On Monday, Wildweed in Over-the-Rhine hosted a special one-night-only collaboration event between the restaurant’s chef/owner David Jackman and Gus Stieffenhofer-Brandson, head chef of the Michelin-starred Canadian restaurant Published on Main.
The special collaboration came about because Jackman and Stieffenhofer-Brandson grew up near each other in Winnipeg, Manitoba; both eventually took their culinary talents to the West Coast later in their career, where they often collaborated together. Monday was the first time the two had collaborated inside Wildweed, and the restaurant’s first collaboration event since March 2025.
While I wasn’t able to snag a spot at the restaurant’s fabled Chef’s Counter for the night (reservations filled up immediately, even before I could write about it), I was able to sit in the dining room to experience at least a portion of what the two chefs had cooked up. The result was nothing short of spectacular.
I started the evening with a bottle of chardonnay from the restaurant’s always-superb wine list. Initially, the wine’s minerality and citrus-forward notes were off-putting, but the more I drank, the more I thought, “Wow, this is some of the best chardonnay I’ve ever tasted.” I considered it yet another reason to trust Wildweed’s excellent staff when it comes to recommendations.
As I sipped wine, the kitchen stopped by and thanked me for stopping in with an “energy bar” dish: the bottom layer was a mix of cashews and foie gras, while the top two layers were parfait and gelatin with flavors of strawberry and wild rose. Weirdly enough, despite the unusual ingredients inside, it did kind of taste like an energy bar with the flavor profiles jacked up a thousand percent. I can’t say that I’ll ever have a dish so unique that makes me think “wow, this tastes like foie gras” and “wow, this tastes like a Kind bar” at the same time ever again in my life — but I wish I could.
Keeping with the theme of lowbrow cuisine morphed into fine-dining opulence, the next dish was “white people taco night,” which I immediately knew I had to order within five seconds of looking at the menu just because of the name. A base layer of beef tartare perfectly seasoned with a heavy mix of cumin, onion and chili powder was adorned with pickled peppers, pico de gallo, crema, and shredded lettuce, with masa tostadas on the side for dipping. Once again, the two chefs nailed the feeling of eating tacos from a grocery store box of Old El Paso while elevating it to something way better than anything I ever cooked up. A special shoutout goes to the tostadas, which were warm, soft and crunchy — our server told us after the night ended, she planned to sit in the back and eat as many as she could, and I was slightly jealous.
While I awaited the main course, Jackman popped over from the chef’s counter and generously gifted the table one of the dishes available up there: a bowl of cured scallops, apple and cucumber inside a cucumber broth with horseradish oil. One single bite, and I was instantly envious of everyone who had secured a reservation in time. The broth, especially, was so good that I held the bowl up and vigorously consumed it like I was slurping up some ramen or an empty bowl of cereal.
Finally, it was time for the show-stopping entrees. First up was the rogies + bacon agnolotti, which featured pierogi filling-stuffed pasta alongside farmer’s sausage, dill beurre blanc — a classic French sauce made with white wine, dill, shallots and butter — and pickled onions. It was incredible, but the real killer was the lamb donair-inspired dish that sported three cuts of meat: one, a lamb loin; another, a sausage; a third, a braised shank. All three were served with a winter tabouli, a ‘turbo hummus’ (which swaps out the tahini used in traditional hummus for peanut butter) and a special turbo green donair sauce, a unique spin on the tangy sauce originally from Halifax, Nova Scotia. As my table partner and I inhaled the entire plate in under two minutes, I felt a bit ashamed I hadn’t taken more time to savor the dish and mentioned as such to our server. She laughed and told us everyone else she’d seen order it had done the exact same thing. Not hard to imagine why.
As our meal concluded, my first thought — other than how outstanding the food ended up — was how every dish I had wouldn’t feel out of place on Wildweed’s usual menu, even though they were all items from the menu of a Michelin-starred restaurant way up north in Canada.
Then it hit me: of course the dishes fit in perfectly, because Wildweed and several other restaurants across Cincinnati are already cooking Michelin-level food. The people in charge of the MICHELIN Guide must have realized it too, because this year is the first that restaurants in the Queen City are eligible for fine-dining’s most coveted award. Events like this, as exciting as they are, just serve as more evidence that our city’s culinary scene can go toe-to-toe with any epicurean destination on the planet. I can’t wait to see what comes next.
For more information on Wildweed, visit the restaurant’s official website.
