Born to Be Wild at Wildweed

With its foraged flights of fancy, this innovative OTR restaurant blazes its own trail.
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“Ranger” chicken tortelli served with chile striped dough, shrimp, fried shallot, nuoc cham vinegar, and coriander.

Photograph by Jeremy Kramer

Before it opened as a restaurant, Wildweed developed a loyal fan base through the hundreds of pasta pop-ups that Chefs David and Lydia Jackman held around the city. Even today, it retains some of the freewheeling quality from its pop-up era with a palpable sense of restlessness in the food. Part of the menu changes from week to week, based on what’s available in the woods and from local farms. The chefs and their young daughter spend their spare time roaming area forests, occasionally foraging treasures for the menu like shrimp-of-the-woods mushrooms, pawpaws, and spicebush berries.

David says that Wildweed—recently named to Esquire’s “Best New Restaurants in America” list—put noodles at the heart of the menu because they’re a blank canvas. They exist in virtually every cuisine and soak up the flavors around them, becoming a crowd-pleasing anchor. As a result, the restaurant remains deeply grounded in the seasons and the natural world, but untethered from any particular culinary tradition. The Jackmans experiment with ingredients and styles at a dazzling rate, both on the regular menu and the prepaid “Chef’s Counter” tasting experience that “follows seven ingredients through approximately a dozen dishes.”

Apple rosette almond cake with caramelized white chocolate and kabocha squash ice cream.

Photograph by Jeremy Kramer

If you see things like ravioli and cappelletti on Wildweed’s menu and go expecting Italian-inspired flavors, you will be disappointed. Instead, you should be prepared for flavors that come from everywhere. A local vinegar is transformed into a sweet-and-sour Vietnamese nuoc cham. Tart preserved lemons, often associated with Middle Eastern cuisine, are paired with wild lobster mushrooms in ravioli. A Chinese-inspired chili oil and mushroom XO share space with local quark cheese. And then there’s the what-even-is- this Japanese-Italian mashup of clams with a dashi and nduja broth. (I kept dipping my finger into the bowl to taste more of it after the clams were gone.)

There are a few reasons why this wild blender of inspiration works. First, the chops are undeniable. From the tiger-striped pasta on the chicken tortelli to the tender-firm fluting on the mafaldine, this kitchen is clearly operating at a high level of skill. Second, the experiments are grounded in respect for the ingredients, and the restaurant never strays too far from this foundation. You can always taste the freshness of the cherry tomatoes or the melons or the oysters, so the experiments serve the food rather than drowning it out. The version of the oyster dish we tasted was a single magical bite with the complexity of a whole dish—the creamy oysters with a tart-sweet pear foam, followed by the bracing sharpness of crispy pickled shallot and the warming peppery note of spicebush oil. In addition to being absolutely delicious, it seemed to reflect and distill the fall season.

Seared albacore tuna served with potato, fennel, Castelvetrano olive, radiccio, egg yolk emulsion, and dill.

Photograph by Jeremy Kramer

As someone who loves to share several dishes with friends rather than just eating one thing, the breadth of flavors on the table sometimes leads to a sense of incongruity. Imbalances like this, at least for grazers like me, are one of the perils of eclecticism on a menu. Most of the time, though, the food’s too good to quibble about stuff like this. The sense of cohesion that may be missing in the menu as a whole is amply present in individual dishes thanks to Wildweed’s loving attentiveness to the natural world.

Chef/Co-Owner David Jackman.

Photograph by Jeremy Kramer

One of the most sublime examples is the beeswax ice cream, which Jackman describes as an expression of “bees and the things they eat and produce.” The beeswax is soaked in the cream, which gives it a faint floral undertone. The resulting ice cream is then topped with the umbels of fennel blossoms, along with crushed fennel seed, and finished with a drizzle of fruity olive oil and a hint of salt. It looks simple enough but has a profoundly unusual and sophisticated flavor. Like so many of the restaurant’s best dishes, it goes beyond simply using a few local ingredients. In a delicious and unpretentious way, it tells a story about the cycles and relationships in the world around us.

Wildweed’s clean, simple interior.

Photograph by Jeremy Kramer

From the massive mushroom mural in its dining room to the people chatting at the bar, Wildweed has a very different energy than other restaurants at its price point. There is a festive feeling. Service is not particularly brisk or formal, people generally aren’t dressed up like they are going to a fancy restaurant, and neighbors start conversations with each other rather than remaining cloistered at their tables. Jackman considers Winnipeg, his hometown, the northernmost point of the Midwest, and says that one quality unifying this particular corridor of North America is a sense of friendliness. The restaurant retains this cozy feeling, and you can tell that there are already people who come here every few weeks rather than once or twice a year.

What makes Wildweed a place to return, I think, is its sense of adventure. Even in a good restaurant, you can find yourself a bit bored—what you’re tasting is skillful autopilot and a kitchen that has stopped trying to learn new things. You never sense such complacency at Wildweed. This place is always pushing itself to try something different. It simply isn’t like anything else in our landscape at the moment and clearly belongs in the conversation about our city’s best restaurants. If you have even a bit of a restless streak, you owe it to yourself to give it a try.


Wildweed, 1301 Walnut St., Over-the-Rhine, (513) 246-4274

Hours Dinner Tues–Sat 5–10 p.m.

Prices $6 (El camino miche with herb butter)–$98 (smoked rib eye steak)

Credit Cards All major

The Takeaway An eclectic, restless, and noodle-y delight.

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