By: Brandon Martin

Brontë Bistro located in Rookwood Plaza in conjunction with Joseph-Beth Booksellers offers a conventional dining experience with a few twists.

Although Brontë Bistro isn’t innovating the food scene in the Cincinnati area, it provides a high quality culinary excursion. The Brontë Bistro’s menu is its greatest weakness and its greatest strength.

The menu is both extremely limited, offering standard favorites of an upper echelon restaurant, but not diverging much from that in terms of creative recipes.

This small menu has allowed Brontë to focus more on ingredients, sparing little to no expense on getting the little things right. Specific ingredients such as Panko bread crumbs and Wisconsin white cheddar cheese make the simple menu pop with flavor and embolden the standard recipes that Brontë offers.

It offers a selection of hormone- free and gluten-free menu items opening the bistro up to a niche market while not sacrificing flavor.

The drink menu is where Brontë finds much more depth. The bar offers some creative cocktails as well as a respectable wine and beer list. Brontë Bistro, named after the Brontë sisters who respectively penned “Wuthering Heights,” “Agnes Grey” and “Jane Eyre,” has given its cocktails fun names primarily based off of classic writers from the Western literary canon.

The cocktail list pays homage to great author such as Kurt Vonnegut, Oscar Wilde and Ernest Hemmingway.

The atmosphere is warm and the décor stays consistent with the literary theme with classic book covers blown up and hung on the walls over the booths. The service itself can sometimes leave something to be desired.

The staff overall sometimes lapses in a manner inconsistent with what the restaurant is trying to be. Brontë Bistro may not change the way you think about Cincinnati dining, but with high quality ingredients and competitive prices, it is a solid place to spend an evening.