced and highly salted, when in fact foodies we poll agree that almost every restaurant puts too much salt and heat on everything they serve.

We like original ideas and experimentation, even when they fail. We wish Kentucky, and America in general, had more Soul Food, Native American, Old South, Appalachian, Greek, African and a mix of British/Scottish/Irish restaurants.