Restaurants in Bardstown

When Zoë Cassimus would appear at a party with a bowl of her homemade chicken salad, everyone's face would light up. In between mouthfuls of creamy chicken, her friends and relatives often urged her to open up her own restaurant. Encouraged, Zoë gathered her family's time-honored Mediterranean recipes and opened the first Zoës Kitchen in Homewood, Alabama. Hungry diners flock to her restaurant in search of her chicken salad, pita bread, and pasta.

Today, Zoë's family-run eatery has branched out into more than 50 locations across the country. Within each kitchen, chefs continue to adhere to Zoë's original recipes, folding fresh ingredients into wholesome Mediterranean-inspired roll ups, sandwiches, and kabobs each day. Out on sunny patios, diners clink glasses of beer and mop up last dollops of hummus with fresh pita. Others opt to take meals to go, carrying out still-steaming four-person dinners of chicken kabobs and steak roll-ups to enjoy at home with their family or with the band of outlaws they call their family.

Joe’s OK Bayou claims to be “da best Cajun,” but there’s also a humility to the enterprise—starting with the playful name and extending to decor that alludes to a low-country shack with a sheet-metal awning and rough wooden walls. Home-style cooking comes naturally to owner Joe Wheatley, whose father farmed grain and raised hogs before opening similarly rustic restaurant The Feed Mill with other members of the family in a former feed-storage building.

Since 1995, Joe and his team have striven to introduce Louisiana flavors to a northern audience, seasoning crawfish étouffée and chicken-and-sausage gumbo with spices that are bold but not painfully hot. Visiting in 2008, the Courier-Journal’s Marty Rosen found that this mission succeeded, with “bold, accessible flavors, friendly, quick service and extremely affordable prices.” He also found oysters “big and glossy with fine, firm textures—as fresh-tasting as any I've eaten along the Louisiana or Alabama coasts” on the menu’s wide selection of simply prepared coastal creatures—fried gator tails, catfish filets, and frog legs among them. Abita beers, the star of the drinks menu, hail appropriately from Louisiana, and join wines and other domestic and imported brews at the full bar.

Originally a 19th-century preparatory school for girls, Science Hill Inn now schools patrons on fine southern cooking served inside a warm-hued dining room laden with chandeliers and white-linen-draped tables. Inside the bustling kitchen, chef Ellen McCarty—who once showcased her skills by cooking for Julia Child—pushes the culinary envelope, stamps it, and mails it to Tastytown with dishes such as grilled salmon topped with a cucumber-dill sauce, marinated chicken breast splashed with a pineapple salsa, and Carolina shrimp and grits. Desserts, such as brown-sugar pie and biscuit pudding slathered in bourbon sauce, can be enjoyed with glasses of wine to cap off meals.

Counter seats run along the kitchen at Mariann's Restaurant, allowing their occupants to nurse cups of coffee while watching the kitchen crew fill orders from handwritten tickets. Since 1969, the classic diner has put on its coffee pots at 6 a.m. and warmed breakfast plates such as biscuits and gravy or rib-eye steak and eggs. As the day goes on, the Mariann crew prepares housemade soups to accompany sandwiches during the lunch rush, as well as dinner plates such as center-cut pork chops, certified Angus steaks, and southern fried chicken. In lieu of an animatronic Johnny Carson, Mariann's Restaurant prepares fresh-baked blackberry and peach cobbler as the ideal accompaniment to late-night discussions in a springy booth.

In the heart of Bardstown lies The Java Joint, a refueling station where hungry patrons can stock up on sandwiches, soups, quiches, and coffee. The menu unfolds to reveal a long list of sandwiches, such as the 3rd Street club—a trio of roast beef, bacon, and provolone topped with veggies and blue cheese. Between bites of quiche or spoonfuls of soup, diners sip on freshly roasted Heine Brothers coffee, made from organic beans that were fairly traded for a rare baseball card. Plaid tablecloths, wooden chairs, and a wall of pottery make one part of The Java Joint's interior as rustic as a tree fort's breakfast nook; this look is starkly contrasted by a bright mélange of colors at the front of the eatery, where purple, green, and yellow walls sprout from a black-and-white checkered floor.