Nida's Thai on High

Nida's Thai on High is probably one of my favorite restaurants in Columbus. As far as authentic Thai food goes, it's not the best you can do in this city--from my field research, I'd say that honor goes to Bangkok hands down, if you're brave enough to venture that far east--but Nida's is still an awesome place. It's both popular and in the Short North, which means you can expect a crowd, but despite that, we've still managed to eat there without reservations on more than one occasion.

What I love most about Nida's is the atmosphere. It's nice and a little quirky, crammed into a small space with a lot of personality. It reminds me a bit of a few restaurants I've been to in New York City, which might account for why I like it so much. The pad thai is great; the curry is good, and spicer than you might expect; but the sriracha rice is my very favorite.

Now, the one downside to Nida's--and for a drinking blog, this is a pretty big downside--is that the cocktails leave a lot to be desired. Beer-wise, they have a few of your typical Asian imports, if you're into that kind of thing (I have yet to find an Asian beer that impresses me), but they have what appears to be a gorgeous, interesting cocktail list...until you actually order one of the cocktails. I should have known I was in trouble when we went there for my birthday last June and the waitress couldn't give me a coherent cocktail recommendation when I asked for one. Both Boyfriend and I were thoroughly unimpressed: they're a bit on the pricey side, and not nearly as good as I would expect from a restaurant like Nida's. So, my advice on Nida's? Stick to the Asian imports; as unimpressive as they are, they still aren't as disappointing as the cocktails.

Tip Top Kitchen and Cocktails

Somewhere during the course of all this bar-going, I got a dog. She's a beagle/bluetick coonhound mix, her name is Raider, and she is actually the cutest dog in the whole entire world. The problem is, after months of being moved from one dog shelter to another and being abandoned by her family on no less than two occasions, she developed very severe separation anxiety. For a few weeks after we adopted her in mid-June, living with this dog was almost unbearable. We couldn't go anywhere, ever, because we couldn't leave her alone or she'd start howling and screaming and tearing up everything in sight, not to mention hurting herself in her desperate attempts to escape.

I mention all this only because the first time we went to Tip Top Kitchen and Cocktails, it was only because we needed a place to go for dinner that would let us bring the dog.

I should clarify: they wouldn't let us bring her inside. But they have a very nice outdoor patio with a not-too-shabby view of downtown, so we were given a table outside right next to the fence so that I could tie Raider's leash to the fence...with her on the other side, since technically having a dog in the patio was some sort of health code violation. Or something. Whatever, there are dogs at Northstar all the time.

Obviously, they win major points from me for being dog-friendly. Even more so because every single member of the staff came over to pet Raider at some point during our meal. The customers, too. And random passersby. And even a wedding photographer, who took pictures of her. But enough about how awesome my dog is.

Tip Top is great. Not only was the food good, but it was interesting--it's not just your typical American fare. They have a ton of veggie options and even more dishes that can be easily converted upon request. The macaroni and cheese is delicious, if you can get over the fact that you sort of feel like you're ordering off the kids' menu (trust me, this is adult mac 'n cheese). And the drink menu was thoroughly satisfying. They even have a selection of ciders, which impressed this one-time London resident, at least.

Thurman Cafe

Full disclosure: I'm a vegetarian. Actually, if we're being brutally honest, I'm one of those obnoxious, self-righteous, hardcore vegetarians who refuses to eat Jell-o or any kind of non-meat item that's been cooked in the same unwashed pan as a meat item, and who periodically condescends to my carnivorous peers about their disgusting, inhumane, earth-killing dietary habits.

And yet, despite all of that, I went to Thurman Cafe, and I ate a cheeseburger.

You may know Thurman Cafe from the Travel Channel series Man Vs. Food; there's an episode where what's-his-name the host conquers the truly enormous Thurmanator. It was a popular restaurant before the TV show, but afterward, this poor little German Village staple has been overwhelmed. The place isn't really very big at all--just one small room of tables--so combine that with its phenomenal popularity, and it's not uncommon at all to have a two- or three-hour-long wait for a table.

I've been to Thurman's twice; once the wait was two hours, and the second time it was an hour (which is basically no wait at all, by Thurman standards). Both times I waited about five seconds before Boyfriend said screw it, and we cut the line and sat at the bar. I'm still not entirely sure if you're allowed to do that, but, well, Boyfriend does it all the time, and as of yet, no restaurant has ever stopped us.

