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Fun and Delicious: Double Dogs in Bowling Green Kentucky is a Winner

Joi — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 21:24:07 +0000

The hardest part about doing Kentucky Restaurant Reviews? You’re looking at it. I have to relive the deliciousness of food such as Double Dog’s Mushroom & Swiss Burger and Onion Rings while I’m, literally, miles away from having another. This is agony. Read on to learn more about one of the funnest, most delicious restaurants in Kentucky.

My husband and I took one of our beloved one day mini-vacations through Kentucky last Saturday. I LIVE for these trips. I’ll let you in on a little secret: When I’m under the weather or going through something that rips at my nerves (you know – dental visits, agonizing ballgames that are way too close for comfort…), I make everything in my world alright just by thinking about these little trips. I picture us driving down the road, enjoying the scenery and a conversation or sitting in a Kentucky restaurant enjoying a meal and a conversation (note: there’s always talking if I’m involved).

While I LOVE eating at favorite restaurants, I also get a huge kick out of discovering new favorites. Such was the case Saturday when I was treated to, not one, but two restaurants I’d ever eaten at before. Mark my words, I’ll be returning to each one millions of times.

I’ll tell you about our special supper destination in the next post, but I’m going to let this restaurant review go to the dogs…. Double Dogs.

We ate lunch at one of the cutest restaurants I’ve ever seen, Double Dogs in Bowling Green, Kentucky. How could an animal lover extraordinaire not fall in love with this place?! While walking into the restaurant, the Double Dog doghouse, with its barking invisible dog, caught me of guard. The highlight of my husband’s day (or week) may have been when I jumped out of my skin. I got a kick out of it, too, but an even bigger kick out of walking in the door and seeing trees filled with information about, and pictures of, precious shelter dogs and cats that are looking for a little love.

A restaurant with a heart of gold? You had me at hello.

Our adorable server took care of us right off the bat. I was actually shocked at how fast our food arrived. I ordered the Mushroom & Swiss Burger with Onion Rings (you know my ring obsession) and my husband Michael ordered the Betty Burger, fries, and coleslaw.

The Betty Burger

Double Dog’s famous Betty Burger is a ridiculously delicious single patty with American cheese, topped with their (very) special sauce, grilled onions, tomatoes, lettuce and pickle. Words cannot describe just how amazing this sauce is. Combined with a burger that can only be described as PERFECT, this makes a stupendous hamburger. Betty is perfection.

The Mushroom Swiss Burger

Gumbo’s Mushroom Swiss Burger is topped with grilled onions, mushrooms, swiss cheese, mayo and Dijon mustard. This is unlike any Mushroom and Swiss burger I’ve ever had and, believe me, I’ve had them all. It’s a favorite burger of mine, so I’ve ordered it far and wide. Double Dog’s Mushroom Swiss Burger doesn’t have the sauce that you’ll find on a lot of Mushroom Swiss burgers. It has, instead, Dijon mustard – which, surprisingly enough, is quite delicious.

The Fries, Onion Rings, and Coleslaw

The hand cut fries were exceptional. I’m such an onion ring fanatic that I often slight french fries, but these fries would be darn near impossible to slight. It’d be even more impossible to eat just one. Or ten. Or fifteen…

This is actually one of the few restaurants where I’d consider ordering fries as much as I would my beloved onion rings. I say consider because their onion rings were off the charts spectacular. To be on the safe side, make sure the people at your table order each – trust me, you’ll want BOTH the fries and the onion rings.

The coleslaw was good, at first bite, but it became delicious after being graced with a little salt and pepper. Apparently coleslaw and pasta salad are new items at Double Dogs in Bowling Green. I can’t wait to try the pasta salad – I’m sure, like everything else they’ll be extraordinary.

As huge sports fans, we also LOVED that we were surrounded by tvs, each with sporting events to enjoy. Great onion rings and fries, some of the best burgers on the planet, and sports everywhere you look? How is that not paradise?

This beautiful and fun restaurant, with food so delicious your knees get weak, is open for lunch everyday at 11:00 am. Sunday through Wednesday, they’re open until midnight and Thursday through Saturday, you can feast on deliciousness til 1:00 am.

Double Dog’s burgers, fries, and onion rings are to die for and their wings look sensational. Check out Double Dog’s menu HERE. Better yet, just go and “wing it.” Sorry I couldn’t resist.

Double Dog’s is located at 1780 Scottsville Rd. in Bowling Green, Kentucky. Go as soon as you possibly can and then pray, just pray, that they’ll one day open a location in your city.

Double Dogs’ Betty Burger and Coleslaw. I’m not sure you’ll find a better hamburger in Kentucky or anywhere else.

