RESTAURANT NEWS | KENTUCKY
Louisville Gets the Taiwanese Restaurant Ming Pu Has Been Building Toward
TANA | MAP | INSTAGRAM
By Eric Barton
6:10 a.m. ET, July 10, 2026
AUTHOR BIO: Eric Barton is editor of The Adventurist and a freelance journalist who has reviewed restaurants for more than two decades. Email him here.
TANA began, at least in the way restaurants often do, after somebody else’s very good dinner.
In 2019, Courtney and Ming Pu were in New York to cook at the James Beard House when they ate at Win Son in Brooklyn. Afterward, they walked out talking about what their own restaurant might be: something rooted in Ming’s Taiwanese childhood. It would be shaped by the restaurants they love. And at its roots, it would have to be serious about hospitality. Years of kitchen-table notebooks, travel, delays, setbacks, and “what if we tried this?” later, that conversation has become TANA.
Courtney and Ming Pu
The restaurant occupies the ground floor of a historic three-story in Louisville’s Germantown neighborhood. TANA is short for Taiwanese New American, which is a tidy name for a fairly personal idea: Ming Pu’s cooking filtered through Kaohsiung, Kentucky, professional kitchens, and the American South. The restaurant has a bar, patio, semi-open kitchen, and private dining room, with Courtney Pu shaping the front-of-house side of the project. The way guests are welcomed, the couple has said, matters as much as what lands on the plate.
Ming Pu has been a familiar name in Louisville for years, with a résumé that includes Jack Fry’s, Village Anchor, and The 502 Bar & Bistro. He has cooked at the James Beard House multiple times, appeared on Beat Bobby Flay, been named to FSR magazine’s 40 Under 40, and participated in the James Beard Foundation’s Policy for Change Boot Camp.
At TANA, the menu channels that history into dishes like mapo tofu cavatelli with Sichuan pork ragu, tartare with scallion pancakes, and TFC, a whole semi-deboned fried chicken. Desserts keep the same logic going with brown butter egg tarts and five-spice babka bread pudding.
Louisville has no shortage of good restaurant stories, but TANA has the rare one that feels years in the making before the first reservation. It’s a husband-and-wife restaurant, a homecoming, and a Taiwanese American argument for letting memory, technique, and welcome sit at the same table.
