Park anywhere on North Main Street in Versailles this month and you can walk to breakfast, lunch, and dinner without moving your car. Eighteen months ago that sentence would not have made sense. Downtown had good spots, but they didn't stack into a full day. Now three buildings, all older than anyone currently living in them, have quietly filled in the gaps.
This isn't a story about a restaurant opening. It's a story about what happens to a downtown when three separate owners, working independently, all decide the smartest building to bet on is one that's already standing.
Three Buildings, Three Different Centuries
Start at 101 North Main Street, inside a bank vault. The building was the Woodford Bank and Trust Company, built in 1852, and it now houses The Aldenberg Hotel after a $10.7 million renovation by Single Barrel Group. The ground floor is Silk's Steakhouse, run by Executive Chef Jon Baugh, a Lexington native with Michelin-starred kitchen experience, serving dinner Tuesday through Saturday from 5 to 10 p.m. The hotel also runs its own craft distillery producing a bourbon called Keyholder's Reserve, and the owners had a rooftop bar penciled in for spring of this year.
Walk a short stretch up the same street to 175 North Main and you're standing in an 1860s brick storefront that's now Black Squirrel, a breakfast-and-lunch spot from Lexington chef Cole Arimes, named Best Chef in Lexington in 2025, and his business partner Richard Turnbull. The kitchen is run day to day by Chef de Cuisine Olivia Jackson, a Versailles native who came up through The Manchester Hotel in Lexington before coming home to run her own kitchen. The restaurant is named for a real horse, a Woodford County saddlebred stallion whose local fame apparently outlasted him by more than a century.
Then there's the building that used to be Versailles' police station, a structure pushing 130 years old that most recently held Vallozzi's, the Pennsylvania Italian restaurant that opened downtown in 2023 and lasted about two years. Last September, a local team reopened the space as Amsden Station, a pub-and-pizza concept that now sits next to the Amsden Bourbon Bar, the bourbon library that's anchored that corner of downtown since 2017.
Three buildings. None of them new construction. All of them within a few blocks of each other on the same street.
Why The Timing Matters
Amsden Station opened first, last September. Silk's Steakhouse followed about a month later when The Aldenberg opened its doors. Black Squirrel came last, opening this January and closing the loop. In under half a year, downtown Versailles went from having isolated good meals to having a sequence.
Cole Arimes said as much when he announced the restaurant, describing the building itself as the reason the concept finally happened.
"Versailles is in an exciting time right now, and we cannot wait to be a part of it."
He's not wrong about the timing, but the more interesting detail is what he's not saying. None of these three teams built anything from scratch. They found old buildings that already had bones and history, and they built dinner, lunch, or breakfast around what the building already was.
What Each Spot Is Actually For
The three restaurants don't compete with each other so much as divide the day between them. Here's how that breaks down if you're deciding where to go and when:
| Spot | Building | What It Covers | Worth Ordering |
|---|---|---|---|
| Black Squirrel | 1860s brick storefront, 175 N Main St | Breakfast and lunch, Wednesday through Sunday, 8 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. | The Breakfast Hot Brown |
| Amsden Station | The old police station building | Dinner, pub fare and pizza | Lump crab beignets |
| Silk's Steakhouse | The Aldenberg Hotel, 1852 bank building | Dinner, Tuesday through Saturday, 5 to 10 p.m. | The bone-in tomahawk ribeye, $185 and built for two |
Black Squirrel closes before Amsden Station or Silk's ever open their doors for the night, which means there's no real overlap. If you want a Saturday that starts with a breakfast burrito and ends with a tomahawk ribeye split two ways, you can now do that entire loop without leaving Main Street. That wasn't a real option before this year. It is now, and it's the kind of thing that only shows up if you're paying attention to what actually opened where, not just that something opened.
Market Days Are Still Running, For Now
The restaurant boom isn't the only thing happening on that stretch of downtown. The District Versailles, the market and entertainment space at 105 Rose Hill Avenue that opened in 2024, has been running Market Days on the second and fourth Saturdays from May through August. This season wraps up on August 22, which means there's one Saturday morning left before the market goes quiet until next year. If you've been meaning to grab coffee and local produce from a vendor table on a Saturday morning, this month is your last shot at it for a while.
The District also hosts a Block Party series through the summer with food trucks, a vendors market, and live music, which has become the kind of casual evening plan that didn't really exist downtown before the space was built. Between the restaurants and the market, downtown Versailles has picked up a rhythm it didn't have a couple of years ago. Something is worth walking to most days of the week, not just on festival weekends.
The Buildings Are The Real Story
It would be easy to write this up as "three new restaurants opened in Versailles," and that's technically true, but it misses the pattern. A 174-year-old bank, an 1860s storefront, and a building that once housed the town's police department all found new life within a few months of each other, and none of them required tearing anything down. Downtown Versailles didn't get bigger. It got used better.
If you've lived here a while, you probably remember when some of these buildings sat quiet, or when Vallozzi's tried its hand in that same police station space and didn't stick around. What's different now isn't just who's cooking. It's that three separate groups looked at three separate old buildings and independently landed on the same bet: that Main Street's history was worth building around instead of building over.
I'll be honest, I used to only have one after-five reason to park on Main Street. Now I have three, and I still haven't made it to Black Squirrel for breakfast on a weekday, which is apparently the move according to everyone I've talked to.
If you're curious about what else is changing in Woodford County, whether that's a new restaurant, a horse farm coming up for sale, or a piece of land you've had your eye on, I'd love to hear from you. Sarah MacHarg is always up for a conversation about what's next in this town. Let's Connect.
