I grew up at a crowded table: five kids, two parents, plates of food, and stories flying as freely as the hand gestures. Our meals had rhythm, a kind of choreography, moving from appetite to laughter to arguments and back again. To be a good storyteller at that table you had to understand timing, surprise, and the delicate balance between comfort and risk. It was an education in narrative, though I didn’t know it at the time.
Years later, when the Cincinnati-based bookstore I own, Household Books, began hosting a dinner series called Plates & Pages with Crown Restaurant Group, I recognized that same rhythm returning to me. A prix fixe dinner is more than a meal. It is a stage play, an exercise in composition, pacing, and revelation, where each course arrives like a scene, a story that unfolds one plate at a time. A chef chooses heat, texture, and acidity in the same way a writer chooses tone, voice, and point of view. Both are crafts of balance and provocation. Both aim to hold attention, to move you, to make you feel.
The creative team at Crown Restaurant Group had been looking to build something unique within Cincinnati’s dining culture when they approached me. The idea of a dinner consisting of a food course, a wine course, and a book course had been simmering in my mind since hosting a series of beer dinners when I lived in Chicago—a concept with origins that trace back to my childhood when my parents asked my siblings and me how our days were at our family dinner table. I had the idea to bookend the evening’s meal with a pop up shop that I would create in the restaurant’s bar area and the Crown team brought their signature elevation, expertise, and accessibility to the menu design. I plucked the name from a literary leaning penchant I had for alliteration, and, in a moment as organic as our shared passions, Plates & Pages was born.
At these intimate dinners, which take place at the restaurant Five Kitchen & Bar in Cincinnati’s Over the Rhine Historic District, we had our chance to add a third layer to the act of pairing food and wine: literature. Each course arrives with a book, an idea, or a passage that speaks to the flavors on the plate. The Chef speaks to the food, followed by a sommelier, vineyard owner, or expert on the wine pairing, and then I jump in with the how and why of the book pairing. After our intro, guests don’t just eat—they participate. They read, they remember, they handle rare editions (careful of the sauce), they argue and compare. Our guests are artists, foodies, first dates and anniversaries, all participating in a shared experience. It is about consumption and creation, a moment and meal that belongs to everyone at the table.
One of my favorite pairings was a scallop mousseline, tender and light, topped with pickled Buddha’s hand, bright citrus, and a herbed brown butter crumble. Alongside it, we placed a passage from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1878): “He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking.” This small domestic detail blooms into something luminous and tender, a reminder that love and beauty can live in the smallest gestures. The scallop was delicate yet layered, and Tolstoy’s words seemed to lift from the page, lingering in the air much like the citrus on the tongue.
At these dinners, it’s not uncommon for a line of literature to transform the whole room. At one dinner, I read a passage from Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient (1992): “We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves.” At Plates & Pages the menu is revealed prior, but the books are a surprise revealed with each course. When I read that passage, the room went quiet. I watched guests look at one another with recognition, as if sharing not just a meal but some other fragile sweetness entirely.
That is what Plates & Pages has become for me. Not just dinners, but gatherings where the act of eating, reading, and conversing collapse into one another. The Crown Group’s chefs bring forward flavors born from scratch and memory, while the books and conversation remind us of the inner landscapes we carry.
For a few hours, at a crowded table with food, wine, and words, we create something together, both temporary and lasting, born out of the shared pleasure of being moved by that on the page, on our plate, and we all leave with one more story to tell.
