On our way home from our vacation along the Gulf Coast of Alabama, we decided to do our best to make it as far as we could so we wouldn't have such a long drive home on Sunday. We made it up to Paducah, KY - a nine hour drive from the Gulf coast - and stopped for the evening. After checking into the hotel, we looked up some places to eat in the downtown area. I found a place that sounded like it was somewhat upscale and had interesting choices of food. We took off from the hotel to go to Grill 211 in downtown Paducah.
George Manganaro grew up in Florida and started to work in restaurants at a very early age. Tired of working for other people, Manganaro and his wife, Joan, opened a pizza restaurant in Pigeon Forge, TN. Not happy with the tourist scene in Pigeon Forge, the Manganaro's looked for a more quiet and laid-back place to live. They found a farm located outside of Marion, KY for sale on the internet. They thought, "What the heck? We can move to small town Kentucky and open a restaurant there!"
One day, a high school student by the name of Lauren Hunt walked into their restaurant - Main Street Italian Grill - to sell yearbook ads. Joan Manganaro was impressed with the girls confidence and ended up buying an ad. A few weeks later, Lauren Hunt came back to Main Street Italian Grill and asked Joan Manganaro for a job. She was hired on the spot and did a little bit of everything for the restaurant over time - cashier, server, bussing tables, tending the salad bar - and the Manganaro's treated Lauren like their daughter.
In 2013, an opportunity arose for the Mangararo's to take over a restaurant in downtown Paducah - about an hours drive away. They sold their Italian restaurant in Marion and made Lauren a partial owner of the new restaurant in Paducah to entice her to come with them. The Italian Grill on Broadway opened in downtown Paducah in March of 2014.
Even though they served pizzas at the Italian Grill on Broadway, George Manganaro felt that Paducah could use a good pizza-centric/sports bar restaurant. As the Italian Grill was clicking on all cylinders after being open for three years, the Manganaro's and Hunt opened Pizza Warehouse in March of 2017. And while that was all going on, the Manganaro's and Hunt were working on an even bigger concept - an upscale, yet laid-back restaurant that featured prime cuts of beef and fresh seafood. In late 2016, they had taken over the old Ristorante Di Fratelli at 211 Broadway which had closed at the end of 2015 and transformed it into their new restaurant - Grill 211. Manganaro decreed that there would be no pasta served at Grill 211 as they already had an Italian restaurant just a block away. Grill 211 opened in November of 2017.
The Manganaro's and Hunt continued to run all three places until they decided to close down the Italian Grill on Broadway in early 2019 and move much of their Italian specialties out to the Pizza Warehouse. Grill 211 had only been open five days a week, but they decided to open seven days a week using staff from the Italian Grill to help out at both the Pizza Warehouse and Grill 211.
2020 was a challenging year for the Manganaro's and Hunt. In the fall of 2019, the group opened a Tex-Mex/Barbecue restaurant out near Interstate 24 on Paducah's west side. That restaurant - Warehouse 11 - lasted less than a year and was forced to close permanently when the pandemic hit.
As the pandemic continued on, it turned out to be very taxing for George Manganaro who was looking to slow down a bit. They decided to sell Grill 211 and were looking for someone locally who would be interested in continuing the restaurant. Jo Tang and Freddie Chaeh, the husband-and-wife team who owned the popular Blue Ginger Asian restaurant in Paducah, were friends with the Manganaro's and they agreed to take over the business in January of this year. They changed a few things in the restaurant, but kept most of same concepts that made Grill 211 so popular.
Now, we really like Paducah. We've spent some time there in the past and it has always been a good place to visit. It was around 8:30 p.m. when we pulled into downtown Paducah and drove past Grill 211. (see map) We parked at a city lot near the Ohio River and walked back up to Broadway to go to the restaurant. It was pretty dead in the dining room when we got there and we asked the hostess if they closed at 9. (We hate to be THOSE people who walk in 20 minutes before closing.) The young lady said, "No, no! We're open until 10!" She took us to a table across from a glass-enclosed wine room in the long narrow brick-walled dining room and gave us our menus.
