Mazzoni's moves east(Mazzoni's, Voice-Tribune, Feb. 14, 2008
Mazzoni's, one of Louisville's oldest restaurants, will celebrate its 125th anniversary next year. It's also brand-new.
This seeming contradiction is easily explained: Founded in 1884 in downtown Louisville by Philip Mazzoni, a recent arrival from Genoa, Italy, Mazzoni's remains in family hands a century-and-a-quarter later, ranking it as the city's second-oldest eatery. (Only Cunningham's, founded about a decade earlier around the time Aristides won the first Kentucky Derby in 1875, boasts a longer local heritage.)
But Mazzoni's as also as new as last week, when it reopened in shopping center quarters in suburban Middletown, having moved from the spot across Taylorsville Road from Bowman Field that it had called home since the 1980s.
Regular customers will find the new facilities comfortably familiar, as it appears management has brought over all the old furniture (or something very much like it), particularly the giant oak bar and back bar with its ancient tin ceiling, a memorable antique fixture that came along when it moved from downtown to Taylorsville Road a generation ago.
The menu is pretty much the same, too (and it also bears a stylistic kinship - without the German chow - to the bill of fare at Flabby's in Germantown, which is nowadays under the same family management). It's hearty fare, much of it fairly described as old Louisville pub grub: fish sandwiches, catfish, oysters, bratwurst, chicken livers and salmon croquettes (but, curiously, apparently no burgers); pasta dinners, soups, salads and a substantial array of bar-food munchies from boneless chicken wings to homenade pretzels and the always-popular raw-oyster "shooter" in a shot glass with hot sauce.
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Mazzoni's
12003 Shelbyville Road
451-4436