There is no doubt that the place is trendy. When we were there on a Saturday evening we were surrounded by painfully stylish alt rock wannabes from Hyde Park trying to impress bored dates.
We stopped into Chez Nora to celebrate my young adult daughter's first apartment in the Mainstrasse area. We found our way to the third floor dining area and were pointed in the general direction of an available table. Even though it was early in the evening and the room was mostly empty, it took a while for the server to find her way to the table.
My son and I ordered the chicken and sausage jambalaya, presumably a house specialty in an establishment that provides jazz oriented entertainment. My daughter ordered the Italian Chicken Breast. After an interminable wait (elevator broke down?), the food was delivered.
I think that it is a stretch to claim that the dish was jambalaya. Perhaps in keeping with the Cincinnati aversion to anything spicy, the jambalaya did not resemble any jambalaya that I had had before... bland and no vegetables other than a mysterious layer of herbs on the dish. In fact, were it not for the bed of white rice, it could have passed for the beef brisket dinner. My daughter managed to get about 1/3 of the way through her chicken breast and then pushed it back and started eating bread. My son who will eat anything declared that he would have preferred to have stayed home and had our home cooked jambalaya recipe for dinner.
I'm sure that Chez Nora will continue to be mobbed on the weekends but it won't be for the quality of the food or the service.
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