The first time we went to Thurman's, I went in knowing I was about to face a moral dilemma. For the sake of adventure and this blog, I felt like I couldn't not at least try a stupid burger, but at that point in time, it had been about a year and a half since the last time I could remember eating a hamburger. There was actually a distinct possibility that even attempting to eat red meat would result in my being very physically ill. But here's the thing: my personal rules of vegetarianism dictate that it's better to eat meat than to insult or greatly inconvenience my host. And by the time I was sitting there at the Thurman's bar, I realized there was no way I could just order a tuna salad sandwich. Probably no one would have been insulted if I had, but it just seemed wrong to not order a burger in the burger capital of Columbus.

The exchange with the waitress went as follows:
Waitress: Are you ready to order?
Me: I have a confession to make.
Waitress: Um.
Me: I'm a vegetarian. I haven't had a hamburger in nearly two years. If I order a burger, will it be worth it?
Waitress: Honey, I don't care what you do. Order the tuna salad.*
Me: But are the burgers actually that good?

Oh joy! Oh rapture! Oh, what a burger it was! It's entirely possible that my memory of burgers had faded over the course of my long burger abstinence, but being that my ever-carnivorous Boyfriend agreed that it was one of the best burgers in the whole wide entire giant world, I'm pretty sure it actually was that good. It was certainly the best rotting hunk of disgusting cow-flesh I'd ever eaten.

I reconciled myself with my broken vegetarian vows by ordering a very large shot of tequila the second my burger was finished. Turns out the human consumption of rotting cow-flesh is morally acceptable if the cow-spirit is thanked for its sacrifice with libations.**



*But seriously. She actually said that. I'm not making it up this time.
**Don't eat animals, it's disgusting.

Park Street Patio

Once, we got drinks at
Park Street Patio. So what?
Nothing else happened.

Bernard's Tavern

This is the story of how Boyfriend and I got kicked out of one of the most popular bars in the Short North.

It begins, as so many of these things do, with beer pong. A few of Boyfriend's coworkers were meeting up at one of their apartments and then heading out for the night, and we were invited to join. Being that Boyfriend's coworkers are all relatively recent college grads and their company does a very good imitation of a college fraternity, it was almost inevitable that by "meeting up" they actually meant "pre-gaming," which in Frat Talk is, of course, synonymous with "beer pong." All our Colgate friends will be happy to note that Boyfriend and I won all of our games, though I should admit that might have had more to do with the fact that the floor of the apartment was ever-so-slightly angled (in such a way as to give us an advantage) than it does any inherent beer pong skills on my part.

After entirely more beer pong than any group of college grads has the right to play, it was just a quick packed cab ride over to the Short North. As any loyal reader of this blog has no doubt noticed, the Short North is a veritable cornucopia of drinking utopias. The choices are very nearly endless. Despite the fact, I have yet to go out with a group of Boyfriend's coworkers to anywhere other than Bernard's Tavern.

Bernard's is just like Facebook: it's not very good and nobody really likes it, but everyone's there because everyone else is there. I can talk myself hoarse with anti-Bernard's pleas, but we always end up there anyway because that's where everyone else is going. I have no idea who decided Bernard's should be the young college grad hangout of choice, but every time I ask someone why they want to go there, the only response I get is "Well, everyone else will be there," so I can only assume it was some sort of collective hive-mind decision and my lonely input was never considered.

I mean, sure, it makes sense that Bernard's would appeal to that crowd, by which I mean they have cheap, uninteresting drinks (think bottles of Bud Lite). But why it ALWAYS has to be Bernard's is completely beyond me. The place is loud, like every popular restaurant and bar in Columbus--I swear the people here don't understand the Kindergarten concept of an "indoor voice." There's not much seating; some chairs at the bar, a few booths against the wall, and some awkward stand-alone tables in the middle of the floor with not enough chairs to distribute between them. But the worst part is that it's really crowded. And I don't mean crowded in the sense that it's hard to find a place to sit. I mean crowded in that it's nearly impossible to stray from the tiny amount of corner space allotted to you and your group of friends because everyone is packed in so tightly that you have to crowdsurf if you want to get to the bar or the bathroom. Definitely not high on my list of go-to bars.

On this particular Bernard's night, I suffered the usual non-stop company talk from Boyfriend and his coworkers by pretending to think a bottle of Miller Lite is an exciting beer choice. Fast forward an hour or two, and I decide I'm hungry.

Remember that time when Boyfriend and I saw a birthday party of Sixty-Somethings order pizza to the French bar? I've been dying to try that ever since, and Bernard's seemed as good a place as any.

