An Old-Fashioned Romance

Roger Pinotti’s an old-fashioned guy. “Don’t have a computer in the store,” he says – an iconoclastic view in an era of online flower ordering. “If I did advertising, it’d be the phone number.”

 

Call the phone number, (502) 454-7272, and you’ll likely get Roger, whose Bardstown Road business, Pinotti’s Flower Market, just south of Douglass Loop, is distinctive because of its European-style market feel, complete with buckets of flowers displayed on the sidewalk out front. “Of course, it makes the whole facade look a lot more attractive,” he says. Those outside blooms are for sale, even in cooler weather. After all, he notes, the weather conditions in February aren’t that much different than that of a refrigerator. 

 

If the Pinotti name sounds familiar, it’s because the family’s flower business roots go back a long way – 1919, to be exact. “My father came over from Italy and opened a shop at Preston and Broadway,” says Pinotti. Today, there remain four generations of Pinotti florists, including various grandchildren, and brother Don, who has a shop on Broadway between Second and Third.

 

What is missing – besides a computer – is the pressure to break the bank on sizable arrangements. “We are a retail florist in that we deliver to funerals and hospitals, but we try to develop the bucket shop florist concept where people come in and hand-pick individual stems,” Pinotti says. “The nice thing is that we get these high school kids and they’ll come in and spend a dollar or 75 cents for a carnation or daisy mum. Or someone will come in and get one rose. On the other hand, we have people who want a $50 or $80 mixed bouquet or arrangement.” Besides fresh-cut flowers by the stem or in arrangements, Pinotti’s offers live green plants, seasonal bedding plants and, in the winter, garland, wreaths and even Christmas trees. 

 

Pinotti prizes the personal touch, so he gears the whole store for walk-in, cash-and-carry sales. Curious passersby have enlisted him to do their weddings, and he’s delighted with the insight he can give. “Find out what’s the prettiest, what is the freshest-looking thing that came in that day, the most beautiful,” he says. “Someone might say, ‘I was thinking of some yellow Fuji mums,’ but I can tell them if the purple ones that day are a lot more stunning or fresh. You want to talk to people and find out what they’re doing and why.”

 

And, he has found, the customers are as individual as the blooms in the buckets. “In the Highlands, you have waiters and people who own restaurants. You have the orderly from the hospital and the doctors,” Pinotti says. “It’s a huge mix of people, which I really believe is what makes a city. If the Highlands didn’t exist, I don’t think Louisville would be a real city.”

 

Pinotti’s Flower Market, located at 2120 Bardstown Road, is open seven days a week till 7 p.m., and sometimes even later.