Mike Linnig's

Mike Linnig opened his eponymous catfish palace back in 1925, when Louisville’s factories were manned by Irish and Italian immigrants who insisted upon fish on Fridays. The restaurant’s continued to thrive since Vatican II, with more than a thousand people packing its patio on sunlit summer evenings for battered and breaded catfish filets, fat house-made onion rings, and white cod sandwiches. “It just grew like a church picnic,” owner (and Linnig’s granddaughter) Nancy Wuerth says laughing.