“We like to pioneer stuff as much as possible,” Louisville, Kentucky-based chef and restaurateur Ryan Rogers says. And the Eater Young Gun’s newest restaurant, Bar Vetti, will mark a few firsts when it opens tonight in a downtown Louisville “no man’s land” bounded by the central business district on one side and the Victorian mansions of Old Louisville on the other.

Bar Vetti is the only restaurant in the neighborhood, and it’s the only restaurant of its kind in Rogers’s HiCotton Restaurant Group. Rogers rose to local prominence with Feast BBQ, a fast-casual barbecue restaurant he opened in 2012 in New Albany, Indiana. He expanded it across the river to Louisville in 2014, opened Nashville hot chicken restaurant Royals Hot Chicken in 2015, and this week, he adds Italian Bar Vetti, the first full-service restaurant of the bunch. With Bar Vetti, Rogers says, “the level of expectation is so much higher.”