This story originally appeared as part of a series in our May 13-26 print edition. Read the rest of the series here and find where you can get a print edition near you here.
As he sits down for an interview, two-time James Beard finalist Jeff Harris wants to make something abundantly clear.
“Tell everyone I’m not a Cajun or Creole restaurant,” he said. “I’m from New Orleans, but my restaurant is not. This is a Global South restaurant, you know?”
One look at Nolia’s ever-changing menu should make that obvious. Several dishes have a New Orleans influence, sure—for example, his take on the West African beef dish suya uses pecans instead of peanuts in the yaji spice blend coating the meat—but what Harris and his team have created is an unconventional, Southern-tinged showcase for the flavors of the Global South and, really, the entire planet.
“I like the mystery that people experience when they come in here. They still think they’re gonna come in here and get mac and cheese, fried fish, all that,” Harris said. “Then they come in and ask their server all type of questions because everything on the menu is unfamiliar. I like that we’re not so easily read. We’re different. We’re unique.”
Harris was well-known in New Orleans for being the sous chef at Emeril’s—yes, that Emeril’s, as in celebrity chef Emeril Lagasse’s globally-known restaurant—but moved to Cincinnati in 2005 after Hurricane Katrina, and ended up sticking around far longer than he ever expected.
His first gig in the city was with Orchids at Palm Court, formerly one of the city’s best restaurants, inside Carew Tower’s historic Art Deco Plaza. Later on, he began working at the Cincinnatian Hotel and met a then-unknown Jose Salazar. He worked with Salazar at The Palace before helping Salazar open his eponymous restaurant in 2013, moved back to New Orleans for a short stint, then moved back here and helped open Mita’s in 2018.
Eventually, Harris wanted to strike out on his own. He was preparing to open a New Orleans-style restaurant as part of Findlay Market’s incubator program in 2019, but then COVID hit and the plan fell through—although he’s “kinda happy that fell by the wayside, because, like, it’s only a temporary spot and I probably would have died over there anyway.”
But a Findlay Market connection did end up coming through for him. Eli Leisring, owner of Eli’s BBQ, let him know he could probably secure a spot at the Oakley Food Hall. Harris applied, and thus Jimmie Lou’s was born.
Named after his great-grandmother who taught him to cook, the food stall was “everything people think Nolia is.” New Orleans staples like gumbo, jambalaya, fried catfish and red beans & rice lined the menu; he even had po’boys with Leidenheimer bread imported directly from the Crescent City. Plenty of Louisiana-themed joints existed in Cincinnati prior, but Jimmie Lou’s was one of the first to truly nail authentic Cajun and Creole cuisine. Still, though, Harris wanted more.
In 2022, he opened Nolia and then subsequently closed Jimmie Lou’s, as the Oakley Food Hall was rapidly going downhill. (It closed permanently six months after Nolia opened its doors.) The building that now houses Nolia was formerly home to Ryan Santos’ award-winning restaurant Please, and it irked Harris that people seemed to resent him for moving into the building of a once-beloved eatery.
“I hated that people wouldn’t let Please die. Every time I’d get interviewed about the space, they’d tell me I have big shoes to fill. That restaurant was closed for two years before I came here. Please is dead. It’s fucking gone. That dude don’t even live in the state anymore,” he said. “Every single writeup, the first few paragraphs were about Please. People still, to this day, come in and ask ‘didn’t this used to be…’ No disrespect to Ryan, but man, fuck dude, this is my shit now! Nobody said ‘big shoes to fill’ when David Falk moved into the Maisonette! It was fuel for me to quiet that noise.”
And quiet that noise he did. Shortly after opening, Nolia was a James Beard finalist for Best New Restaurant in 2023. In 2024, Esquire Magazine named Nolia one of America’s 50 best new restaurants, and Harris was again Beard nominated—this time for Best Chef: Great Lakes, the same award he’s up for in 2026.
But he’s quick to tell you that any awards are “for my staff, not for me.”
