That's So Cincinnati: Top Cincinnati restaurateur worries about Over-the-Rhine's future

Cincinnati chef and restaurateur Jose Salazar chuckles about a conversation he had with his wife in early March.  

"Everything was just starting to click," Jose Salazar said about his three restaurants, the most popular being Salazar in Over-the-Rhine. "My wife about two weeks before the shutdown said, 'I feel great. I feel like for the first time in years I'm not worried whether I'm going to make payroll next week.' "

Some 10 weeks later, Jose Salazar is fighting to stay in business.

He talks in-depth about the challenges of reopening Salazar, Goose & Elder at Findlay Market and Mita's in Downtown on The Enquirer's That's So Cincinnati podcast.

Salazar also worries about his peers as the restaurant industry tries to recover from the two-month pandemic shutdown. He has been part of Over-the-Rhine's renaissance in the past decade, and he worries what this pandemic will do to all the small businesses who've gone all in on the neighborhood. 

"God, if all these restaurants don't survive, what's it going to look like again? It'd be hard to imagine it going back to a bunch of boarded up storefronts again. But I don't know. It's kind of scary. It's kind of scary to think that a good portion of our retail and restaurants might not survive all of this." 

Will Salazar's restaurants make it? And what does he think about Gov. Mike DeWine's decisions to shutdown restaurants for two months?

Find out on this week's That's So Cincinnati episode. Click the Audioboom link at the top to listen for free. Or listen to the episode for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio and other listening platforms. 

Salazar's interview begins at the 13:40 mark in the episode.