Louisville Has a Charm All It Own

“Here comes our little parcel of love,” Patrick Hallahan says, taking the bundle from the drive-through window of the Chicken King. Immediately the car smells amazing. Hallahan is the drummer for My Morning Jacket, the Louisville-based band known for its emotive sound and loyal fans. He's also a friend, and today, on break between tours, he's volunteered to play hometown tour guide. After a hike through Cherokee Park, part of Frederick Law Olmsted's magisterial park system that weaves green through the city, we've established an appetite. The fragrance of the dark meat and spicy potato wedges combo is intoxicating, but we resist the urge to tear open the bag. Hallahan has plans for us. We're going across the river, and the state line, to Indiana, to get a good look back at the city. Heading north, we turn onto South Clay Street. Henry Clay: the morally conflicted antebellum Unionist senator known as the Great Compromiser. Then across Muhammad Ali Boulevard. Ali, the undisputed GOAT, hometown hero turned global icon. He was once labeled The Louisville Lip; now the airport is named for him. Then we hit Nanny Goat Strut: an alleyway down which goats were once raced, now at the crossroads of shops, hotels, restaurants, and bourbon distillery tasting rooms that occupy the revitalized 19th-century warehouses of the downtown-adjacent commercial zone known as NuLu, or New Louisville. We'll return to NuLu because it's very much a part of the story of how the city has blossomed in the past few decades from a lovely place to live into a distinctive destination with much to entertain visitors beyond the traditional draw of the pomp, heraldry, and big hats of the Kentucky Derby. But first we cross the Ohio River via the George Rogers Clark Memorial Bridge. George Rogers Clark: Revolutionary War general, enslaver, anti–Native American campaigner, Louisville founder. On a strip of green along the Ohio, we settle at a picnic table under a cottonwood tree. Nearby is the visitors center at the Falls of the Ohio, where rapids and limestone formations once stymied riverboat traffic. “I try not to eat a lot of fried food, but when I do, I like to treat myself by coming out here and having this private little moment,” Hallahan says. Chicken King makes a rightful claim to the crown, but I need to clarify that Kentucky fried chicken (lowercase) is not really a thing. Sure, people batter and fry the bird here, as anywhere, but it doesn't constitute a staple of the cuisine or conform to a unique regional style. “People also assume this would be barbecue country because of the South,” Hallahan says. “But Louisville isn't actually—or not completely—the South. Southerners think we're northerners. Northerners think we're southerners. The Midwest just lets us be. It's this weird little part of the world. We're in the middle of the compass.” This suits Hallahan, as both a creative and a citizen. “It's just a beautiful little spot that's constantly changing and never changing at the same time.” The modes by which the city evolves without shedding its unique character—and the sense in which it is and isn't Southern—are areas of special interest to me because, like Hallahan, I grew up here. After I left for college, and eventually settled in New York City, trips home tended to be short and family-focused. Over time I developed a benign obliviousness, noting broad-stroke changes but missing details. So I return to this city both a biased booster and somewhat blinkered native son. At the Falls of the Ohio, we take in the exposed fossil bed, the Ohio Coral Reef, relics of the Paleozoic era. These rapids were the crucial hiccup in riverboat traffic along the Ohio, the prime snag in the river's nearly 1,000-mile run from Pittsburgh down to Cairo, Illinois, where it meets the Mississippi. First canals and then locks were devised to guide boats around the falls. From this friction, trade resulted, then settlement, and a city was born. “Louisville was a shipwreck,” Hallahan says. “This is our lineage: a bunch of people exploring waterways, unable to move forward and being like, Okay, I've got to make something out of this.” “Bring a magnet.” That's Tom Owen's advice for visitors to Louisville's downtown. Specifically West Main Street, where a stretch of 19th-century buildings constitutes the second-largest collection of cast-iron façades after Manhattan's SoHo. Planting a magnet on—and seeing it stick to—the building fronts is one of his tour guide parlor tricks. A former Metro Council president and longtime archivist and historian at the University of Louisville, Owen has been giving enlightening tours of the city for the last 50 of his 85 years. Owen lives down the block from my parents. We meet for coffee in the Highlands. The night before, he accepted an award from a local tourism organization. The notes for his speech offer a concise distillation of what makes Louisville special. They read, in part: “We celebrate the fact that we all don't look or worship alike….Walkable, memory-making neighborhoods…. Horses, vats, and bats help define us.” While the city isn't horse country, racing culture is deeply ingrained in its image of itself, embodied by the Kentucky Derby, run annually at Churchill Downs since 1875. The Derby transforms the city. It's our Mardi Gras and Super Bowl. It's also when the city