Unconventional April greetings from Food & Dining Magazine.
I’m Roger Baylor, erstwhile beer guy and reigning ne’er-do-well, who has tended to F&D’s digital acreage since 2019, and currently finds himself the temporary keeper of a legacy.
With Kentucky Derby 152 on the horizon, I’ve decided in a purely autonomous sort of way to publish online those bits of our Spring 2026 print publication (Vol. 89) to which I have access (for now, my own), because as most of you know by now, there was no Spring issue — and that’s because our friend, founder, publisher and mentor John Carlos White unexpectedly died in late February.
Note that under normal circumstances, the cutoff date in preparation for this edition of “Comings & Goings” would have been around February 22, assuming a publication date during the first week of March. In the wake of John’s passing, I extended the cutoff to March 1 in the hope that we might yet be able to publish the magazine. It hasn’t been possible.
Consequently, information received after March 1 won’t be reflected here. If I were clairvoyant, I’d provide readers with more detailed information about the future of Food & Dining Magazine. However, its ultimate disposition lies somewhere above and beyond my pay grade.
F&D has come to mean very much to me, and John’s loss has been an emotional challenge in ways I didn’t foresee. I cannot thank him enough for his support for my writing during the past two decades, but what I can do is try my best to maintain a semblance of regularity in terms of the website and social media, until there is more certainty.
When these bits and pieces of Spring 2026 have all been released, there’ll be a compendium.
RB
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COMINGS & GOINGS — SPRING 2026
From this magazine’s 2003 inception, a seemingly ancient time prior to the advent of Yelp, Eater and DoorDash, the late John Carlos White resolved to track everything about food and dining in Louisville ― in print, on a quarterly basis, collating restaurant listings, cross-indexing them with maps, and tracking comings and goings since the previous edition.
To manage this ambitious, herculean endeavor, John developed a personalized, shareable Google spreadsheet, a convoluted assembly of colors, symbols and internet links one step removed from ancient hieroglyphics. When I stepped in for the late Ron Mikulak three years ago, I undertook to learn John’s “pidgin spreadsheet” dialect in order to preserve Ron’s stellar “Comings &...Read more
