I don’t know whether you’ve noticed, but Cincinnati has become a top-tier dining city. Over the past couple of decades and especially in recent years, our food scene has developed beyond anything I ever would have imagined. We don’t have to go to Chicago, New York or California to enjoy astonishing, world-spanning restaurants and markets. It’s all right here.
When I moved to Cincinnati from Atlanta in the late 1990s, it felt like going backward in time for this food lover. In those days, Jungle Jim’s was my lifeline for home cooking, and places like Chateau Pomije in O’Bryonville and Maisonette downtown along with a smattering of spots in Mt. Adams were among the few interesting restaurants I could find.
Then, around 2003, 3CDC began its long-term investment in the OTR neighborhood, rehabbing historic buildings and attracting new businesses to the area. It was slow-going at first, but by 2010 or so, both OTR and downtown Cincinnati experienced both residential and commercial growth. Restaurateurs took note, and top chefs began to find their way here, often from larger cities in the Midwest and beyond.
“Without the investment by 3CDC,” said David Falk, chef/owner of Boca and Sotto, “none of the restaurants in OTR or downtown would exist today.” Most of them managed to survive the 2020-2021 pandemic and have been joined post-Covid by another surge of exciting new culinary ventures.
But that’s not to say the past few years have been easy for restaurants, here or elsewhere. Inflation has taken a toll on discretionary spending. “I understand that it is a luxury to dine out,” said Jose Salazar, owner of Mita’s downtown and Safi in OTR. And yet he and many others are inspired to take financial risks and share their talents with those of us who are willing and able to gather at their tables.It’s certainly been a very good year for Cincinnati dining in terms of national recognition. For the 2024 James Beard Awards, sometimes referred to as the Oscars of food, four Cincinnati chefs were nominated as regional semifinalists for Best Chef. They were repeat nominations for Salazar (for Mita’s), Jeffery Harris (Nolia Kitchen), Elaine Uykimpang Bentz and Erik Bentz (Café Mochiko), but the final awards went elsewhere. With our region overshadowed by the much larger city of Chicago, winning a James Beard competition in Cincinnati has been out of reach. The late Jean-Robert de Cavel, renowned chef at Maisonette and Jean-Robert’s Table, received four nominations as Best Chef, Midwest Region, without taking home the prize.
Additional recognition followed in 2024. Over the summer Camporosso, a deservedly popular pizza restaurant in Ft. Mitchell, Ky., was honored by Pizza Today magazine as Pizzeria of the Year. That’s after Food & Wine named it Best Pizza in Kentucky in 2021. (I challenge you to find a better pepperoni pizza within driving distance of the Ohio River.)
Later in the year, the New York Times selected The Aperture as one of the 50 best restaurants in the United States. In December, Esquire Magazine named Wildweed (chef/owners David and Lydia Jackman) one of the best 35 new restaurants in the nation. In December, Open Table announced the inclusion of six Cincinnati restaurants in its Top 100 for the year: Alfio’s, Boca, Jeff Ruby’s Steakhouse, Pepp & Dolores, The Precinct and Sotto. No other Ohio restaurants made that list.
There is just so much delicious cooking coming from a variety of restaurants in our metro area. “Cincinnati boxes above its weight in the quality of our restaurants compared to our size,” said Salazar. There’s so much creative, innovative energy here, he said. “It isn’t lost on me how spectacular a dining public we have in our city, [and] I thank them very much for their support of independent restaurants.”
Dave Willocks, chef/owner of The Baker’s Table in Newport, also expressed gratitude for the public response his restaurant has enjoyed this year. “We’ve been pushing upward to [offering] more elevated food,” he said, applying innovations common at top-shelf restaurants in California, D.C. and New York. The response has been enthusiastic, Willocks said. For instance, one week per month Baker’s Table schedules elaborate wine dinners when they debut the following month’s menu paired with specially selected wines. Many of the dinners have been sellouts, he said.
Willocks added that other area chefs also are “doing things we haven’t seen here before,” and “it’s working.”
Why chefs choose Cincinnati
Willocks grew up in Washington, D.C., studied music and spent time in New York City trying to make it as a musician before he settled into cooking in top-shelf California restaurants. He met and later married Wendy Braun, a Cincinnati-area native and now co-owner of The Baker’s Table. Although they could have set up shop in a larger metro area, they opened the restaurant on the edge of downtown Newport, Ky., in 2018.
“There’s so much opportunity here,” Willocks said. “Customers are really hungry for great food. And the market is still affordable enough to start a restaurant here.” Affordability has attracted a lot of chefs from larger cities to open for business here, alongside customers also fleeing bigger cities, he said.
