Welcome to In the Weeds, a new publication covering the business of independent restaurants.
When Alex Green opened Mileta in Lexington, Kentucky, in 2024, he was hoping to shake up the city’s dining scene, which he described as “very much a steak and potatoes kind of town.” Introducing diners to new dishes, though, requires a certain amount of education. But do diners want to be educated? Alex and his team view education through the lens of helping diners feel confident and comfortable. That’s hospitality, in my opinion.
Also in this edition: the case for Restaurant Week, the Texas Restaurant Association argues for access to work permits for vetted immigrants, and the National Restaurant Association warns of the dire knock-on effects for restaurants and workers as Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haitian and Syrian immigrants ends.
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When Mileta opened in 2024, they served beef tartare with pickled celery, smoked oyster aioli, and potato chips fried in beef tallow. The dish isn’t the sort of thing diners find on menus in Lexington, Kentucky, where Mileta is located, Chef and Co-Founder Alex Green said. But he wanted to make it approachable, so he compared its flavors to those of a burger.
“When you close your eyes, you’re like, yeah, actually, this kind of tastes like a burger. So that’s how we try to educate our staff to then relay that to the guests,” he told me when we spoke in July.
The team tries not to talk down to diners or sound pretentious, and to connect dishes that aren’t commonly found on menus in Lexington to something diners are familiar with and can relate to, he said.