Done deal: Louisville will lose Southern Living’s Tastiest Town contest

Here’s a bold prediction: Louisville will finish second in Southern Living magazine’s South’s Tastiest Town contest

I’ll write it another way: We’ll lose to Lafayette, La., by a disappointingly wide margin.

Ah, we remember when ... Louisville actually led the contest.

Real sage I am, right?

Anyone who watched the voting over the past two weeks knows the score. They saw Lafayette, La., pull ahead and steadily extend its lead to more than 5,000 votes before Southern Living stopped showing vote totals at midnight, Jan. 24.

Why hide the tally when voting continues until Jan. 31? So the magazine could keep the results secret until it makes a splash with its March 23 issue.

Sorry to blow the secret, but we know Lafayette will win because Louisville was the only city even close, the only other city that ever led the contest. And it wasn’t close enough.

The people of New Orleans—and we all know that’s really the south’s tastiest town—barely put down their po’ boys long enough to peck in enough votes to show they cared. Same for Charleston, S.C., another fantastic food town whose peeps didn’t represent for obvious reasons.

Some in Louisville gave it a heck of a try. The Derby City led the contest through about Christmas time before 6,000 votes were mysteriously taken from its tally. Some locals dug deep, urged others to vote and after a week or so, Louisville surged back into the lead for about a half day.

Yet just as that happened, Lafayette nudged back ahead so rapidly and easily you could almost hear the foreheads being slapped around town. It didn’t make sense to locals then, and it doesn’t now—but not because of the way the contest was run.

This thing should have been a no-brainer, a Goliath v. David contest, a big-town smack down, but it wasn’t. Lafayette has a population of about 120,000 residents, while Louisville proper likely has about 800,000—more than six-and-a-half times the number calling Cajun Central home.

And yet, Louisville couldn’t muster the votes.

Really?

Based on the Louisville-area population alone—recently cited by Business First as 1.3 million—there were potentially another 500,000 people who could have voted (though, technically, you have to be 18 or older to vote in the SL contest, so factor out kid votes.)

But just as Goliath v. David worked out in the Bible, li’l Lafayette beat Louisville handily—or at least was doing so when the vote tallies disappeared.

And that’s a shame.

Why? Because this contest really means Louisville really would have been regarded the south’s tastiest town?

Of course not. This is a popularity contest, a ballot-box stuffer that never pretended to be the least bit objective. And that means voters had actual control of the outcome.

The shame is that so large a metro area couldn’t rally enough support for its restaurant community, to be totally, shamelessly biased by implying with its daily votes, “Louisville is a hell of a place to dine out. Come see for yourself!” Had every adult voted just one time, it wouldn’t have been close. We’d have shown support for the men and women who bust their humps in a brutally busy business—people who are our friends and neighbors, not just our paid cooks and servers.

No, Louisvillians in general don’t lose anything by their city losing this contest. But its restaurateurs do. They lose out on great publicity, the recognition in a major publication like Southern Living, the sheer millions of eyeballs that would have taken notice of an under-noticed restaurant town, and the potential tourism dollars from which the city could have benefited.

But, nah, people were too busy to think that through and cast a vote for the home team.

And that bothers me. A lot.