CINCINNATI — An Over-the-Rhine restaurant has been named to the New York Times' "Best Restaurants in America" list.
Wildweed, located at the corner of E 13th Street and Walnut Street, made the 50-restaurant list, which is the NYT's "favorite places in America right now." The list was curated by reporters and editors at the newspaper.
According to the Times' Brett Anderson, "the descriptions accompanying each course served at Wildweed's chef's counter are filled with action."
The restaurant opened its brick-and-mortar restaurant in OTR in 2024, but began as a food pop-up by chef David Jackman at Oakley Wines in 2019. Guests can enjoy a rotating menu of starters, pastas and main dishes in Wildweed's dining room, but the restaurant's crowning jewel is its 12-seat chef's counter experience, where guests get to enjoy a daily menu based around a selection of seven ingredients over the course of 12 or so dishes.
"It's common for restaurants to highlight the busywork behind their creations," Anderson wrote. "It's less common for those efforts to end up accentuating the silky beauty of lake perch or to lead dishes as coherent and novel as cool marcona almond tofu jeweled with raw tuna and picked ramps. Those are just two of the breathtaking miniatures from a recent tasting menu, which contains half as many options as the restaurant's a la carte menu."
Anderson also credited Jackman, who was recently named a finalist in "Best Chef" category for the Great Lakes region at the 2025 James Beard Awards, as a chef who is also "a forager, gardener, fermenter and more."
"Mr. Jackman, who owns Wildweed with his wife, Lydia, is cooking like Southwest Ohio lit a fire inside him," Anderson wrote. "Long may it burn."
After Wildweed received the honor from the Times, Jackman celebrated it on social media, saying, "This one means a lot."
"If you would tell that young Canadian cook, that one day he would have a restaurant in Cincinnati, and it would be recommended on this list, he wouldn't believe you," Jackman wrote. "The harder we work, the luckier we get."
