PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF BIG JAYS PLACE
It’s not like Jason Howard, owner and executive chef at Big Jays Place in Finneytown, always knew food would make him famous.
“My grandmother was a caterer and food director for Bethesda hospital,” says the Bond Hill native. “Then she started her own catering company, and it just got larger than expected very quickly.”
His grandmother’s company, Howard Enterprises, grew to occupy a facility in Walnut Hills, with a small fleet of catering trucks and accounts with such companies as Duke Energy and Messer Construction.
“It became a family business,” he says. “I got the bug, but it wasn’t something that I said I wanted to do as a career. I just saw that food could produce a way to take care of yourself.”
Howard made his way to Southwestern Adventist University in Texas, where he studied business administration and management. His initial career track was in advertising, and he even secured an internship with Coca-Cola in Atlanta, but his grandmother’s final message led him to reconsider the opportunity.
“One of the last things she said to me was, ‘Follow your passion—food,’” Howard says. “I told her, ‘Grandma, you’re crazy. Food isn’t my passion, it’s just a way to make a little bit of money.’ She goes, ‘I’m telling you, if you follow your passion, it will take care of you.’”
Howard’s life circumstances refuted his claim, though, as a bartending job at Chili’s started drawing him into the kitchen and led to a management job offer from Carabba’s. Meanwhile, during his off hours on campus, he was forging a food entrepreneurialism path for himself.
“We would do little breakfasts in the dorm on Sundays and sell them to all the kids on campus, do delivery service to their dorm room,” he says. “I was known as the campus hustler, but entrepreneurship and food ended up being the goal.”
He joined Students in Free Enterprise (SIFE), an on-campus business club that had students find a struggling business to help. “My partner and I ended up buying the business and selling it about a year later for profit,” he says of his first restaurant. “That was my first taste of owning a restaurant.”
Howard headed to Asheville’s Buncombe Technical Community College to study culinary arts along the way, then he headed back to Cincinnati, starting Big Jays as a New York-style deli in Over-the-Rhine. The business did well, especially his soul food Sundays, but when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, he decided to move out of the city center. He moved to a location in Finneytown, a neighborhood he’d noted was home to many of his downtown customers and shifted from a deli to the concept restaurant of his dreams.
“I said ‘let me do a Caribbean/soul food fusion,’ which was kind of an ode to my heritage, with my father being from the South and my mother being Caribbean,” he says. “Let’s get that story told through food.”
This iteration of Big Jays Place got busy fast, gathering dedicated patronage from the community—so busy, in fact, that when a Diners, Drive-Ins & Dives producer called, Howard hung up on him. “I thought it was a hoax,” he laughs. “I said, ‘It’s in the middle of a shift. If you guys are going to play on a business phone, just don’t. We don’t have the time for it.’”
Luckily, the producer was amused and called back, resulting in a feature on the Food Network show last September that even included a mention of Howard’s forthcoming cookbook, From Big Jay with Love.
“You think someone’s going to come in and have this bravado and posturing, but it was one of the coolest experiences of my life,” says Howard, explaining how host Guy Fieri turned off cameras a few times to offer chef-to-chef advice. “It changed a lot. Just being able to sit down and talk to someone like that was absolutely awesome.”
And now Big Jays Place will be featured on America’s Best Restaurants, an online show that highlights quality eateries around the country. The episode will air on Friday, February 9, at 7 p.m. on the show’s YouTube channel and Facebook page.
While Howard appreciates all the attention Big Jays has gotten of late, he stresses he’s in it for the food, not the features.
“We’re a serious food restaurant,” he says. “We get people every day that say, ‘I had no idea you were here.’ I say, ‘Man, that’s awesome. It’s a new opportunity to meet someone and make them believe in the food.’ I take that on as my challenge.”
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