Cincinnati, Ohio

My first flight since 2019! What an odd feeling. But it was so wonderful to go back to my hometown and visit my mom, as well as explore both Ohio and Kentucky with Alex. We dubbed the trip the “Baseball, Beer, and Bourbon” tour. On the to-do list: Watch a game at Great American Ballpark; visit Oktoberfest Zinzinnati (the largest Oktoberfest in the whole world this year); and take a tour through Kentucky’s bourbon distilleries. With so many other adventures in between!

Fun fact, Cincinnati’s airport is actually in Kentucky, which is just across the Ohio River. Our first stop: introducing Alex to Cincinnati-style chili. You eat it over spaghetti or on a hot dog, haha. He liked it!

Then we got my mom and brought her to Over-The-Rhine for dinner and ice cream. Greaters– a Cincinnati classic.

Exploring OTR.

Findlay Market.

Holtman’s Donuts. And a ride on the Cincinnati Bell Connector, which is a streetcar that runs in loops around downtown. It’s become free since the pandemic! Kind of fun.

Baseball time! This was one of the major reasons for the trip, so Alex could check off another ballpark from his list. He has now visited 16 of the 30 MLB ballparks, so this tipped him past the halfway mark.

I had been here for a game when the ballpark was brand new! But I really don’t remember anything from back then. This was really wild to see. So festive, so many people. So few masks.

We were joined by Cynthia and Erik, my friends and clients who are new to Cincinnati! 

We were there to root for the Reds, but also against the Dodgers. Sadly the Reds lost. But it was still a pretty exciting game.

Next, we walked straight out into Oktoberfest! Historically, Cincinnati had a large German population. Hence the “Over-The-Rhine” neighborhood named for the Miami-Erie canal that they nicknamed the Rhine. Also the large pork industry that gave the city the nickname “Porkopolis.” Anyway, despite never having been to Ohio, Alex somehow knew of this Oktoberfest because it is usually the second largest Oktoberfest in the world, after Munich’s. I, not being a beer lover, nor being of age at the time, lived in Cincinnati for nearly a decade and had no idea. 

This year, with the pandemic and all, Munich called off their Oktoberfest. So this was the largest Oktoberfest in the whole world! Dubious distinction, haha. It does take up several city blocks and is right next to the ballpark. Very convenient! The atmosphere was festive but not too overwhelming. Alex enjoyed some local Rhinegeist beer, and we tried goetta, the special Cincinnati sausage concoction. Also cheesy bacon tater tots, because why not?

Afterwards we opted for a proper restaurant, which also happened to be a historic brewery, overlooking the Roebling Bridge– which is the smaller predecessor to Roebling’s more famous Brooklyn Bridge.

The Christian Moerline Brewing Co. Keeping with the Baseball, Beer & Bourbon theme.

All of the downtown stuff is great, but my actual experience of growing up in the Cincinnati suburbs is centered more up here… at the mall, haha. Sporting our new Cincy + Ohio shirts from Homage.

My mom definitely has more of a green thumb than we do. Celebrating Mid-Autumn Festival with some tea flavored moon cakes I brought over from California!

Then I brought Alex to Jungle Jim’s. A very wild experience… technically a supermarket, but so much more. It’s gigantic and has the kitchiest decor, and they sell all sorts of everything.

There’s even a Greater’s inside.

These photos really don’t do Jungle Jim’s justice. I hope some of you caught the videos in my instagram stories when I posted about this place. But here’s a whole hot sauce section, four different shelves under this fire truck. Next to a giant bbq sauce section too. Plus, they have a lot of international produce and groceries. Each country has a section!

Back home, we cooked a simple meal with some groceries we got from Jungle Jim’s.

Definitely not in California any more. Next was a visit to Meijer’s, which is just a Michigan-based supermarket chain. They sell fish inside…

A newer brewery in Blue Ash, Sonder. The food was not very good. But it’s fun to have new stuff showing up in the suburbs!

More home-cooked goodness. And a rainy walk around the neighborhood.

Back at Findlay Market.

This arepa from The Arepa Place was very delicious! 

We came back to the northern part of the Over-The-Rhine neighborhood to visit the newly branded “Brewing Heritage Trail” for a brewery tour. As I mentioned earlier, Cincinnati had a large German population when immigrants populated the area in the 1800s. They built a bunch of breweries and also introduced German-style lagers to the area. But as mentioned in the sign above, with WWI and WWII, sentiment turned against the Germans. Plus, prohibition happened and shut down the breweries. I haven’t seen much written about what happened between the early and late 1900s, but filling in the blanks, it seems like Germans left the area and Black people moved in post-WWII. Then, only recently, a development company called 3CDC has been gentrifying the neighborhood, and millions of dollars have been poured into the redevelopment. It’s definitely made for a very interesting vibe as a result. 