Click the arrow for the inside scoop on my Ky Restaurant Reviews!

When writing Kentucky Restaurant Reviews, I try, very hard, to accentuate the positive, while spending as little time with the negative as possible. However, in fairness to my readers, the negative can’t be glossed over or ignored. However, when a “negative” is addressed by a restaurant, I always go back and edit the original post. It’s my pleasure to do so! A few of my pet peeves when it comes to restaurants are:

Crummy sides. I hate for a restaurant to rest on the laurels of their meat and/or main dishes. If it’s on your menu, it should be able to stand on it’s own, as if it were the ONLY thing on the menu.
Unfriendly servers. If you read a restaurant review on Genuine Kentucky and the server is not mentioned, rest assured that they either weren’t very friendly or weren’t exactly on the ball. Or both!
Unfriendly hosts and hostesses. Hello?! You’re paid to be friendly. Your job exists to welcome visitors and make them feel like you’re glad to see them.
Off brand condiments. I LOVE to see a restaurant owner who cares enough about his/her guests to serve them Heinz or Hunt’s, Red Gold at the very least. Off brand Ketchup is gross. It screams “Someone’s cutting corners!!!”
Overcooked fries. Come on, take them out before they’re brown. Brown fries aren’t cool.
Watery soft drinks. Servers should be taught that if you see the beverage come out of the machine and there is NO fizzle, DO NOT serve it to the guests. Blech.
Servers who “Push the Wrong Button.”Servers charging the wrong price for menu items is becoming an alarming trend. A server can get annoyed with a customer and, bam, “accidentally” hit the wrong button. A word to anyone who eats out: Examine your ticket. For example, if the restaurant offers 1/2 off Sushi, make certain your server doesn’t charge you the full price.
I am, by nature, a very friendly guest when I visit restaurants. I always, always leave tips. When the service is good, I don’t just tip, I over tip! My oldest daughter is the same way. One sweetheart of a server in Olive Garden once got a $10 tip from us for lunch. She made us smile, so we wanted to make her smile. It’s really as simple as that.
Real butter is always better than Margarine.
Options, Please. As someone with a vegetarian daughter, I love for restaurants to offer completely meatless dishes. Bonus points for the restaurants, like Denny’s, with Boca Burgers on their menu.

One final thought: If an owner really wants their restaurant to be the best it can possibly be, he or she should have comment cards on the tables. Guests will tell them what they’re doing right but, more importantly, they’ll tell them where they’re messing up. A closed, secure box should be provided for guests to put the cards in. Get the opinions from the people who’s opinions matter most.

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Dear Catfish House in Bowling Green…

Joi — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 15:44:03 +0000

The Catfish House in Bowling Green Kentucky is outrageously good. Perfect catfish, perfect okra, perfect onion rings, perfect hush puppies, beans, baked potatoes. Who could ask for more?! Oh yeah, the iced tea is perfection too.

I might as well say, right up front, that this particular Kentucky Restaurant Review will probably read more like a love letter than a review but, what do you expect? Some of my favorite things in the world are:

Great Catfish
Great Hush Puppies
Great Fried Okra
Great Iced Tea

The Catfish House in Bowling Green Kentucky takes “Great” to new heights. Get this, they knock the ball out of the park with, not just one… not just two… but with EACH of my above named obsessions! Every single bite and every single sip is nothing short of perfection. So much so that I actually wanted to try everything on the menu in one setting.

It’s kind of like a great actress – like Julia Roberts, for example. You see her on the red carpet and you think, “Perfect!” You see her in Pretty Woman and Runaway Bride and you think, “Perfect!” Then you see her in a dramatic role like Erin Brockovich and you think, “Perfect!” You realize that she’s a perfect 10 in everything she does, so you can’t wait to see what she does next. You know she’s going to be all kinds of brilliant and you want a front row seat to see it.

That’s how it is with exceptional restaurants, isn’t it? You walk in and see a beautiful setting (The Catfish House is gorgeous inside and out – incredibly clean, spacious, and homey), you’re seated by a warm and friendly hostess and greeted by a friendly server. Then you browse over the menu that looks as promising as anything you’ve ever seen. Your hopes are sky high and a little voice inside your head keeps whispering, “Please be as good as the opening act…”

Having been disappointed by more than a few main events, I never allow my hopes to climb too terribly high, but after taking a bite of a ridiculously wonderful onion ring and enjoying a sip of iced perfection they called iced tea, hope began to climb. My husband, Michael, finished off an onion ring and said it was probably the best he’d ever had. His hope was a step ahead of mine! But don’t worry, this catfish lover extraordinaire’s hope soon caught up. (Review continued after the drool-worthy picture)

The experience was kind of surreal. Each thing our friendly server brought us was as delicious as the thing he had just served. The beans were good, the coleslaw was very good, and the hush puppies were even as good as The Willow Pond in Aurora (the ultimate praise from me). The Homemade onion rings were out of this world. The golden, deep-fried onion rings are made from scratch and you can taste it in every bite. You’ll want to order the large order. Trust me. When my husband said they were probably the best onion rings he’d ever had, I would have responded but my mom said to never eat with your mouth full. Responding would have meant momentarily pulling myself away from the onion rings and that wasn’t going to happen. So to say that they’ll leave you speechless is a Biblical truth.