looks and sounds most Southern. Accents are more pronounced. Out come the seersucker, feathered fascinators, mint juleps. (I've never met anyone who drinks them any other time of year. It'd be like sipping eggnog in August.) Vats and bats: Bourbon and baseball. Leaning against the brick edifice of the Louisville Slugger Museum & Factory on the cast-iron corridor of West Main is a massive 120-foot-high steel replica of Babe Ruth's original Louisville Slugger bat. And while most of the bourbon in Kentucky is produced outside the city, downtown once housed a concentration of bourbon-adjacent businesses dubbed Whiskey Row. Today bourbon is a major driving force of Louisville tourism. Wherever you walk downtown there are tasting rooms and signs commemorating the spirit's history: “Evan Williams…a Native of Wales. In 1783, he built his distillery on the banks of the Ohio River….” But for a long time—from, say, the end of Prohibition to the week I left for college—corn whiskey wasn't the cultural draw it is today. We liked our bourbon, but people didn't travel here for it. They certainly didn't have places to stay like downtown's swank new Hotel Bourré Bonne, which employs a “bourbon steward.” The bourbon boom began in the late 1990s and really took off in the 2010s. Exports spiked; Americans awoke to the pleasures of their native whiskey. Across from the Slugger Museum stands the Michter's Fort Nelson Distillery building, an 1890 structure with arched Romanesque windows. The building was ready to topple when Joseph Magliocco, head of Michter's Distillery, purchased it with a plan to put a distillery on Main Street. Eight years and 400,000 pounds of steel reinforcement later, Michter's Fort Nelson opened in 2019. By then eight other distilleries had opened downtown. Magliocco invites me out to Michter's main operations in Shively, a nearby industrial suburb. After walking the facility, we sit for a comprehensive tasting. I can tell we're in for something special when master distiller Dan McKee pulls on a pair of dainty white gloves. He uncorks a bottle of 2022 Celebration Sour Mash, one of only 328 made. Blended from seven choice barrels, it retails for about $6,000, though bottles often sell for three times that. A recent vintage sold at auction for nearly 40 grand. My expertise is in drinking the stuff, not describing it, so all I can report is that it's dark, heady, and just extremely damned tasty. “There are 623 precincts in Jefferson County,” Mayor Craig Greenberg says. “I love to run. When I was campaigning for mayor, I ran through all 623 to get to know every corner of our city.” We're talking over coffee and guava pastries at Sweet Colada, a new Cuban café in Shelby Park. Greenberg has wanted to be mayor since eighth grade. “I know it sounds dorky, but that's me.” Before making good on that dream, he helped run 21c, a culture-changing downtown hotel known for its contemporary art collection. In many ways he feels he's still in the hospitality business. “There's something in the DNA of Louisvillians that's all about hospitality,” he says. That extends to welcoming outsiders. “The city has been a strong magnet for immigrants over the past couple of decades, and that has had a wonderful impact on our communities.” I don't make it to every precinct, but I pack a lot into my days. After coffee with the mayor, I drive west, past downtown, to the Portland neighborhood, to meet the artist Stan Squirewell. His current project takes as its starting point old photos, mostly of Black Louisvillians from the early 20th century. Onto these found images, collected from archives and friends' family albums, he layers on a collage of color, texture, fabric. Squirewell doesn't know the stories of the people in the photos, so he honors them with new ones. “I rework them because they speak to me,” says Squirewell, whose work has been collected by the Studio Museum in Harlem. “Look at this couple here.” He gestures to a black-and-white portrait enlarged to nearly life-size. “The way she leans on him, the comfort he has holding her up. What I'm asking the viewer is this: Remember; don't forget these people.” I was introduced to Squirewell by Gill Holland, the prominent real estate developer and philanthropist credited with breathing life into NuLu. Holland and then wife Augusta Brown ended up buying 16 buildings and advocating for the walkable entertainment district the area eventually became. Next he turned his attention to Portland and its neglected industrial and residential blocks. Squirewell's studio is in one of Holland's buildings, the old Dolfinger School, formerly a Civil War hospital. “Now it's filled with artists and nonprofits,” Holland says. From Portland I make my way back to the Highlands to catch an early-evening set at The Monarch, a member-supported nonprofit music space. Founder Mark Roberts has an infectious idealistic zeal and a great cascading beard. He shows me around the backyard with a performance stage, hammocks, and barbecue. Inside, first-time singer-songwriters play to a supportive room. Then it's back to NuLu for a drink at The Last Refuge, a music venue and whiskey bar on a totally different scale. Inside a Gothic-feeling 1880s church now owned by a bourbon company backed by Bob Dylan are two towering walls of backlit bottles. Down the block is Meesh Meesh, chef Noam Bilitzer's