Pepp and Dolores

The Restaurant

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.

The kitchen is pasta-led and proudly red-sauce: a hand-cut pappardelle with twelve-hour Bolognese; a tableside-finished spaghetti and meatballs with a sauce simmered for six hours; a hand-rolled rigatoni alla vodka that has become the room's most ordered plate; a baked ziti for two with mozzarella and fresh basil; and a chicken Parm the size of a serving platter that anchors most four-tops on a Friday night. Mains run $28-$42; pastas $22-$28; the family-style Sunday Supper menu at $65 per person, designed for tables of four or more, serves antipasto, three pastas, two mains, and a dessert family-style across the whole table.

The bar is theatrical: a martini list of twelve with house-vermouth blends, a red-sauce wines programme of forty Italian-American producers (Chianti, Barbera, Montepulciano, Aglianico) priced to be ordered by the bottle, and a short cocktail list anchored by a strong Negroni programme. The room is loud, joyfully, energetically loud, and that is the entire programmatic intent. For a Cincinnati team dinner of six to fourteen guests that wants to feel like an event without a tasting-menu production, Pepp and Dolores is the default city answer.