Nolia Kitchen

The Restaurant

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.

The cooking is unmistakably Louisiana — but Harris is doing more than nostalgia. The menu reads as soulful Southern filtered through the Creole technique he learned at home: a gumbo of dark roux with andouille and Carolina-rice cake; a Carolina-Gold-rice grits cake with a brown-butter etouffee of Gulf shrimp; a buttermilk-fried quail with red-eye gravy and stone-ground grits; a wood-grilled redfish with smoked-tomato pontchartrain; a slow-braised oxtail with collard greens and red beans; and a praline bread pudding with a bourbon Anglaise that has become the kitchen's signature. The five-course Sunday supper at $85 per person — built around a single rotating Louisiana theme each week (gumbo Sunday, etouffee Sunday, court-bouillon Sunday) — has become the hardest-to-book seat in Over-the-Rhine.

The bar programme leans hard on classic New Orleans cocktail history — Sazerac with both Peychaud's and house-aged absinthe, Vieux Carre in three rye-cognac splits, a Pimm's Cup served in summer with house-cucumber soda. Wine is short and considered: about eighty references with a focus on Loire whites and Beaujolais reds that pair cleanly with the spice-forward kitchen. Cincinnati Magazine named Nolia a 2024 Best New Restaurant, and chef Harris was a James Beard semifinalist for Best Chef Great Lakes in 2025 — recognition that has confirmed Nolia as the city's most quietly important opening of the decade.