Photos by Mick Jeffries
Joe Bologna’s Italian Restaurant in Lexington isn’t famous for potato chips, and that’s a good thing. In the beginning, it could have gone either way.
When the restaurant’s namesake was considering potential appetizers, the options were breadsticks or potato chips. Bologna tested both on a friend, who bit into a warm breadstick and spoke plainly: “Joe, get those potato chips out of here.”
That was 50 years ago, when the former Air Force cook opened one of Kentucky’s most celebrated eateries, Joe Bologna’s Restaurant & Pizzeria near the University of Kentucky campus.
Early Days
The cooking part certainly wasn’t new for Bologna. “All I’ve done is cook since I was 14,” said Bologna, now a spry 78. “I cooked in the Air Force for four years. The last year I cooked in Vietnam, it was for 3,000 soldiers a meal at Tan Son Nhut Air Base in Saigon.”
Then a funny thing happened. When a general requested an aide who could cook, Bologna went from prepping meals for 3,000 to cooking for one. That assignment had a big, if indirect, effect on Bologna’s future path. “After dinner, the general would say, ‘I love your food, and I’d like to back you in a restaurant someday,’ but he left Vietnam three months before I did,” Bologna recalled.
The seed had been planted. Bologna got another top-brass cooking assignment for another general, this time with Italian roots. “He was like my father,” Bologna said. “I wasn’t married and had ambition to open my own restaurant someday. We were talking about a steak/seafood restaurant. Pizza really had nothing to do with it at that point.”
In the long run, neither general ended up financing the business venture, but Bologna was unfazed, even feeling it was the first general’s way of motivating him. “He liked to push people to do it on their own,” Bologna said. “He made me believe in myself.”
Bologna has spent the last 50 years cultivating an ever-growing legion of customers who believe in him. Or maybe more specifically: They believe in his handmade pizza. And his sumptuous hot breadsticks. And made-from-scratch sandwiches.
Celebrated music educator and trumpeter Vince DiMartino is a believer. “Joe and I came to Lexington about the same year [in the early 1970s]. I believe he started the culinary expansion of Lexington and contributed to the diversity of restaurants in the downtown area,” DiMartino said. “Personally, Joe offered the only authentic Italian food reminding me of my Long Island, New York, pizza walk-in restaurants. But most of all, he made me, and every patron, feel like part of the family.”
Which is fortuitous, because “Joe B’s” had roots in another Lexington family staple—Columbia Steak House—which was in full swing in the early 1970s with multiple locations, including at 103 West Maxwell Street, which would become the original Joe Bologna’s Italian Restaurant & Pizzeria in 1973. Bologna says he grossed $635 the first week. “I figured I was going to starve to death,” he said. “I not only had never owned a business; I had no accounting experience.”
MICK JEFFRIES
The Dough Rises
When you’re talking Italian food, it’s all about the dough—and not just what’s in the cash drawer. Bologna’s wife, Anne, already made a winning dough that was the basis for his traditional Sicilian deep-dish pizza as well as the famous breadsticks, which were modeled after those served in his hometown of Detroit, with delectable garlic butter on the side.
Bologna surveyed the Lexington restaurant scene, such as it was in the early ’70s. “I went all over Lexington and tried every kind of pizza that was made. Everything was frozen, and they used cheap products,” he said.
Fortunes soon improved with the arrival of a particular clientele: college students, whom Bologna quickly embraced. “It definitely became the ‘college place’ in the ’70s and ’80s. Before that, our lunch customers were all businesspeople from downtown. A college student wouldn’t even come into the place,” he said.
One such customer was UK Associate Professor of Multimedia Kakie Urch. “When I was in college in the late ’80s, Joe Bologna’s was almost always the right answer for: ‘Where are we going to eat?’ ” she said. “The food was fresh and delicious; the atmosphere was open and casual. You were likely to see your classmates, professors, administrators or city leaders have a meeting meal, a celebration meal, or just a quick lunch. There were many sessions of strategy for our college radio project, WRFL-FM, at Joe B’s, tossing ideas about while dipping breadsticks or folding pizza.”
“The atmosphere was created by the customers themselves,” Bologna said. “I didn’t try to make it anything. We were a casual place.”
