Wunderbar

The Restaurant

Wunderbar opened in 2021 in a restored MainStrasse Village storefront a block from the glockenspiel, the work of restaurateur Kyle Higham, who grew up in Covington and spent a decade cooking in Berlin and Munich kitchens before returning home. The room is a deliberate stylistic statement: a long communal table down the centre running fourteen seats, with two-tops along the walls, a small bar at the front, and a brick-courtyard patio at the back covered by a vine-clad pergola. The interior is modern German biergarten by design — long wooden table, mismatched antique steins along the high shelf, a chalkboard that lists the day's snack offers.

The kitchen runs a German-Bavarian small-plate menu with serious technique. Signature plates include the house pretzel with bone-marrow butter and grain mustard; veal sausage with sauerkraut and apple-mustard glaze; a duck-confit schnitzel with red-cabbage slaw; käsespätzle with Emmental and crispy onion; a Bavarian roast pork with dunkel-beer reduction; and a frequently rotating wurstplatte that the kitchen builds across the four house sausages. The kitchen finishes the savoury menu with a Black Forest cherry pavlova that has become the room's signature dessert.

The beer programme is one of the most serious in Greater Cincinnati: more than forty German imports rotated through the year, organised by style — pilsner, hefeweizen, dunkel, doppelbock, rauchbier — and poured into the correct glassware by staff trained to brewery specification. The wine list adds about thirty Riesling and Pinot Noir labels from the Mosel, the Pfalz, and Baden, with a small selection of Austrian Grüner Veltliner. Service is neighbourhood-warm, two-hour-dinner pacing, with the long communal table designed specifically for groups of eight to twelve. For a team dinner that needs a frame of character, Wunderbar is the most-asked-for reservation in MainStrasse.