Made With Love: Cincinnati Chefs Share the Holiday Dishes They Love and How to Ace Your Holiday Feast

This story is featured in CityBeat’s Nov. 29 print edition.

From now through the end of the year, any number of culinary delights related to the many winter holidays will grace dinner tables across the world. Sure, there are the classics like Thanksgiving (and Christmas) turkey and green bean casserole. But what makes something a holiday food? Can you eat it at other times of the year? Would it be a holiday without it? What are new traditions waiting to become popular?

“I definitely love this time of year, because not only is it very food focused, but it’s like, essentially, all-hands-on-deck food focused, and that’s pretty rare nowadays,” said Kayla Robison, most recently head chef at Arnold’s Bar and Grill. “The days of the family coming together and making food from scratch isn’t very common anymore. So it’s kind of nice that we kind of come together and these are the moments where all the family recipes from generations on come out and everybody kind of pitches in and it really is like the true meaning of breaking bread.”

Robison has plenty of professional experience with the holiday season — and not just at Thanksgiving and Christmas time. Prior to the pandemic, for over 30 years, Arnold’s served a Thanksgiving feast every Thursday.

“I worked there for two years before the pandemic. That means I made the turkey 52 times a year,” said Robison. “I have kind of gone on to perfect, having made it so many times, my craft.”

In addition to Thanksgiving Thursdays, also in the years before the pandemic, Arnold’s would host what Robison calls a misfit Thanksgiving. The doors would open, with the regular fixings provided, and the only requirement for attendees was to bring a side to share with everyone else.

“I think quickly Thanksgiving grew to be my favorite holiday because of that,” said Robison.

Chef Jose Salazar echoes that sentiment.

“Thanksgiving has always been really important to me,” he said. “For one, it’s the night that my wife and I met. It’s always just been kind of our holiday. I also love it because it’s centered around food. How can I not love it as a chef?”

Salazar’s three restaurants — Mita’s, Salazar and Goose & Elder — are all closed on “the big holidays,” as he calls them: Thanksgiving, Christmas Day, Christmas Eve and New Year’s Day. The day before Thanksgiving, all staff members prepare a dish to share at a “family meal” (industry speak for the restaurant staff meal consumed before serving guests) Friendsgiving.

“We want everybody to enjoy those holidays,” said Salazar. “We don’t want them to have to work when everybody else is partying.”

Many of the traditional dishes served at Thanksgiving also make an appearance a month later on Christmas Day, including turkey. Robison’s advice for the perfect juicy turkey? It’s all in the way you brine. You can do dry or wet, and a lot of people do wet. She prefers dry.

“I just take straight-up flaky salt and I will rub the turkey inside and out, under the skin, every little bit – the thing looks like it’s got crazy dandruff,” said Robison. “I wrap it with Saran wrap really tightly, no more than two days. I rinse it thoroughly, pat it dry, and then I slather it in mayo. Mayo is the secret ingredient for all things browning. It’s got sugars and fat from the oil and egg yolk. All of those things help the Maillard effect where it really caramelizes and browns those proteins and it just makes this beautiful browning.”

Salazar personally is turkey-ed out by the time Christmas rolls around.

“I do ham on Christmas usually, or I’ll do a beef roast of some sort, like a little prime rib or something like that,” said Salazar. “The ham is my favorite. And I always make fried rice, too. I grew up in New York and if you have nowhere to go on Christmas Day, foolproof, a Chinese restaurant is going to be open. So I’ve leaned into that and I’ve been doing a lot of Chinese foods as an homage to the Chinese takeouts of my childhood.”

Robison has Jewish heritage and also partakes in Chinese food on Christmas Day.

“We really blend the holidays,” she said. “Family-wise, my family recipes are definitely on my Jewish side, so like my great-grandma’s recipes [like her] sweet noodle kugel on Hanukkah. And as each generation goes, somebody’s tweaking something. Those are fun for me to bust out during Hanukkah or Yom Kippur or Rosh Hashanah, those kinds of holidays.”

Chef Candice Holloway of Soul Secrets has some dishes that are exclusive to certain holidays, too.

“When I think of holiday food, I think of cornbread dressing,” said Holloway. “We only make it for Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter.”

The recipe, like all the others at Soul Secrets, was passed down to Holloway from her grandmother and is only offered on the menu during the holiday season. The handing-down of recipes is more than just an instruction for cooking; it’s a portal to connection.

“It definitely brings back the nostalgia of the family gathering around the table,” said Holloway. “Food brings people closer together; it shows the love, and because we cooked together as a family, it brings back memories of everybody being in one place and one space and just sharing the love between each other.”

Soul Secrets has a dine-in option and has also offered catering for holiday meals for the past five years, which means Holloway often finds that her family’s food is on another family’s table.

“We received an overwhelming response to our holiday orders, that we were like, ‘Wow, this many people aren’t cooking?’” said Holloway. “Last year we closed for Thanksgiving because we got so many orders for people that were wanting to share our family recipes. It’s special to me because these are recipes my grandmother taught me to make. It just warms my heart that people are sharing her recipes at their kitchen table during Thanksgiving dinner.”

In fact, Soul Secrets has been so inundated with orders, Holloway has already closed holiday ordering for Thanksgiving and, this year, is taking off for Christmas and New Year’s Eve and Day.

But if you’re in need of a traditional holiday food option on New Year’s Eve, you can swing by Kiki in College Hill.

“We’ve been doing the toshikoshi soba every year,” said chef and Kiki owner Hideki Harada. “We sell the noodle soup, the broth and the noodles. It’s really simple, and we price it so everybody can really enjoy it. That’s just something we’ve been doing since we opened — the year-end soba. That’s something people have been coming in for on New Year’s Eve.”

As Harada explains it, in the Japanese tradition, on New Year’s Eve, you want to cut the year out, or end the year, by eating soba noodles. The noodle represents the whole year, but as buckwheat noodles break easily, it’s symbolic of ending the year.

“You just have to make sure you eat that before the bell rings at midnight,” said Harada.

The biggest piece of advice from Cincinnati chefs to make your holiday meals a hit? Prep, prep, prep.

“Truly prep your stuff ahead of time so that you are not stressing and doing it all in one day,” Robison said. “A lot of things can be what we call in the industry ‘parcooked,’ meaning, partially cooked. A lot of things at restaurants are cooked half or three-fourths of the way and then finished to order, meaning they finish the last bit of it. It’s mise en place. It really just comes down to it. That’s how we set ourselves up to feed 300 people on a Friday night.”

“I think a lot of people don’t necessarily know how much they can do in advance, and you can do a lot,” Salazar echoed. “It’ll cause you less stress the day of, and you can do more assembling and reheating than cooking-cooking. That’s what we do in restaurants. We joke that all the work really happens before service.”