That wasn’t the norm in the early 1970s, when Lexington’s fabled eating spots like Stanley Demos’ Coach House had a semiformal dress code. Not so with Joe Bologna’s Restaurant. “We were not ‘fine food,’ but we were good food and good service. A clean place with a simple philosophy,” Bologna said.
MICK JEFFRIES
Branching Out + Crossing the Street
The approach was a hit, and business was so good that, during the ’70s and ’80s, Joe Bologna’s had three Lexington locations and a delivery business that worked until it didn’t. “I had a general manager at the time who convinced me to go out Richmond Road, but that place lost me $350,000 over seven years,” Bologna recalled. “If it wasn’t for the little place here making so much money … I broke even for the whole seven years!”
Fond memories abound for the original Joe B’s location, at the corner of South Limestone and Maxwell streets. It was small. The capacity claimed to be 70, though packed-in regulars might raise an eyebrow at that high number.
Retired UK music professor Ron Pen said it was his first meal out when he moved to Lexington for graduate school, and he fell in love. “[It] looked and acted exactly as a pizza dive in a college town should: suitably dark, intimately cramped booths, boisterous and gregarious inhabitants,” he said.
A bigger space was on the horizon, though, motivated by a looming rent hike, which seemed unfair to Bologna and his bustling business. “I felt the place never would have had the success without the work we were doing, so I figured I should not pay more because I was successful,” he said.
In August 1989, after 16 years in the original spot, Joe Bologna’s Restaurant found a new home right across the street. The space was in a historic building that had begun life in 1891, serving first as a Presbyterian church and later a synagogue. Both of those congregations had outgrown the space. It was a great match for Bologna, more than doubling the seating capacity and adding the charm of 18-foot-tall stained-glass windows, soaring ceilings and original hardwood flooring.
Rising to Economic Challenges
Bologna has had his share of challenges in the restaurant business—the 1992 and 2008 recessions and the COVID-19 pandemic being among them. In 1992, Bologna was told that he needed to cut $10,000 a month from the budget to make up for a 20 percent drop in sales just to break even. “So, I laid off two managers. I took a 20 percent cut in pay and went back to working 16 hours a day. You do what you got to do to survive,” he said. “After the 2008 recession, I lost money for eight years straight. And I was just getting to break-even and starting to make money again when the pandemic hit.” Bologna said he went from $350,000 in the bank to $25,000.
The COVID-19 pandemic would have been the restaurant’s swan song without support from the federal Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), which floated Bologna $850,000 in forgivable loans. “You didn’t know where it was all going to end—it lasted three years,” he said. “If the PPP money hadn’t been totally backed by the government, I’d have been bankrupt.”
Looking Ahead
After 50 years, both the man and the restaurant seem to be going strong, undaunted. Part of the explanation for the longevity of Joe B’s is surely Bologna himself, who proudly proclaimed: “I like work.” And work he does, usually four-five shifts a week, circulating throughout the back and front of house, doing whatever needs doing, though he confesses it’s harder now that he’s in his 70s than it was when he was younger. “But I can still go back and do whatever I gotta do in the kitchen if I have to,” he said.
Especially critical to the restaurant’s success is a solid staff. “You try to find people with good teamwork, whether it’s in front or the back. You’ve got to be compatible with everybody,” Bologna said.
Through it all, Bologna is grateful for a rewarding and lengthy career. “I got to do what I love doing. Not only had I not planned on being around 50 years, I didn’t plan on it being as successful as it was. I think that we try to just do the same thing we’ve always done,” Bologna reflected. “We don’t try and change things; we just make them the same way people expect to get them every time. I could put a prime rib special out there and have nobody buy it because they know what they want when they come here.”
Which can be a funny predilection but a fun challenge for Joe Bologna. “I had a guy that came in for 13 years and ordered nothing but zucchini parmesan. I finally made him a pizza. And he started getting different things,” he said.
“I stand behind everything that we make—it’s going to be good.”
IF YOU GO:
Joe Bologna’s Restaurant & Pizzeria
120 West Maxwell Street, Lexington
859.252.4933
joebolognas.com