David Jackman, chef/owner at Wildweed, born in Winnipeg, Canada, came our way after he married Ohio native Lydia Jackman, and she took a job in Cincinnati. “I knew nothing about the city, [and] I quickly fell in love with it. We’ve spent a lot of time building our lives in this community.” He points to a “Midwestern sensibility” and “the support we get to share our alternate vision of Midwestern cuisine” that has made the couple settle here.
Harris had no connection at all with Cincinnati when he arrived by bus after Hurricane Katrina devastated his home city of New Orleans. With a resume that included time as sous chef at Emeril’s in New Orleans, he started strong here. He worked under Todd Kelly in what was then perhaps our city’s top restaurant, Orchid, followed by stints with Salazar at the Palace and subsequently Salazar in OTR. Eventually he opened his own restaurant, Nolia Kitchen, in 2022.
Harris said that while New Orleans wasn’t the same after Katrina, “it took a lot to call Cincinnati home. What kept me here, kept me grounded, was the freedom to do my own thing with New Orleans cooking. I can bring what I miss, and what I love, to the people here.”
Jordan Anthony-Brown was born and raised in Cincinnati, then left for college in North Carolina followed by work in New York and Washington, D.C. When he unexpectedly found his way back here in the mid-2010s — for family reasons, he said — he was surprised that Cincinnati was “a much different, more inviting city.” After a few years working with Falk at Boca, he decided to work toward opening his own restaurant. After several years, delayed by the pandemic, and late in 2023 he opened The Aperture, which has been a smashing success by most measures.
Salazar was born in Columbia, South America, grew up in Queens, New York, and moved to Cincinnati in 2008 to become executive chef at the Cincinnatian Hotel’s Palace Restaurant. A few years later, he opened the beloved Salazar’s in OTR, a space he rebranded in 2024 as Safi Wine Bar. As he plans for the downtown relocation of Salazar’s and continues to operate Mita’s, he reflected on how Cincinnati became his permanent home.
“I stay because I have a wonderful community of friends and because it is a wonderful city, [with] beautiful green spaces and architecture and of course because we have a spectacular food and beverage scene,” he said. “We have a great variety of restaurants that are soulful and operated by people who have a real connection to the food they are cooking and serving.”
A veteran of restaurants in New York City before he moved here, Salazar suggested that the food-loving public of Cincinnati shouldn’t feel overshadowed by larger metro areas. “Unlike a lot of cities, the operators in Cincinnati are less concerned about what is trending and more into showing us who they are through their cuisines.”
But the operation of a restaurant, whether upscale or mid-range, can be a nail-biting way of life. The restaurant business “has always been a difficult model with very thin margins,” Salazar said. “Post-COVID it has become even harder to make the numbers work.”
The statistics are sobering. Almost two-thirds of new restaurants close within three years of opening, and the National Restaurant Association estimates that just 20 percent make it past five years. The upfront investment to open a restaurant easily can reach hundreds of thousands of dollars or more, which usually must be borrowed or otherwise raised from a variety of sources. Staff turnover is among the highest in the private sector, while, for a variety of reasons, food waste can significantly dent a restaurant’s bottom line.
It’s remarkable that we have so many great dining choices, considering those scary statistics. I have wondered about the whereabouts of some of my favorite chefs whose restaurants closed, before or during COVID, and who haven’t been in the public eye since. Occasionally, I’ll look them up online, hoping for a recent entry.
I had lost track of Mark Bodenstein, whose cooking dazzled us at Nuvo in Newport back around 2013-2015, until he opened Alara in Madisonville this year. Turns out that after Nuvo he became executive chef with the suburban restaurant group Looking Glass Hospitality to help develop new ventures. After opening mid-range to more upscale restaurants in Mariemont, Mason and Hamilton, he cooked at Alara for the first few months of its existence. His food was as great as I remembered it, but his tenure there was short. Turns out, that was his plan all along. He hired a replacement and left the company to start a small catering business as he contemplates his next move.
Bodenstein was born in Tennessee and moved to Cincinnati with his family in his youth. He learned his craft in Europe and Asia and settled in Louisville where he was sous chef at the award-winning Lily’s before he drifted back here.
“I didn’t intend to stay more than a year,” he said of his return in the mid-2010s. But he was captivated by the changes he saw. “I enjoyed watching the city grow, evolve, and overcome past hindrances. It was cool to be part of the process [and] to help Cincinnati grow from a culinary standpoint.”
Falk — chef/owner of the downtown restaurants Boca, Sotto and Nada — deserves recognition as a major influence in generating that growth. When he opened Boca at its first location in Northside in 2001, he was only 25. But he already had worked in significant restaurants in larger cities, including Charlie Trotter’s in Chicago, and under Jean-Robert de Cavel at Maisonette.