The fried okra was also an amazingly perfect experience. We Southerners LOVE our fried okra – when it’s done right, that is – and The Catfish House does fried okra as well as I’ve ever seen (or tasted) it done. It’s absolutely delicious and would be worth the trip all by itself!

If you read my Kentucky restaurant reviews regularly, you know my special relationship with hush puppies. Wonderful hush puppies make me weak in the knees but bad hush puppies make me want to throw them at somebody. I hate, hate, hate bad hush puppies. I’ll try not to get off on a rant here but, come on, why would anyone serve hideous hush puppies? Wouldn’t they be better off just NOT serving any at all? Memo to restaurants, if your hush puppies look like little black marbles, if they don’t have an onion-y flavor, if they’re so yellow you think they’re Easter Eggs, or if they they taste nothing like hush puppies – just take them off the menu until you figure everything out.

One Kentucky restaurant… God love them… actually has hush puppies that taste like little balls of yellow cake batter that have been deep fried alongside fish. Oh how the fish must have laughed.

Oh, yeah, I promised not to rant.

Back to The Catfish House: No one (fish included) will ever laugh at their hush puppies. They’re excellent. As I’m sitting here in my home office typing this review (and getting crazy hungry, I might add), I’m ready to make a bold statement: The two best places to get hush puppies are:

Willow Pond Catfish Restaurant in Aurora, Kentucky
The Catfish House in Bowling Green, Kentucky

When, and if, I come across a restaurant that ties with these two powerhouses, I’ll let you know. The wonderful thing is that each of these restaurants have mind-boggling delicious catfish as well. Catfish so extraordinary that putting tartar sauce (or anything besides your fork) on them would be a crime against humanity.

The catfish at The Catfish House was HEAVENLY. It was full of flavor and beautifully flaky and juicy – just how I love for my catfish to be. It was absolutely delicious and flat out blew me away. I would have LOVED to have tried one of The Catfish House’s desserts. For one thing, I have a sweet tooth rivaled by no one. For another, as I said earlier, when you have an outstanding restaurant, you want to try everything they make. However, after gorging on the beans, coleslaw, hush puppies, catfish, onion rings, and tea – this gal was so full she could barely even move. I labored to breath!

I waffled over whether or not to include this little tidbit, but I’m going to and I’ll tell you why in a minute. Michael and I actually ate at The Catfish House in Bowling Green about a year or so ago and it was “average.” So much so that I didn’t even bother writing a review (you may have noticed that I only write reviews for restaurants I love – I figure the internet is filled with enough negativity, I refuse to add to it). I remember that the catfish was really good and I remember liking the coleslaw, but the onion rings weren’t on their game, the hush puppies were average and the beans didn’t have much flavor. I don’t know if, within a year, they’ve gotten new management or a new chef – but it absolutely seemed like we were in a different restaurant entirely. It’s a 100 percent turnaround and I was flabbergasted. I only mention this in case there’s anyone reading this who hasn’t been to The Catfish House in a while. I want you to know that it’s a different experience entirely.

Bowling Green is absolutely covered up with restaurants. Sometimes it appears that the restaurants are stacked on top of one another. Don’t get me wrong, many of these restaurants are outstanding and I applaud the city for all of its options. However, the next time you go out to eat in Bowling Green, Kentucky, you HAVE to go to The Catfish House.

Click HERE for the menu.

The Catfish House in Bowling Green Kentucky is at 300 Cumberland Trace Road. If you need a reminder of what perfection tastes like, The Catfish House is waiting for you.

View Larger MapImages courtesy of The Catfish House (again, I was too busy eating to photograph my prey)

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Towns in Kentucky are Stimulating Themselves!

Joi — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 18:16:59 +0000

New Geography.com recently published an article about small to medium-sized towns in Kentucky. It focuses on how these towns are stimulating themselves in a rather trying economy. It’s a great read. Click the following link to take a look: Stimulate Yourself!

Click HERE for an article I wrote on my Self Help Blog about this article and about the motivating approach being taken by Bowling Green, Kentucky’s mayor.

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