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Rick Hahn manning the kitchen at Nancy's Home Cooking.
Dan Trittschuh
While searching for a tasty dish to satisfy a comfort food craving, you won’t have trouble finding a few spots to help you fondly remember your favorite home cooking. In fact, the hunt might lead you to Nancy’s Home Cooking, 3133 N. High St., or Knead Urban Diner, 505 N. High St.—places that have developed reputations for serving comfort food with very different approaches.
Nancy’s opened in Clintonville 40 years ago, and Cindy King ran the place until she closed it in June 2009 due to personal health concerns and financial woes. Her niece, Sheila Davis Hahn, reopened the restaurant in 2010 after an outpouring of support from the community. “My aunt’s point of view was that comfort food makes people feel good, and we’re just trying to continue that,” Hahn explains.
The vibe inside the diner is relaxed as construction workers, state officials, doctors and others gather for breakfast or lunch, just trying to “start their day off and get it rolling the best way possible,” says Hahn, adding that the menu hasn’t changed much over the years, except breakfast now is offered until closing.
The menu, which includes classic comfort food staples such as omelets, French toast, pancakes, sandwiches and soups, is not exactly known for its health value. “I think we’ve done our job if you walk out of these doors and all you want to do is sit and not do anything the rest of the day,” says Hahn, laughing. “Maybe sometimes people just need to do that.”
And if you head south on High to downtown, you’ll find Knead, which serves up comfort food with a twist, says co-owner Krista Lopez. “It’s our comfort food we remember from our pasts, kicked up a notch using high-quality, local ingredients.” She mentions the turkey marzetti as an example. It’s modeled after Johnny Marzetti, a pasta casserole that many guests might remember eating as children. There’s handmade farfalle pasta, fresh ground Ohio turkey and Wayward Seed Farms organic heirloom peppers and onions, topped with a tomato sauce and Canal Junction Wabash Erie cheese. It’s familiar, but it might introduce new flavors to the palate even though the ingredients are similar, she says.
Her husband and the restaurant’s executive chef, Rick, says he was surrounded by cooking as a child. “My grandma would never sit down. People would always be asking for this and that. I don’t think she ever ate a hot meal,” he says, adding that it’s these memories of food and family that he and his wife are trying to create at Knead.
While the grub at Nancy’s might seem simple compared to the dressed-up comfort items available at Knead, each place has the same goal: to provide guests with a feeling of community while enjoying food that just makes them feel good.