small, lively Levantine restaurant. House-made pita dragged through hummus topped with salty-sweet pastrami “marmalade” makes it clear why it's one of the city's hardest tables to book. Green shatta, the Middle Eastern chili paste, lends its spicy tang to the grilled chicken shishlik. Buried under a flurry of herbs, it's a welcome challenger in the commonwealth of the Chicken King. Edward Lee and I are in the back of an Uber decorated with mini disco balls. We'd met at his restaurant 610 Magnolia. At the bar I enjoyed an elegant chilled soup of golden beets and Korean melon with paddlefish caviar and struck up a conversation with a gentleman whose thoroughbred once won the Kentucky Derby. He has a distillery now. Lee wants me to try a few places to get a sense of what the city has to offer. In the car the conversation turns (again) to the question of where Louisville exists in the world, geographically and emotionally. Lee, originally from Brooklyn, came here after 9/11, took a job, and stayed on to become one of the city's biggest boosters and culinary stars. “I remember asking the original owner of 610, ‘I'm a fuckin’ Korean guy from Brooklyn—am I gonna be accepted?' And he was just like, ‘Cook good food and they'll like you.’ And they did. So I speak a bit of the gospel when I travel because people do clump the whole South together.” Unbidden, our Uber driver weighs in: “I mean, we're a state and a half way from Canada, so….” Next we stop at Perso, a modern restaurant, mostly Italian, with hints of owner-chef Emil David's Filipino heritage. At Four Pegs, in the historically German neighborhood of Schnitzelburg, we snack on fried pickles and pork belly burnt ends. We end the night with pints of hickory stout and a platter of fried bitterballen (Dutch cheese and sausage fritters) in the garden of Holy Grale, a serious beer bar inside an old Unitarian church space. It strikes me, not for the first time, that this is the kind of evening that couldn't have happened in this city not long ago. Louisville is at an interesting inflection point because, while bourbon tourism has transformed it, bourbon consumption globally has peaked, as younger generations drink less and tariffs impact American goods. “We're going to have to learn to stand on something other than bourbon,” the chef-restaurateur Lawrence Weeks says when I visit him at his new spot, Murray's Creole Pub. One of the city's most respected chefs, Lawrence was previously at the acclaimed restaurant North of Bourbon. Named for his mother's family from Louisiana with a menu and decor inspired in part by his love for London gastropubs, Murray's blurs traditions, English and Southern. There are Scotch quail eggs with pimento-cheese-stuffed olives. Chicken tikka masala with St. Landry Parish rice from Louisiana. In other words, it's familiar, new, and altogether personal, a way forward for a city looking to build on traditions but not be limited by them. Once, years after moving north but still fresh in the world of New York publishing, I found myself alone at a glitzy downtown book party celebrating the publication of a biography of Muhammad Ali. The man himself was present and looking a little bored, silently posing for pictures on a receiving line. When it was my turn, I nervously blurted out that we shared a hometown. Surprised to be invited, surprised to have this audience with the Greatest, I was even more surprised when he motioned for me to come closer. I put my head near his and, quiet but effusive, he whispered in my ear: “I love Louisville!” Maybe it was just his version of small talk, but it was a gesture I'll never forget. It felt like a statement about the power of origins: No matter where you traveled, or how long you stayed away, the bond remains. Like everyone who showed me around, I love this place too. I love what's unchanged and where it's heading. Stay The newest addition to a growing downtown hotel scene, the 168-room Hotel Bourré Bonne is sleek, modern, and well situated in the city. It has a beautifully designed restaurant, Steakhouse Bourré Bonne, as well as a rooftop bar. Located in the Highlands area of town, The Bellwether is a small, thoughtfully designed self-check-in hotel occupying historic buildings that once housed a police station, the Bell South switchboard station, and the local ballet. Eat and drink North of Bourbon earned a national reputation with a menu that blends Kentucky and Louisiana influences. Its new chef, Brittany Kelly, brings her Appalachian background to bear with great dishes like house-smoked pastrami with collard green chowchow. A long-anticipated new opening from North of Bourbon owners and the chef-owner of Meesh Meesh is Mill Iron 4, a steakhouse focused on local products. Kern's Korner is a dive-y neighborhood bar and grill with a solid burger and chili, a neon sign that reads “Bullshit,” and horse racing on the TV. For a real taste of track culture, Wagner's Pharmacy has been serving folks working across the street at Churchill Downs since 1922. And, while we stress that fried chicken isn't a big deal here, in addition to Chicken King, we'd be remiss to not mention that a favorite of Ed Lee, chef of the always excellent 610 Magnolia, is Indi's Chicken; there are several locations around town. This article appeared in the April 2026 issue of Condé Nast Traveler. Subscribe to the magazine here.