Nothing screams artisan or handcrafted food like a flannel-shirted, tattooed server. Remove the pageantry from the building, please, and just give us the weird cuts of beef or spruced up hot dog served alongside a Prohibition-era cocktail.   

I’d learned through an accidental slip of the lip that pastry chef Summer Genetti left The Palace this summer. She’d been a star at that fine-dining restaurant, and leaving was a tough decision. But for a young woman who’d started soaring ahead in her career soon after she started at age 18, the focus it had taken to get to the top was taking a toll. She’d grown up at work, in the kitchen, putting in an incredible number of hours and missing her twenties almost entirely.  

Quick: During what month can you learn how to raise urban chickens in your own backyard and get $2 million in free food and wine from Jeff Ruby? Yep, it could only be August in Cincinnati.