Jeff Harris revives Jimmie Lou's po'boy shop in Cincinnati
Chef Jeff Harris has reopened his po'boy counter in Cincinnati's Pendleton neighborhood, five years after the first Jimmie Lou's closed inside a food hall.
Jimmie Lou's, the New Orleans po'boy shop chef Jeff Harris closed in 2022, reopened on November 3 in Cincinnati's Pendleton neighborhood.
Harris, a James Beard Award semifinalist for his Over-the-Rhine restaurant Nolia Kitchen, signed a five-year lease on the new address in May. The 1,435-square-foot space sits at 1201 Broadway, inside the storefront that housed Razzo's pizzeria until it closed in March 2025.
A counter that outlived its food hall
A single counter can carry a whole city's appetite for someone else's hometown.
Jimmie Lou's started in 2021 as a walk-up stall inside the Oakley Kitchen food hall. The counter closed the following year as the food hall lost tenants, but Harris kept the name and the recipes, built around dishes from his native New Orleans: po'boys, gumbo, jambalaya, fried catfish, red beans and rice, and beignets.
The restaurant is named for his great-grandmother, Jimmie Lou Green, who taught him to cook in Louisiana. A pop-up at the Pendleton address in September tested a shorter menu: a shrimp po'boy, red beans and rice, bread pudding, and a dish Harris calls the "pig mac."
Harris moved to Cincinnati in 2005, after Hurricane Katrina displaced him from New Orleans, arriving on a Greyhound bus with no plan to stay. He worked local kitchens for over a decade before opening Nolia Kitchen, a Gulf Coast restaurant that now anchors his small group.
Two decades after that bus ride, Nolia Kitchen has drawn multiple James Beard nods as a finalist or semifinalist, and Harris has become one of Cincinnati's most closely watched chefs for Southern and Gulf Coast cooking.
Cincinnati's Southern food scene widens
The reopening adds a second kitchen to a small but growing cluster of Southern and Gulf Coast restaurants in a city still better known for chili parlors than po'boys. Harris told the Cincinnati Enquirer the city's dining scene has matured enough that he expects Michelin inspectors to take notice eventually.
No opening-week menu or prices have been published for the Pendleton address, and Harris has not confirmed standard operating hours. Nolia Kitchen, four miles away in Over-the-Rhine, remains his flagship and his first proof that the city would support the cooking of his childhood.
For now, the only fixed points are the address and the date on the door. The rest, Harris has suggested, will build the way the first Jimmie Lou's did: one counter, then whatever comes next.
