RESTAURANT REVIEW: El Monstruo
Review by John David Kolter, MD
Louisville has long embraced ethnic cuisine, often mirroring immigrant populations in our fair city. A quick perusal of Lost Restaurants of Louisville, a 2015 compendium of notable bygone restaurants, reveals a local dining scene in the early- to mid-20th century decidedly skewed to European fare. Reflecting my own family’ s German immigrant background, German food was, at the time, well represented. The opening of Hoe Kow in 1962 introduced Louisville diners to Chinese cuisine and was an Asian forerunner to later classics such as August Moon. In the new millennium, reflecting our country’ s ethnic composition, the local dining scene has resembled more of a starburst pattern than a transoceanic straight line. Queen of Sheba( Ethiopian), Lee’ s( Korean), multiple south Louisville Vietnamese eateries and an array of Mexican restaurants( whose names seemingly all begin with Sol) now represent examples of a diverse ethnic dining culture in Louisville. A new star in our local thousand-points-of-light is El Monstruo( The Monster), located one neighborhood in-town from Buechel’ s International Row, on Bardstown Road. Opened in 2024 by second generation Columbian American Junior Rojas, El Monstruo adds Colombian fare, largely absent previously, to our city’ s ever-expanding gastronomic terrain.
Tucked in the back of Gardiner Lane Shopping Center, directly behind the upper Highlands outpost of Planet Fitness, the location of El Monstruo is unassuming. Nonetheless, my family and I were welcomed on a recent Saturday evening visit by the monster himself, a decal of a comically ravenous gorilla devouring a massive hamburger, dressing up the standard strip mall plate glass doors. The decor inside, while as simple and clean as the entry doors, conveys Latin soul with bright colors and an ever-present din of Spanish language. Large flat screens occupy the majority of the available wall space in the dining area, their share of the real estate mimicking soccer’ s share of the sports psyche of Latin America. During our visit, the screens were tuned to Latin American soccer matches( save one to ESPN en Español discussing, predictably, soccer). Our inquiry, in English, about a table was not understood in spoken language but met with a smile. Our famished looks revealed the obvious reason for our presence and we quickly were invited to put two tables together for our large group.
As we settled in and engaged the atmosphere, I felt transported to points equatorial. Enamored with the authenticity of the atmosphere and enjoying a sense of the exotic, I immediately admonished my teenagers, who have been in some form of Spanish immersion instruction since kindergarten, to“ use their Spanish.” My wife, for her part, required no admonishment, bursting with eagerness to utilize her Spanish language skills. Listening to the Spanish chatter around us there was a sense, in challenging the monster to fill our bellies, we were invading a space not
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