"We will be the first establishment of this kind in our state," Tetiana Soloshchuk said last fall, describing the Ukrainian restaurant she and her husband Taras were building inside a former pet grooming shop on East Maple Street. She wasn't exaggerating for effect. Taste of Ukraine really is the only restaurant of its kind in Kentucky, and it opened two blocks from a soul food kitchen that didn't exist a year ago and a coffee shop that a longtime reviewer said finally let Nicholasville "join the crowd" of Central Kentucky towns with a proper Main Street café.
That phrase is the part worth sitting with. Nicholasville wasn't behind on restaurants generally. It was behind on one specific thing: the kind of quirky, sit-and-linger coffee shop that Midway, Versailles, and Georgetown had already built into their downtowns years earlier. For a while, if you wanted that experience, you drove somewhere else. Now the gap has closed, and it didn't close with a single ribbon-cutting. It closed three separate times in under a year, from three owners who had never met each other and were solving three different problems.
The Coffee Shop Every Other Main Street Already Had
Mercantile Coffee & Feed sits at 213 N Main Street, inside a space with vintage furnishings and the kind of eclectic seating that makes a Saturday morning stretch longer than planned. Order the lavender latte or the blackberry latte, or catch a fall biscuit with country ham and apple butter if it's on the seasonal menu, and it's easy to forget this kind of spot didn't exist here two years ago.
One local review put the comparison plainly: for a while, most Central Kentucky towns had a fun, quirky little coffee shop on their main drag except Nicholasville. That's not a knock on the town's food scene generally. It's a specific, checkable gap, and it's the kind of detail that only shows up when you've actually spent time comparing Main Streets rather than just listing what's open. Mercantile filled it with a space that works as easily for a laptop and a quiet hour as it does for a Saturday crowd waiting on breakfast sandwiches.
Two Doors Down, a Different Kind of Bet
Soul on Main opened in September 2025 at 111 N Main Street, in a building that had been home to the Nicholasville Cafe for years under owners Gerald and Gertie Deeken. When that space finally turned over, CJ and Carrie Gabrielson took it, and CJ brought three decades of restaurant experience with him, including a run as general manager at J. Alexander's in Lexington.
The menu leans into scratch-made Southern comfort: pulled pork tacos, fried chicken, mac and cheese, cheese grits, pimento dip, a roasted pork chop with chipotle maple glaze that shows up in nearly every review. The dining room keeps the building's exposed brick and adds reclaimed wood, so the space reads more farmhouse than storefront. CJ has described the menu as intentionally small so it can shift with the seasons rather than trying to be everything at once.
What makes this opening different from Mercantile's is the building's history. That address had one restaurant in it for years. When the Deekens' cafe finally closed, the space could have sat empty, or it could have become something generic. Instead it became a full-service sit-down restaurant with a curated bourbon bar, built by people who already lived in Nicholasville and wanted, in CJ's own words at a city commission meeting, a place where he could eat with his own family any night of the week.
The Corner That Used to Be a Dog Grooming Shop
The most unlikely of the three openings sits at 106 E Maple Street, in a space that used to house Downtown Dogs Spa. Taste of Ukraine soft-launched there on January 15, 2026, and held its grand opening on February 14. Taras and Tetiana Soloshchuk fled Ukraine in 2022 after Russia's invasion, arrived in Nicholasville, and spent months renovating the old grooming shop into a dining room decorated with paintings representing Ukraine's twenty-six regions and wheat motifs lining the windows, a symbol the Soloshchuks describe as representing resilience.
The menu is priced and built like a restaurant that means it: borscht at $14, a green version made with sorrel and spinach at $10, varenyky dumplings filled with potato at $17 or pork and chicken at $22, deruny potato pancakes at $17, holubtsi stuffed cabbage at $18, homemade Ukrainian sausage at $29, pork schnitzel at $27, and beef stroganoff at $33. The restaurant also employs at least ten Ukrainian refugees, giving the opening a second purpose beyond the menu itself.
This is the opening that turns Nicholasville from a town that closed a gap into a town that opened one nobody else in the state has. Louisville doesn't have this. Lexington doesn't have this. It's on Maple Street, a block off Main, in a building that used to smell like dog shampoo.
Why Three Strangers Landed in the Same Six Months
None of this happened because a redevelopment plan willed it into existence. Soul on Main happened because a longtime restaurant space finally turned over and a couple with the right resume was ready to take it. Mercantile happened because someone noticed a category of business every comparable town had and Nicholasville didn't. Taste of Ukraine happened because a refugee family with restaurant experience in their home country needed a building, and an empty pet grooming shop was available at the right time.
That's a more useful signal than a single planned anchor tenant would be. When one developer fills a downtown, you're watching one bet. When three unconnected owners independently choose the same three blocks within the same year, each solving a different problem the street actually had, you're watching a pattern. It suggests the storefronts on Main and Maple were genuinely available and genuinely worth the risk, not that someone subsidized the outcome.
What Happens on September 11
All three of these businesses will be doing regular Tuesday-through-Saturday business when Downtown Days arrives on September 11 through 13, 2026. The three-day festival, organized by the city and Visit Jessamine, turns the same stretch of Main Street into a Main Street Market with a Kentucky Folk Art Row, a BBQ Competition Row with Ask-the-Pitmaster sessions, a classic car show, a cornhole tournament, and a community parade, with live music running from a main stage down to porch musicians scattered between storefronts.
It's worth keeping this separate in your head from the Jessamine Fall Festival the following weekend, September 18 and 19, which is a different event out at 1101 Brannon Road with its own pageant and craft vendor lineup. Downtown Days is the one that actually uses Main Street as its stage, which means it's the one where Soul on Main's dinner crowd, Mercantile's coffee line, and Taste of Ukraine's borscht all end up within a few hundred feet of a BBQ competition and a car show at the same time.
Earlier in the year, the city's free Performance Park Concert Series gave downtown a similar test run, with monthly shows running from 7 to 9:30 in the evening and acts like Sheerflow and The Encore Band drawing people who then walked over for dinner rather than driving home first. Downtown Days is the same idea at festival scale.
The Street Didn't Get a Makeover. It Got Three Answers.
None of these three businesses would make headlines on their own. A new coffee shop opening is not news. A new restaurant taking over an old cafe space is not news. But add a state's-only Ukrainian restaurant run by a refugee family, stack all three within roughly six months of each other, and the story stops being about any single storefront and starts being about what a Main Street looks like right before people start noticing it from the outside.
If you already live here, you've probably been to one of these three. Maybe you haven't connected all three yet, or noticed that the timing lines up, or realized that the building on Maple Street used to smell like wet dog. That's the kind of detail you only pick up by paying attention to your own street, which is exactly what's worth doing before Downtown Days turns it into a festival for a weekend.
If you're weighing what it means to put down roots on a street like this one, or you're curious what else in Central Kentucky is quietly building the same kind of momentum, Trey McCallie can walk you through it neighborhood by neighborhood. Let's Connect.
