Food as Memory: Migration, Belonging, and the Making of Over-the-Rhine

This post is Part One of a three-part adaptation drawn from a research paper I wrote on foodways, migration, and identity in Over-the-Rhine. The writing grows out of my work connected to the Over-the-Rhine Museum’s Three Acts program. It reflects an ongoing effort to translate academic research into public, community-centered history.

Food rarely appears in archives as a headline, yet it quietly carries some of our deepest histories. Recipes, grocery lists, street food, and shared meals often survive where official records fall silent. In Over-the-Rhine (OTR), foodways offer a powerful lens for understanding migration, identity, and belonging across nearly two centuries of change.

Poet Yalie Kamara writes of lumpia as a “great unifier of tribes,” a food that holds memory, labor, and cultural inheritance all at once. Her reflection captures something essential: food is never just sustenance. It is a vessel for identity, migration, and the everyday work of belonging. When those meanings are disrupted—when a dish is reframed or its origins complicated—we are reminded that history itself is layered, relational, and never fixed.

OTR’s story unfolds in much the same way.

German stores in OTR, courtesy of Cincinnati Public Library

German immigrants began arriving in Cincinnati in the early nineteenth century, settling north of Canal Street—now Central Parkway—and shaping what would become Over-the-Rhine. They carried with them beer gardens, sausages, pretzels, and communal food rituals that transformed public space into places of familiarity and home. These foodways were not nostalgic gestures; they were strategies of survival and cultural continuity in an unfamiliar city.

As waves of migration continued, new communities layered their own food traditions into the neighborhood. Appalachian families arriving in the mid-twentieth century brought soup beans, cornbread, and the rhythms of shared meals that mirrored family kitchens left behind in eastern Kentucky. Restaurants like Tucker’s became more than businesses—they became emotional anchors, spaces where migrants could feel seen and fed in a city that often marginalized them.

Tucker's Restaurant, courtesy of Tucker's Facebook

African American families displaced from Cincinnati’s West End during mid-century urban renewal carried Southern food traditions into OTR, using meals as tools of resilience, care, and community-building. These practices—often overlooked in official narratives—shaped everyday life through block gatherings, informal food networks, and small neighborhood eateries.

Even earlier, Chinese migrants in the late nineteenth century maintained food traditions amid extreme vulnerability. Though scattered and few in number, they preserved ancestral practices like the New Year celebrations, preparing sweets and shared dishes that tethered them to cultural memory despite racial hostility and social isolation.

Those early acts of preservation laid the groundwork for later Asian foodways in Over-the-Rhine, most visibly through Vietnamese migration beginning in the mid-1970s. In conversation with Nghiep Ho, second-generation owner of Saigon Market, he recalled that after immigrating to Cincinnati, his mother struggled to find essential Vietnamese ingredients—fish sauce, vermicelli, and specific vegetables—and would make repeated trips to Chicago to shop. These journeys were not simply about access to food; they were acts of cultural survival. In rebuilding meals that tasted like home, Vietnamese families were rebuilding identity, continuity, and belonging. Saigon Market emerged directly from this need, becoming more than a grocery store. It became a cultural anchor, a shared space where memory, language, and tradition could be sustained for Southeast Asian families navigating life in a new city.

Saigon Market, creator unknown

Across these histories, food functioned as both connector and boundary—welcoming those who shared it, while marking difference in a city shaped by migration and inequality. To understand OTR, we must look beyond restored façades and curated dining districts and attend to the kitchens, street vendors, grocery stores, and family tables where history quietly lived.

Foodways remind us that belonging is not abstract. It is practiced—daily, materially, and often invisibly—through acts of cooking, sharing, and remembering.