Walk down Main Street in Nicholasville this month and you will pass a restaurant serving borscht and varenyky two doors down from a diner that has served biscuits and gravy since before most of us were born. That restaurant, Taste of Ukraine, opened this year at 106 E. Maple Street, and by most local accounts it is the first Ukrainian restaurant in the state. Owner Tetiana Soloshchuk opened it four years after fleeing Ukraine, and the menu runs through borscht, varenyky, holubtsi, pelmeni, and potato pancakes called deruny.
That one restaurant is not the story. The story is why a restaurant like this landed in a county seat of under 20,000 people instead of a bigger stage down the road in Lexington. The answer has been sitting in city budget documents for years, and it explains a lot more than one menu. Downtown Nicholasville has been the target of two separate rounds of public investment aimed at exactly this kind of tenant, and this fall's event calendar is the clearest sign yet that the strategy is working.
A downtown that has been quietly funded into existence
Nicholasville was laid out in 1798 and named for George Nicholas, sometimes called the father of Kentucky's constitution, and its downtown carries National Historic District status. For years that status meant old buildings and a historical marker or two. Then the city and a Main Street organization called Nicholasville Now! started paying property owners to actually use it. The Downtown Nicholasville Façade Rehabilitation Project offered matching grants to owners willing to follow federal rehabilitation standards, and the program has distributed $80,000 in public funds across 23 projects. The Advisory Council on Historic Preservation credits that funding with helping bring ten new businesses into the historic downtown.
Ten new businesses on a few blocks of Main Street is not a rounding error. It is the difference between a downtown people drive through and one they walk to.
The city did not stop there. A second, larger round of funding followed, this time using federal American Rescue Plan Act dollars. Winners of that inaugural ARPA-funded round were announced in early 2023, and the city ultimately awarded $487,000 to downtown businesses for structural repairs and beautification work like exterior lighting and landscaping, out of a $500,000 budget. Commissioners liked the results enough to fund a second round in the following fiscal year budget, with an estimated impact on downtown revitalization projected at $984,000. Two funding rounds, a few years apart, both aimed at the same six or seven blocks. That is not luck. That is a plan that took a while to show up on the sidewalk, and this year is when it started to show.
What actually moved in
Taste of Ukraine is the most unusual arrival, but it is not the only one. A few miles outside downtown on Chrisman Mill Road, Ghost Fox Winery opened its tasting room in 2023 and has become the kind of small operation that gives a county something to point to besides its courthouse. Owners Mallory and Josh run it as a small-batch operation with regular weekend hours, Saturdays from noon to 9 p.m. and Sundays from 1 to 5 p.m., plus added Thursday and Friday afternoon hours during the summer, and it has become a regular stop for locals looking for something other than another chain restaurant off the bypass.
When you ask Soloshchuk why she wanted to open here, her answer is not about foot traffic studies or rent comps. She has said plainly that she wanted Kentuckians and Americans to understand Ukrainian culture through food. That is a small-business reason for choosing a place, but it only works if the place can actually support a business built on curiosity rather than convenience. A revitalized Main Street with grant-funded storefronts and a built-in audience from downtown programming is exactly that kind of place.
The calendar that proves it
None of this would matter much if the businesses opened and the street stayed quiet. It has not. This past Saturday, Main Street hosted Main Street Rewind, the latest installment of the Stars, Stripes & Small Town Nights series at 213 N Main Street. That series returns next month with a second installment called Harvest Heritage on September 12, meaning the city is now running a themed event series with multiple dated stops in a single season, not a single annual festival and nothing else.
The next six weeks alone carry a run of dated events that would have been hard to find on a Nicholasville calendar a few years back:
- August 15: Mats & Mimosas at Ghost Fox Winery, a Saturday morning session that pairs the winery's small-batch pours with a slower weekend pace
- September 11 through 13: Downtown Days, a three-day festival that turns Main Street into a market with artisan demonstrations, a Kentucky Folk Art Row, a beer and wine garden, a barbecue competition, a kids' business fair, a classic car show, a community parade, and live music on porches throughout downtown all weekend
- September 12: Harvest Heritage, the fall installment of Stars, Stripes & Small Town Nights
- September 18: the Jessamine Fall Festival at the county fairgrounds on Brannon Road, running alongside the downtown calendar rather than competing with it
That is a festival, a themed street event, a winery event, and a countywide fall celebration inside a five-week window. A downtown does not accidentally support that much programming. It needs enough businesses to sponsor booths, enough foot traffic to justify closing streets, and enough civic appetite to keep funding the next round of grants. Nicholasville's Main Street has spent several years building toward having all three at once, and this season is the first time it is visible on a single calendar.
What this actually changes if you already live here
If you have felt like there is more reason to go downtown this year than there was two or three years ago, that feeling has a paper trail behind it. It is not a new coffee shop here and a new bar there happening by chance. It is a Main Street organization and a city commission that spent grant cycles on facades and small business support long before anyone noticed the payoff, and the payoff is a restaurant unlike anything else in the state, a winery with its own event calendar, and a fall lineup dense enough that you could spend three straight weekends downtown without repeating a venue.
None of this requires you to do anything differently this week beyond maybe getting a table at Taste of Ukraine before word spreads further, or putting September 11 on the calendar for Downtown Days. But it is worth knowing that the town you live in has been investing in itself in a specific, funded, traceable way, and that the results are the events and businesses you are already walking past.
If you are the kind of person who likes knowing what is actually happening in your own neighborhood before it shows up in a headline, that is the same instinct I bring to reading the Nicholasville market for clients. When you are ready to see what that kind of local attention means for your own home, Thaddeus Blevins offers a free home valuation built on the same block-by-block knowledge, not a generic estimate. Get Your Free Home Valuation whenever you are curious what your Nicholasville address is worth in today's market.
