Proof on Main Louisville: Artistry on Your Plate and on the Wall

When it comes to pairing art and upscale dining, there's no place like Proof on Main Louisville, located on Main Street in the Central Business District. Proof on Main Louisville — like the adjacent 21C Museum Hotel — is bursting with contemporary paintings, photographs, sculptures and even video. That's no accident: both are the brainchild of art collectors Laura Lee Brown and Steve Wilson.

Esquire magazine declared Proof on Main one of the best new restaurants of 2006 soon after its opening. The restaurant has also been featured in Bon Appétit, Glamour, Epicurious, Food & Wine, Travel & Leisure and Metropolitan Home magazines, as well as The Wall Street Journal and USA Today.

Chef Michael Paley's dishes show the influence of both Italy and Kentucky Southern-style cooking — usually separately but sometimes in fusion, as in the Rock shrimp risotto with red eye gravy ($18); the chickpea-and-and-country-ham fritter atop a Treviso salad with grain mustard aioli ($9), a dinner appetizer, and the Kentucky bison carpaccio ($13).

Proof on Main's artistry emerges in the Proof Bison Burger, topped with applewood-smoked bacon, Tillamook cheddar from Kenny's Kentucky Cheese and a Jezebel sauce ($14); oven-roasted free-range chicken ($23); the grilled Berkshire pork chop, served with arugula,  pickled green beans and Mission figs and a Berkshire bacon vinaigrette ($26).

Proof also offers "tastings" — samplings of three or four items. (Everyone at the table must participate for anyone to get a sampling.) The lunch tastings average $20, while those at dinner one hovers at $55. Like the rest of the menu, the tastings change.

The breakfast, lunch, dinner and dessert menus change seasonally, so it's worth checking before you go.  

You can make reservations online or by calling (502) 217-6300 or (877) 217-6400.

Proof on Main (and the 21C Museum Hotel), with 5,000 square feet of art-bestrewn space and seven meeting rooms, can accommodate meetings, private parties, retreats, receptions or charitable events of up to 450.

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