Linda Vaccariello

You may be having pre-seasonal dreams about restaurant menus filled with spring pea tendrils, sautéed ramps, and fiddlehead ferns. But as a fan of root vegetables and slow-cooked anything, I’m not so eager to say farewell to winter.

Looking for a little romance? Each Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday evening, Jack Shallat plays for diners at Pitrelli’s restaurant in Mason.

Somewhere in your bleak, mid-winter musings, you’ve had the fantasy: you want your own restaurant. Not a fancy-schmacy city place, but a Mayberry RFD-ish small town spot with checkered tablecloths and mismatched china.

After years of shooting the great, the grand, and the glamorous, celebrity portraitist Matthew Rolston discovered a lively new muse—dozens of them, actually—in Ft. Mitchell’s tiny museum of silent entertainers.

A whole neighborhood of breakfast options.

It’s early summer in Middletown, and on a quiet street of modest homes a riot of rose bushes is overtaking the path to Jeannie Yazell’s door. “I haven’t had time to prune them,” she says, apologizing for the tangle of overgrown canes. And who knows when she’ll get to them? She is preoccupied.

Twenty years ago, Ed Stern arrived to quell backstage drama at a struggling Playhouse in the Park. Before he exits, we talk with the general artistic director about what it took to complete the transformation.

Nern Ostendorf, the new executive director of Queen City Bike, has returned to town in hopes of bringing the bike-friendly flavor of cities like Portland and Denver to Cincinnati. Hills be damned.