Cincinnati Magazine
March 2, 2021
The restaurant industry has been hard hit by the pandemic, of course. With no clear path through Ohio’s and Kentucky’s official COVID response, these three Cincinnati restaurateurs made tough decisions to ensure they’d be able to serve another day.
Illustration by Lucila Perini
The Aperture
Chef Jordan Anthony-Brown was set for a summer 2020 opening of The Aperture in Walnut Hills’s Paramount Square redevelopment. But about a month before construction started, COVID put the project on hold. He pivoted by serving Mediterranean-by-way-of-Appalachia cuisine at a few pop-ups over the course of the year, but the constraints were real. “Not having space to cook was probably the most difficult thing,” he says. “Even if I wanted to do takeout options over the summer, I just didn’t have the space to do it.” With hope finally in sight, though, Anthony-Brown eyes an Aperture opening later this year.