“I couldn’t be who I am without the team I have. No matter how talented you are as a chef, if your staff isn’t right down with you, you won’t be successful,” he said. “Every day, at 4:15, no matter how busy we are, we all sit down with each other, have a meal, talk smack, have a smoke, get on our phones, whatever. And it’s important to do, because at 5 o’clock, all that stops and we lock in for service.”
In conversation, Harris speaks softly and tends to draw out a sentence until it’s practically gasping for air, but his words and tone of voice reveal a playful confidence that’s different from a lot of industry professionals. He’ll acknowledge he’s fiercely competitive too, although only in a friendly sense—not in, say, a “Control” by Kendrick Lamar way.
“You talking about damn near a whole different level…” he said, struggling to hold in a chuckle as I bring up the classic diss track.
“More like a ‘Family Matters,’ you know? Or a ‘Like That,’ he said, referencing two songs by Drake and Kendrick Lamar before letting out a raucous belly laugh. “Or almost like a Michael Jordan. Like, oh, you said something about me in the newspaper? Well, next time I see you, it’s on. But also at the end of the day, when the game’s over, I’m still gonna shake your hand even though you lost.”
If it wasn’t obvious by now, Harris tends to march to the beat of his own drum. Anything on the menu at Nolia is something he enjoys making, noting that the one thing he always wanted to do when he opened his restaurant was to “only cook for myself, never for a guest.”
As an example of his culinary philosophy, his purveyors often try to let him know that items like salmon or steak are huge moneymakers that diners tend to gravitate towards because they’re familiar.
“I don’t understand when people say ‘people really like this on the menu, so I gotta put it on there,’ you know? When I hear that, it’s like, why would you even go to school for this? Why would anyone train under these chefs just to please people? Then you’re not showing your full talent and range of skills to keep people happy. Fuck all that,” he said. “I’m trying to have my own thing. My own look and name for what I do. I’m gonna cook what I wanna cook, and eventually, you will like it.”
He appreciates all the love and recognition, but intentionally avoids reading most coverage of his restaurant because “when you check the temperature and start to ride off of ‘hell yeah, people love us,’ that’s when you get complacent.”
“I just wanna keep my foot on everybody neck until bones crack. In a good way. Metaphorically speaking, of course,” he said. “I’m proud of what Nolia has become, and these awards and everything, but I haven’t fully accepted it yet. Because we’re not done.”
What’s “not done” is for Harris to achieve his two biggest goals as a chef.
First, he wants to unify local chefs in such a manner that helps Cincinnati become the next great food city, and get “everybody in the same room” to discuss how it can happen. He’s already partially achieved that goal thanks to his involvement in local nonprofit Chef & Coffee, which sponsors local meetups among industry professionals and provides no-cost mental health care to chefs in the Cincinnati area.
“I think there’s a lot of animosity among chefs in the city … We got a lot of chefs who’ve never even met each other, let alone being next to somebody,” he said. “We need all those people in one room. It’s not about any personal gain, it’s about the city, man. One restaurant can’t do it alone, you know?”
His other goal is two-fold: not only does he want to be known as Cincinnati’s best Black chef, but the city’s best chef, period—although he doesn’t know if Cincinnati is yet the sort of place to accept that the best chef in the city is Black, ending the thought with a winking “but that’s a story for another day,” as he does several times across our conversation.
Harris is a great storyteller, spouting hundreds of amusing anecdotes, hilarious references and service-gone-wrong tales as we sit at one of his favorite tables in the restaurant. But one sticks out: a moment when he gave a reporter from London a “euphoric, almost Ratatouille moment.”
“This guy literally started crying and couldn’t speak after trying the food. His wife tugged on my apron and was like, ‘Look what you did to my husband.’ I couldn’t understand what he was saying, but I knew what he meant. Sometimes food transports you to another place,” he said. “And I could almost take the ride with him because I knew that feeling. That joy. It’s like when you see your favorite cousin after a long time … For him to tell me, ‘This is one of the best meals I’ve ever had,’ that’s what we’re always trying for.”
Nolia is located at 1405 Clay St. in Cincinnati, Ohio. For more information, visit their website.
This article appears in May 13-26, 2026.
