For one night in October, the counter at Nonesuch will belong to two kitchens instead of one. On Tuesday, October 6, the Oklahoma City restaurant at 803 N. Hudson Ave. welcomes Chef Jason Paul and the team from Heirloom at The 1907, an intimate tasting-menu room tucked inside a historic building in downtown Rogers, Arkansas. The two crews will present a single ten-course menu, alternating dishes course by course, each chef bringing his own technique and point of view to the table. Optional wine pairings will run throughout the evening. Seating is limited and reservations are required, and because the menu is built as one continuous collaboration, the restaurant has said it cannot accommodate dietary restrictions for this event.
The pairing is less of a stretch than the map suggests. Both restaurants are built around the same idea: a menu that changes with what is fresh, and a kitchen that treats locality as a discipline rather than a slogan. Nonesuch describes its approach as hyper-local and zero-waste, with a monthly-changing menu shaped by nearby farms and, in its earlier years, by foraged ingredients gathered around Oklahoma City. Heirloom runs a monthly-changing menu of its own, an eight-to-ten-course progression served to a room small enough that the cooks and the diners share the same air.
Nonesuch's origin story is the kind that reshaped how the country looked at Oklahoma City dining. The restaurant opened as a roughly 20- to 22-seat counter concept run by two young Oklahoma chefs, Colin Stringer and Jeremy Wolfe, and in 2018 Bon Appetit named it the best new restaurant in America, the top spot on the magazine's Hot 10 list. Restaurant editor Andrew Knowlton confessed his bewilderment in print: "I was head over heels but utterly confused. Who cooked this dish? And what the hell was this place?" For a city more readily associated with chicken-fried steak and onion burgers, the recognition was a jolt. Writers who visited described a kitchen that foraged honeysuckle and wood sorrel around the metro and worried, in lean winter months, about whether the model could survive on what Oklahoma's extreme seasons actually provided. One cook summed up the local palate as "a steak and potatoes kinda state" — and Nonesuch as the exception proving it could change.
The restaurant has since changed hands in spirit and in stewardship. Nonesuch now operates under the Id Est hospitality group, a James Beard- and Michelin-awarded outfit whose other restaurants are in Colorado; Nonesuch is the group's only address outside that state. The kitchen is led by executive chef Garrett Hare, and the format remains a counter-centered tasting menu, served Wednesday through Saturday, with the cooking on full display to the people eating it. In late 2024, The Oklahoman described Nonesuch reentering the city's dining conversation "with a bang and chicken fried steak" — a playful nod to the way a restaurant known for fermentation and raw culinary artistry can still wink at the region's food heritage. The restaurant has been ranked among the top restaurants in North America by Opinionated About Dining, placing at No. 266 in 2025.
Heirloom's story is a different kind of unlikely. Chef Jason Paul started in professional kitchens at fourteen, under the renowned chef Alex Stratta, and worked his way through a series of restaurants, including several in Las Vegas, before landing in Northwest Arkansas with his partner, Danielle Ribaudo. Heirloom itself has a second act: the restaurant previously operated in Rogers from 2014 to 2016, but when the building was purchased, the new owner did not renew its lease, and it closed. It later reopened inside The 1907, a building constructed in 1907 as the Rogers Wholesale Grocery and later home to a Dollar Saver before a renovation turned it into a shared space that now houses Onyx Coffee Lab, Providers by Onyx, Yeyo's, Pinky Swear, and Heirloom. The restaurant sits at 101 E. Walnut St., Suite 301, an 18-seat room hidden within the building — a detail its own reservation page leans into with the line "good things are hard to find." When reservations first opened for Heirloom at The 1907, they were gone in four minutes. Paul told an interviewer he was astounded. The restaurant has become one of the hardest tables to book in Northwest Arkansas, and Paul has kept it independent, without outside investors, running on the slim margins that a small tasting-menu room demands.
That independence, and that scale, is part of what makes the October dinner notable. Neither restaurant is a large operation. Nonesuch seats a few dozen at most; Heirloom seats eighteen. A ten-course menu split between two kitchens means each chef contributes roughly five courses, handing the evening back and forth, and it means a room built for one team's rhythm has to absorb another's. The two menus are also, by design, never the same twice — Nonesuch's changes monthly, Heirloom's changes monthly — so the dinner is not a greatest-hits set from either kitchen but a one-time document of what both were cooking in early October.
The event is a seated, ticketed dinner, and the VisitOKC listing does not publish a start time or a ticket price; reservations are handled through the restaurants. What is clear is the shape of the thing: two small rooms, two chefs with strong points of view, one menu, one night. For diners who have followed either restaurant — the Oklahoma City counter that stunned Bon Appetit, or the hidden Arkansas room that sells out in minutes — October 6 is the only evening the two will exist in the same place.