I’ve spent four of the past six weeks in Lexington, Kentucky, for work-related matters. I now consider myself a Lexington expert, where the word expert is defined as any individual that can recommend a place to eat a fancy meal as well as where to find great tacos. I know both such places. There may be other fancy meals, and there will certainly be other tacos, but my picks are solid and should a person find themselves in the middle of the state of Kentucky, they would be served well in seeking these locations out.

But before we get there, some quick highlights:

1. If you’re coming to Lexington from the west, you will likely find yourself on Bluegrass Parkway (Kentucky Route 9002), this takes you to Lexington Road which will leads to the city itself. While driving east on this road you will see a giant castle. This will be the weirdest thing you will see in Kentucky. There are no billboards signaling its arrival. You will not know why it is there, just that it’s huge, and on a hill, and a castle.
2. There seems to be some sort of regionally mandated horse motif. Every establishment may be required to have a least one painting of a horse hanging on the wall. The hotel room in which I am currently typing has seven. This makes sense because of the horse races held in the are as well as the miles and miles of white fencing that surround every piece of open greenspace in a 40-mile radius. Driving in and out of the city you see hundreds of horses milling about, looking gorgeous and eating the I’ve-never-seen-green-like-this grass. Lexington is, without a doubt, a horse town. What makes this fascinating is that I can’t think of another place in America where a population is so tied to an animal that it does not want to eat. How many pictures of cows have you ever seen that weren’t behind a piece of plastic protecting the menu.
3. While I was living in Lexington, I spend a good chunk of my days working in is surrounding towns. This was a mostly pleasant experience, helped largely by the fact that most of the highways extending out from Lexington are absolutely gorgeous. In fact, the single best piece of road I have ever been on in my life is the 10-mile strip that connects Midway and Versailles (pronounced, here, Vir-Say-Alls). On a nice day with the windows down and some popular tunes blaring, there are few things more relaxing. The road is well maintained, lined with (more) horse farms and white fencing with a canopy of trees covering the road itself but not blocking out the east/west views of rolling hills and well kempt barns. This might be the greatest road in America.

Now that we have that out of the way. You’ll be served well if you head downtown and get a meal at “a la Lucie” at the corner of South Limestone and Barr. Nice staff, wonderful food, fun interior (though it was nice that day and I ate outside). On the other side of the spectrum, head up to Paris, Kentucky, somewhere around 282 E. Main Street. There you will find a truly fantastic taco cart serving authentic barbacoa tacos (meat, onion, cilantro, lime juice, corn tortilla).

Other area locales of note: Common Grounds, a coffee shop off downtown; CD Central, record store with a decent vinyl selection near UK; Malones, a curious sports-bar/steak house/sushi place with pretty great food located a few blocks from my hotel — many meals here; The Liquor Barn, a ridiculously-sized retail establishment; Joseph-Beth Booksellers, a really gorgeous bookstore in West Lexington.