HOW TO GO
WHAT: Mockingbird's Cafe
WHERE: 1024 Central Ave., Middletown
ORDER LINE: 513-435-2559
HOURS: 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., Tuesday to Saturday
MORE INFO: www.mockingbirdscafe.com or 513-465-5038
Downtown Middletown’s newest eatery features eclectic comfort food with a twist.
Mockingbird’s Cafe opened its doors on Tuesday at 1024 Central Ave. and is the next chapter in Owner Nancy Griffith’s cooking career.
Griffith, the youngest of eight children, said she loves to cook.
“We were always in the kitchen as that is where everyone congregated,” the Middletown native said.
Griffith said she had worked for three years as the banquet manager at the Sycamore Banquet Center at Central Connections, formerly the Middletown Area Senior Center.
“I thought that if I could do this at Sycamore, I could do it for myself,” she said. “I wanted to do this for me because I didn’t want to live the rest of my life saying ‘what if’ or ‘I wish I had tried that,’” she said.
Griffith opened a small eatery down the street at the Pendleton Arts Center where she started her business in 2012.
“I outgrew it,” she said. “I needed more space for my operation.”
The landlord of her new building had heard she was looking for a larger space and contacted her to take a look at the building, she said.
Griffith and her partner Charlie Shafor worked on their eclectic menu for about a year before deciding on their small list of offerings.
“We would make things, tried them and decided what to keep,” she said. “All of our ingredients are multi-taskers and can be used in more than one dish or sandwich.”
She said she was not worried with many of the eateries downtown giving her competition for customers.
“We will have our own niche,” she said. “We have our own menu and no one else has what we got. This is stuff my mom would have made at home but with a twist on it.”
While the cafe is across the street from Cincinnati State’s Middletown Campus, Griffith said the students and staff are not her target audience.
“We’re looking for the more established residents, the people who are looking for something nicer than fast food and that’s not going to dent their pocketbook,” she said.
Griffith and Shafor, who is also the executive director of the Middletown Lyric Theater, had known each other since their days at Middletown High School. He was a couple of years ahead of her and both had crossed paths once in a while over a 15 to 20-year period. However they became reacquainted when the Lyric Theater was giving a performance at the Sycamore Banquet Center and met through food as Griffith was working as the banquet manager.
“We both have a passion for food,” she said.
Griffith, a 1990 MHS grad, also has a passion for Middletown as well as this is where she wanted to locate her business.
I have a lot of friends who I grew up with and chose to move elsewhere,” Griffith said. “A lot of them are really hard on the town.”
While she is very enthusiastic about the positive things Middletown has been doing over the past few years, Griffith noted that one of her friends in the Pacific Northwest keeps saying that Middletown is dead. She most of her friend’s opinion was based from what he read about the city’s heroin epidemic as well as the negative article that Forbes magazine wrote saying that its a dying city.
She said she opted to open her cafe downtown instead other Middletown locations because “it was way more affordable.”
“It’s also nice to be part of a revitalization (in downtown Middletown),” she said. I’m raising my family here and I want the city to be better for my kids than it was for me.”
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