Cincinnati’s Greatest Tables
5 restaurants listedGet the complete Cincinnati dining guide.
New openings, reservation tips, and editor picks — updated quarterly. Free to join.
$ under $40 · $$ $40–$80 · $$$ $80–$150 · $$$$ $150+ per person
Best for First Date in Cincinnati
Best for Business Dinner in Cincinnati
The Top 5 Cincinnati Restaurants
Boca
Boca occupies the corner of East 6th and Walnut, in a polished modern dining room of fewer than ninety seats that has — since chef-owner David Falk reconceived it in 2014 — been Cincinnati's most national restaurant. The kitchen runs an open-fire programme at the back of the room, visible to most tables, and the menu balances Mediterranean small plates with a tight selection of mains that lean toward live-fire cookery. The room is grown-up: linen napkins, low banquettes in deep walnut, ambient lighting that flatters every guest, and a captains-led service team that operates at the international standard.
Sotto
Sotto sits below street level beside Boca's red door on East 6th — the entrance is a narrow staircase that descends past hand-lettered chalkboards into a low-vaulted brick cellar of around sixty covers. The room is the differentiator: exposed nineteenth-century brick walls, hammered-tin ceilings stained dark, votive candles on every table, and acoustic-warm wood floors that absorb the sound of the room and leave a dining hum that never becomes loud. It is the closest Cincinnati comes to an authentic Roman or Florentine trattoria, and it has been the city's reference Italian room since David Falk opened it in 2012.
Nolia Kitchen
Nolia Kitchen opened in 2023 in a converted nineteenth-century brick building on Clay Street in the Pendleton corner of Over-the-Rhine — about a six-minute walk north of Findlay Market. Chef-owner Jeff Harris, a New Orleans native who came up through the kitchens of Brennan's and August in his home city before moving to Cincinnati, runs the kitchen and the room in equal measure: he is on the line most services and on the floor for the rest. The dining room seats sixty across a single high-ceilinged space — exposed brick, a long oak bar at the back, an open kitchen on the right wall, and a row of leather banquettes that read more Manhattan than Midwest.
Pepp and Dolores
Pepp and Dolores sits in the centre of Vine Street's Over-the-Rhine restaurant row, in a converted nineteenth-century storefront opened by the Thunderdome Restaurant Group in 2022 as a tribute to the founders' Italian-American grandparents (Pepp is short for Giuseppe; Dolores an Americanisation of Addolorata). The dining room is theatrical — a long open kitchen runs the right side of the room, an oak bar with copper-clad backsplash anchors the entrance, a single floral-tiled archway opens onto a smaller back room of six tables, and the ceiling is hung with a constellation of warm-bulb pendant lights. The room reads as a deliberate evocation of mid-century New York-Italian rooms — Carbone, Rao's, Sammy's Roumanian — without ever feeling like pastiche.
1931
1931 sits inside Cincinnati's Hilton Netherland Plaza, in the Carew Tower — one of the great American Art Deco hotel buildings, opened in 1931 (hence the restaurant's name) and listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The Palm Court space that houses the restaurant is one of the most architecturally significant interiors in the Midwest: soaring painted ceilings, exotic-wood columns clad in Brazilian rosewood, hand-painted murals depicting allegorical figures, original Rookwood pottery panels (the Rookwood Pottery Company was founded in Cincinnati and the hotel commission was one of its most ambitious), and a hand-laid Carrera-marble floor that runs the length of the room. The space has been used as a film location more than a dozen times and once held wedding receptions for several mid-century Cincinnati industrialists.
