Coles 735 Main

The Restaurant

Coles 735 Main holds a converted single-storey cottage on East Main Street in the Bell Court neighbourhood, two miles east of The Square in downtown Lexington and one block from the Henry Clay Estate at Ashland on Sycamore Road. Lexington-native chef and proprietor Cole Arimes opened the room in 2012 and has run it as a single coherent chef-driven dining floor for fourteen years now — the giveaway that a chef-driven Kentucky room is genuinely held rather than rented. The dining floor seats about sixty across a single low-lit room with French-countryside-inspired decor — exposed limestone walls salvaged from the original cottage frame, warm filament pendants over each white-linen-set table, leather banquettes along the western wall, a small marble-topped front bar that pours about thirty signature cocktails, and a single chef's table at the back of the floor that books four-tops with a view directly into the working kitchen line.

The kitchen runs a modern American programme organised around a deliberately rotating Kentucky-and-international producer list — Marksbury Farm beef from Lancaster, Weisenberger Mill grits from Midway, in-house-cured charcuterie cycling weekly across the small bar's antipasto board, daily-baked breads from the kitchen's own service oven, and house-pickled vegetables that anchor every salad and grain bowl on the seasonal-rotation menu. Signature plates across the rotating dinner menu include the seared duck breast with sour-cherry gastrique and farro, the Marksbury Farm pork loin with brown-sugar bourbon glaze and grilled peaches, the pan-seared Atlantic salmon with miso-and-honey glaze, the dry-aged Marksbury ribeye with bone-marrow butter, and a hand-cut tagliatelle with country-ham carbonara that runs as a dining-room signature whenever Chef Arimes has the Pleasant Hill bacon in. Chef de Cuisine Megan Duffy has held the kitchen line for several seasons running.

Service at Coles runs at the upper Lexington chef-driven pace — captains who walk the floor with the day's specials, a sommelier on the floor every weekend evening, and a kitchen pace that runs at the deliberate eighty-five-minute rhythm of a real three-course evening rather than the fast turn of a Bell Court neighbourhood restaurant. The wine programme has held the Wine Spectator Award of Excellence — the cellar runs to about two hundred and fifty labels with deliberate Burgundy, Loire and Napa depth — and the cocktail programme runs about thirty signature builds with house-made shrubs and bitters. The dining floor stays low enough on volume for real conversation across the table, which is the design choice that has carried the room through fourteen years of Bell Court neighbourhood turnover. For a Lexington first date or birthday weeknight evening that needs to register as chef-driven without ever announcing that it is, Coles 735 Main is the address that has held East Main since the second Obama term.