“Jean-Robert never gets enough credit for revolutionizing fine dining” in Cincinnati, Falk said. “He was critical in pioneering the dining scene here.” Falk now helms one of the most elegant restaurants in the Midwest at Boca, and one of the most sought-after tables in Cincinnati at Sotto. More than twenty years after he opened Boca, he still has an enduring passion to make Cincinnati dining better. “I am constantly searching for inspiration wherever I can find it,” Falk said.
The world at our doorstep
Our metro area’s food bounty doesn’t end with the upscale, chef-driven restaurants. We are blessed with one of the best markets in the world at Findlay Market, where butchers, bakers, seafood purveyors, florists, produce kiosks, coffee and tea specialists, hot food stands and more operate six days a week. The two Jungle Jim’s locations in Fairfield and Eastgate offer countless foods and beverages you won’t see at your local supermarkets. When my food-loving relatives and friends visit from out of state, pilgrimages to these markets often make our activities agenda.
Smaller, less upscale restaurants located from downtown to our outer suburbs also are worth seeking out for lovingly prepared meals that span the globe. A very small sampling would include everything from a family-run Peruvian place in Sycamore Township, Inkazteka, to Sago, a Malaysian spot in Mt. Lookout and the Turkish-Mediterranean Artemis in Montgomery. Mt. Adams doesn’t have the variety of restaurants it did twenty years ago, but the cozy Luca Bistro has added homey cooking in a cozy, très français setting to the neighborhood.
We are well represented by Asian restaurants, including a handful of terrific Japanese places. Café Mochiko in East Walnut Hills, as noted above, has repeatedly caught the attention of James Beard voters, and Baru downtown has received recognition for its elevated take on sushi. I’m a regular patron at the modest yet adorable Kiki in College Hill, owned by Hideki Harada. He and his wife, Yuko, received James Beard Best Chef nominations for that restaurant in 2023.
Kiki serves dinner five nights a week, including Sundays, making it one of the few independent restaurants open for Sunday dinner. The atmosphere is bright and casual, with an inviting bar and two small dining rooms. Open since 2019, the restaurant was featured on Guy Fieri’s Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives in 2023. Harada also owns a Japanese convenience store on Court Street, Daruma, as well as Sen, a wonderful seafood shop at Findlay Market that makes fresh poke and ceviche daily.
Harada grew up in Cincinnati before moving to Japan to attend culinary school and worked in kitchens both there and in Europe. He eventually came back to Cincinnati with his wife and young daughter, opening his first restaurant in 2012. That was Kaze in OTR, which he later said was “exhausting” with its 200 seats. The more intimate Kiki seems to suit him and his family better.
“A huge part of my life revolves around this city,” he said. “From my childhood going to Hoshuko (weekend Japanese school) at UC and going to Findlay Market afterwards to my dad and I getting Skyline on the weekends, I just love Cincinnati.”
Harada expressed optimism about what lies ahead. “I think the culinary scene is starting really to take shape,” he said. “There are some seriously talented chefs here and we’re fortunate to have them in our small city.”
A taste of things to come
The Aperture’s Anthony-Brown noted that our restaurant culture “has a kind of humility” in which restaurant owners encourage the personal growth of their ambitious, younger staff. “Everybody helps everybody to feel that you’re one part of a larger whole,” he said. In larger cities, competition can overcome cooperation, but he has found the opposite here. “Everybody helps everybody.”
Willocks echoed those sentiments. “There’s too much egotism in California,” he said, referring to his time working in the state. “Here, people want each other to do well.” A rising tide lifts all boats, he noted. “Everybody doing amazing things elevates the standard for everyone else.”
“2024 was a tough year for many of us,” Harada said, suggesting that, as Salazar noted, dining out is a luxury for most people. “[But] I hope to continue to see more diversity in the dining scene in 2025.”
As chef/owner of a restaurant that opened in 2024, Wildweed’s David Jackman said he hoped for continued growth in Cincinnati’s restaurant environment, along with “stronger support for everyone who is part of it, our farmers, our co-producers, our vendors, our teams, our employees — and more opportunities to love food for our guests.”
Clearly, it will require energy, passion and a few lucky breaks to sustain the city’s momentum. “We have to keep pushing,” said Falk. “We aren’t close to what we can be.” He meant to include his own establishments — Boca, Sotto and Nada — which you might think already have reached a comfortable pinnacle of success. “I’m constantly searching for inspiration wherever I can find it and ask, how can we get better every day?”
If the recent past is prelude to the near future, we may have even more outstanding dining experiences to celebrate in the coming year.
This story is featured in CityBeat’s Dec. 25 print edition.
This article appears in Dec 11-24, 2024.