FOOD

Market Street Grille’s Sunday buffet works because it refuses to choose between breakfast and lunch. The opening side of the spread is recognizably brunch: made-to-order omelets, eggs Benedict, sausage, bacon, and goetta. But the line keeps moving into salmon, fried chicken, pasta, salads, fruit, pastries, and dessert, so the meal has enough range to support several different kinds of plate instead of one oversized breakfast.

The omelet station is the most important piece of live preparation. It gives the breakfast side of the buffet something cooked to order and creates a natural place to begin before exploring the rest of the spread. Eggs Benedict adds the more composed brunch note beside it, while bacon and sausage cover the familiar breakfast baseline. Together, those foods make the buffet immediately legible without making it ordinary.

Goetta is where Harrison and Greater Cincinnati enter the plate. The region’s pork-and-beef sausage, stretched with oats and rooted in Cincinnati’s German-American food tradition, is a much more specific breakfast marker than another generic pan of links. At Market Street Grille it sits comfortably among the standard breakfast meats, but its presence gives the buffet a local accent that would be missing almost anywhere else in the country.

Then the meal turns toward Sunday lunch. Fresh salmon expands the spread beyond eggs-and-meat breakfast territory, while Chef Chuck’s fried chicken is the strongest savory anchor on the other side of the clock. Fried chicken changes what the second plate can be: instead of repeating breakfast, the meal can pivot into something closer to a traditional Sunday dinner. Pasta provides another substantial route, while salads give the heavier choices some needed contrast.

That breakfast-to-lunch progression is more useful than sheer item count. An omelet, goetta, and eggs Benedict can define one trip; salmon or fried chicken can define the next. The buffet does not need dozens of unrelated dishes to create abundance because its categories are far enough apart to make successive plates feel different. It is the kind of spread where sampling across the whole line can become a meal before anyone has gone back for a favorite.

Dessert keeps the same mix of straightforward and playful. Fresh fruit and pastry sweets can close brunch conventionally, but the chocolate fondue fountain is the detail that gives Market Street Grille its most obvious flourish. In a room of old brick and tin ceilings, a contemplative after-meal cup of coffee is a perfect reason to slow the pace and immerse in the historic surroundings. It also makes dessert feel like a destination rather than an afterthought tucked at the end of the buffet.

The strongest way to understand the food is therefore as a sequence rather than a catalog. Start with the made-to-order element, let goetta establish the Cincinnati connection, use salmon and fried chicken to cross fully into lunch, and leave room for the coffee and dessert. Market Street Grille has the breadth expected of a serious Sunday buffet, but its identity comes from how those pieces fit together: regional breakfast food, full midday entrées, and a little dessert spectacle inside one historic Harrison restaurant.