The bar area was sort of interesting with sort of a purple hue casting down along the walls and the front of the bar. The panels under the front of the bar looked like they were a chrome diamond plating. They were still in COVID-19 restrictions for bars in Kentucky, so they had tables up next to the bar to space out seating. We were told that it would be another week before the restrictions would be lifted.
Now, on the way up from the Gulf Coast, we stopped at a Whataburger on the north side of Birmingham to get something to eat. It was a big mistake all the way around. Now, I love Whataburger and my wife will indulge me when I see one and will eat there, too. But this Whataburger location was suffering from a number of problems. We ordered and waited and waited and waited to get our meal. And when it finally did show up, it just looked horrible. And it tasted horrible. I ate maybe half of it and I shouldn't have eaten that much.
Pictured at right - the offending Double Meat with Cheese.
It was the worst Whataburger experience I have ever encountered in the long history of my love for Whataburger. And on top of that, the burger gave me a bad stomachache. Not quite as bad as I felt when my wife and I were sick during our vacation along the Gulf Coast, but it lingered and lingered, even after I had taken some Tums to try and soothe my stomach. By the time I got to Paducah, I just wasn't hungry. I knew my wife would be, so I went into Grill 211 thinking that I could maybe nibble on whatever she got.
Our server for the evening was a young lady by the name of Liz. I told her that I had a bad lunch earlier in the day and I thought maybe a lighter beer would get me unhinged in the stomach. I ordered a Bud Light and it didn't help. My stomach was still knotted up after the one beer.
I sort of wish I didn't feel bad because there were some things on the menu that I really wanted to try. They had a sushi grade ahi tuna with a wasabi cream sauce as an appetizer. They also had an appetizer of Italian-style mussels served in a white wine sauce with capers. For seafood that evening, they had a Chilean sea bass on the menu, as well as chargrilled scallops on skewers.
For meats, they had a ribeye that they age for 28 days before they smoke it in-house, then finish it off on the grill. Now, THAT sounded really interesting. They had a grilled chicken breast in a saffron marsala sauce that sounded good to me, too. But what REALLY caught my eye was the smoked meatloaf - a combination of ground beef brisket and pork belly that is also smoked in-house, then finished on the grill like the smoked ribeye. But my stomach was still so upset that I knew it would go to waste if I ordered it.
Since the Manganaro's and Laura Hunt no longer owned Grill 211, the new owners put a couple pasta dishes on the menu. One was the creamy margarita - gemelli pasta noodles in a creamy white wine/butter sauce with a house-made basil pesto. Protein choices were available and my wife got the grilled chicken. She also got a glass of a house red wine. (She misread the menu and thought it was in a red sauce.)
When Liz brought the bowl of pasta and grilled chicken out to the table, my wife's eyes grew huge. "That's a lot of food," she exclaimed. And it was. I wish there was something I could have put next to the bowl to compare in size, but this would have been more than enough food for two people.
My wife thought it was very good. And very rich. She said, "Are you sure you can't eat any of this? It's going to go to waste."
I did have a couple bites and it was very good. The creamy white wine/butter sauce was heavenly in taste. The basil pesto was a wonderful complement to the sauce. But I could only have a couple bites as my stomach still felt like it had a bowling ball sitting in it.
My wife was able to finish about a quarter of it. It was just a huge portion of food. They could have easily cut the serving in half and it would have been perfect. But there was going to be a lot of food leftover that my wife could leave and be embarrassed about it, or take with us and probably throw out later. She chose the latter - better to be embarrassed in private rather than in public, I guess. And she felt so bad in doing so because the creamy margarita pasta was excellent in her eyes. It just wouldn't have traveled well even if we would have been able to keep it in a cooler.
It's too bad for me that I wasn't hungry when we visited Grill 211. They had some interesting menu items to choose from including fresh seafood, steaks, pasta dishes, and a smoked meatloaf that really had me intrigued. My wife was very happy with her selection - the gemelli pasta in a creamy white wine/butter sauce with basil pesto. The grilled chicken breast that she got to go on top of the pasta was cooked perfectly to her liking. As I said, we like going to Paducah and the next time we go back I want to try Grill 211. Hopefully the smoked meatloaf is still on the menu.
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