In terms of the brewery district, many new breweries have been established in the last 10 years, some of them in historic breweries that had laid dormant for a long time. But other historic breweries are still abandoned. The main thing I was interested in seeing on the tour was an abandoned beer cave. Kind of like a wine cave, but built for the cool temperatures needed for brewing lager specifically.

I’ll be honest, the tour guides were nice enough, but I had trouble staying interested while they talked for 40 minutes about the history of various brewery families and we really just stood on the street looking at the outside of buildings. I would’ve rather learned more about the brewing process that made this district unique, or toured an actual working brewery, or tasted some beer, or just visited the beer cave.

But finally, in the last 20 minutes, we got to go inside and look at the beer cave!

Pretty cool, and much darker in real life.

Interesting to think about what brought this structure here and what it might become in the future. All in all, other than seeing the inside of the beer cave, this walking tour didn’t have that much to offer. A brewery tour with no working brewery and no beer! Maybe if we check back in a few years the trail will get better and put together a better offering too.

Afterwards, a visit to the Rookwood Pottery studio. It wasn’t a tour day, so we just visited the shop, but I would come back for a tour. Rookwood is a historic pottery, woman-owned, and dating back to 1880.

So cute with a Fiona the hippo ornament (a famous hippo born at the Cincinnati Zoo)

We decided to remedy the brewery tour having no beer by visiting the Rhinegeist brewery ourselves. The building is part of the old Christian Moerlein brewing complex, but Rhinegeist is new, founded in 2013 by a San Franciscan and his West Coast friend.

Supporting the local sports teams. Cincinnati just got a new soccer stadium and team FC Cincinnati, and everyone seems to love them even though they are terrible. 

Then I got to visit a very special art gallery Studio Kroner, which was featuring my friend Tom Owen’s work.

So wonderful to be able to catch this show while I was in town!

And so wonderful to meet Paul Kroner and to learn about his art and his gallery!

Some cool murals around downtown.

This 80s mural really spoke to me and Alex.

Continuing the art themes, we headed over to the Cincinnati Art Museum in Eden Park. Free views alongside the free art museum!

We also got to visit my friend Lauren and see her gigantic new home. Suburb life!

The kids were asleep, but Marv the cat joined the selfie.

Selfie with my high school… and my old house.

Then we went off to Kentucky for a little sub-trip to our trip and the bourbon part of Baseball, Beer & Bourbon. But we ended back in Cincinnati!

There’s so much free art in this city. We visited the 21C in downtown Cincinnati, part of a small chain of 21C museum hotels that all feature galleries that are free to the public and great restaurants as part of their museum concept. They typically convert historic buildings– in Cincinnati’s case the Hotel Metropole and give them new life. When we visited reservations were required due to the pandemic, but it was still free. On exhibit: Dress Up Speak Up.

A theme of the 21C Museum Hotels: these plastic penguin friends. Cincinnati has yellow.. we would visit two more locations in this trip, so you’ll see which colors they have!

Next door is the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center. Also free! But they actually weren’t open that day, so we just took a look around their lobby and gift shop. My work was once featured in this museum!

Back to beer, we visited Taft’s Brewing Co. which is located inside a converted church in OTR. 

Taft, as in William Howard Taft, the 27th president, who was from Cincinnati. But I’m not sure why they went with the image of him in a bathtub.

Just down the street, the iconic Music Hall. I spent many a weekend here growing up, attending or playing symphony concerts! They recently completed a multimillion dollar renovation, and I haven’t been in it since. Would love to return some time.

Back to Graeter’s. And a stop by Ault Park.

And finally, technically across the river in Kentucky, a meal at Smoke Justis because it did a great job of hitting all three of our themes: Baseball, Beer, and Bourbon! The restaurant is named after a minor league pitcher, Walter “Smoke” Justis, who honestly didn’t do that much but had a cool name. 

But we got our beeer, our bourbon cocktail, chili over bbq, and a nice random baseball story.

One final walk across the Roebling suspension bridge to go look at Cincinnati across the river, and then it was off to the airport and back to California for us!

See below for parts two and three of this trip as we traipsed through Kentucky!

Til next time, Cinci.

Anna Wu is a wedding and portrait photographer based in San Francisco. She compulsively documents and blogs all of her daily adventures. Follow her on instagram and view more of her professional work at annawu.com.

Part 1: Cincinnati, Ohio
Part 2: Louisville, Kentucky
Part 3: Lexington, Kentucky