What's next for Wiltshire on Market chef? Don't worry. She's not leaving Louisville

When a luminary on Louisville's culinary scene, Susan Hershberg, announced recently on social media that she was closing the longstanding and iconic Wiltshire on Market, there was some legit panic.

But don't worry, Louisville diners. She’s not retiring just yet, and she hand-picked her successor at the intimate little space in NuLu.

I caught up with Hershberg to do something a lot of folks haven’t done since March of 2020 — take a breath and reflect.

The biggest takeaway for me during my lovely conversation with Hershberg while she was taking some necessary R&R in Maine, was how very fortunate we've been to have her nourishing us, and the Louisville food scene, for so many years.

With a solid catering operation plus later her Highlands bakery, downtown cafe, and Speed Art Museum outpost, the NuLu restaurant she opened 14 years ago at 636 E. Market St., was free to be a "creative adventure," Hershberg told me. "It was never a really serious business model if you will ... It was purely a culinary experiment where we change the menu every week and play with what we wanted to play with."

With only eight tables and limited opening hours, she was able to streamline operations to run it with a single team.

"We did it purely for the joy of that," she says. "We didn't worry about the bottom line, because we didn't have to."

While she would never say this herself, Wiltshire on Market was really a gift to the food scene in this city.

For nearly a decade and a half, she and her dedicated team shone a light on local farmers and producers, helping us love all that is good about Kentucky, and anchoring a part of town that has changed radically with an experience that's authentic and true to our roots.

The other gift was the launching pad she offered to rising talent. While chefs as a breed have a reputation for their own drive and ego, Hershberg takes genuine joy in the opportunity to showcase the talents of others. To see their creativity every week “really was the exciting part of it,” she says.

That path culminated with handing over the reins of the space when she brought in Noam Bilitzer as a chef in-residence to develop his new eastern Mediterranean concept, MeeshMeesh.

This was exceedingly intentional.

Specifically on the East Market corridor, Hershberg says, “I did not just want to put a for rent sign on the window.” She was committed, she says, to making certain the space remained independent as it's become increasingly harder for local entrepreneurs to break into the dining business.

"I mean, try to open a small independent restaurant right now," she says. Unless "you either have really, really deep pockets … which if you have pockets that deep you're … not working in the restaurant, or you are buried under debt."

Thankfully for us, she's “now in this wonderful position where I can have somebody in the space that I know and trust,” she says.

After the bleak COVID-19 days, when many restaurants had to instantly get up and running again without a moment to draw a breath, she couldn't be as hands-on as she wanted at Wiltshire on Market.

"It was really, really hard to find somebody that could take it on and wanted to take it on. And then I had a couple of really unsuccessful attempts at trusting folks to go in there and cook and the public really became [nasty] and I was waking up to just hideous comments online.

"I just didn't have the tolerance for it anymore. So, I just closed the restaurant."

(Ahem, fellow diners: maybe think about that the next time you want to write something hateful about a local business online. The chefs giveth and the chefs can taketh away.)

But she feels good about this choice. Bilitzer’s skill blew her away, Hershberg says. He is “extraordinarily talented.”

And their several-month collaboration allowed him to properly ramp up MeeshMeesh, which honors the food traditions of the eastern Mediterranean, encompassing flavors from Israel — where Bilitzer is from — as well as Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria and more.

I wondered if this is a model used elsewhere — a seasoned restaurateur paving the way for a rising star. It makes perfect sense, after all. Hershberg isn’t aware of anyone else having done this, but I, for one, hope this approach becomes more common as veteran industry stars begin to make their way out of the workforce.

On that, we truly don't have to worry just yet that she's exiting Louisville's culinary scene. Although she does have a plan in mind, all other operations, such as the popular Wiltshire Pantry Bakery and Cafe, 901 Barret Ave., are still in play, she assures us.

But she does have a caution, and request for us as diners.

"I think more than anything right now … I wish that we would extend quite a bit more grace to one another across the board," she says.

“Restaurants have been through hell and back and we're still stuck in so many ways. And if ... small, independent creative folks are going to make it to the other side, we need committed followers. We need folks to really dig in deep with us and help us and be kind," she added. "If you have a bad meal, you know what? Bite your tongue. Because we're still really making our way out and, really, we're doing our best."

You may like: Chef taking over former Wiltshire spot brings 'very soulful' Mediterranean food to NuLu

You may like: How this new craft brewery is changing Portland's neighborhood identity

Tell Dana! Send your restaurant “Dish” to Dana McMahan at thecjdish@gmail.com and follow @bourbonbarbarella on Instagram.

This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Chef Susan Hershberg on why she closed Wiltshire on Market restaurant