So we ordered Donato's delivered. They didn't even question the order, because it had to be about 1:30 in the morning by then and we were right down the street from the pizza place. The delivery dude called when he got there, and we went outside to collect the pizza, huddled around the tiny little Bernard's table we had finally managed to claim, and had a pizza feast. Boyfriend's coworkers either thought we were insane or really awesome, I still haven't decided.

It took about four seconds for the first Bernard's waiter to approach us and say we aren't allowed to have pizza in the bar. I, being my polite midwestern self who can't stand the thought of causing inconvenience to any poor soul who is just trying to do his job, was ready to turn and run. Boyfriend and one of his friends, however, somehow pulled a brilliant story out of their asses about how we had tried to order pizza from Bernard's, but had been told that the kitchen was closed so we had no choice but to have pizza delivered. I don't know if the poor waiter was just confused or if we'd been tipping him really, really well all night, but he let us alone with our pizza.

Then it was about another eight seconds before the second Bernard's waitress approached us, and she was not as easily convinced. Boyfriend and His Friend even tried explaining that our pizza decision had been endorsed by the waiter we had spoken to only a few moments earlier, but she was having none of it. That's about the time she started swearing. "Get this delicious pizza out of this overrated restaurant right this very minute!" except instead of "delicious," "overrated," and "very," she was actually saying "fucking." Boyfriend, being Boyfriend and with a few beers in him, started arguing back, at which point my poor aforementioned midwestern sensibilities were completely overcome, and, hounded by the waitress's nonstop profanities, I fled the scene with our either delicious or fucking pizza, depending on your perspective.

Boyfriend and coworkers followed me out (I mean, they had no choice, I had pizzanapped the pizza) and the waitress, ah, "escorted" us to the door. Boyfriend, still being Boyfriend and with a few beers in him, demanded to speak with the manager. Me, being me and also with a few beers in me, plopped the pizza box down on top of a trash can, and Coworkers and I went back to pizza-eating.

So, the end scene: there we are, me and two or three of Boyfriend's coworkers, somewhat drunkenly eating Donato's pizza out of a box propped up on top of a trash can, while Boyfriend reams out the manager of Bernard's about how he and his friends dropped who-knows-how-much-money on drinks there that night, were told the kitchen was closed, and get got screamed at by a hysterical waitress, so that now all of Boyfriend's friends were eating pizza out of the trash.

Needless to say, we haven't been allowed back to Bernard's since.*

*That's a blatant lie. I just wanted to be dramatic. We were there last week.

Elevator Brewery & Draught Haus and Fleur (and the city impound lot)

To begin, allow me to apologize for the long delay and assure you that while I took a break in posting, we did not take a break in drinking. We've had quite a lot of excitement in the last two months, and believe it or not, it all starts with a perfectly ordinary Friday in June when we decided to catch some afternoon happy hours.

At the start of summer, Boyfriend was promised half-day Fridays at work for the summer months. Half-days turned out to be more like three-quarter-days which eventually evolved into "today is a half-day but you'll still need to stay until 6:30 so we can get all this work done"-days. But back when we were young and naive and believed "half-day" meant, well, half of a day, we made plans to check out Elevator and Fleur, two downtown restaurants that I'd heard a lot of good things about (from the internet, I mean).

Elevator Brewery & Draught Haus is a rather well-known downtown establishment with an extensive food menu and some truly entertaining beer options. You can't beat the atmosphere; I don't know what that building used to be, but my first guess would be either a theater or a church. They offer a huge selection of local and seasonal beers, and the bartenders were able to speak knowledgeably about every single drink on the menu, which is awesome when you haven't heard of half of them and have tried even less. The most impressive drink of that afternoon was the watermelon beer, which sounds disgusting but was unusual enough to be worth a try. It smelled like a watermelon Jolly Rancher, but when you drank it, there was only the faintest hint of fruit. If that alone doesn't sell you on Elevator, the $2.50 drafts until 7pm on weekdays should.

It was when we left Elevator, after about a beer-and-a-half each, that things started to get interesting. Parking in downtown Columbus, to put it politely, sucks balls. We'd driven in circles around the block for what felt like most of my life before we finally found a parking meter on a street perpendicular to Elevator, maybe a block or two away but easily within walking distance. We were in Elevator for maybe 45 minutes, tops, and when we came out again, our car was gone.

Yeah. Yeahhhh.

After a confused and panicked few minutes, we noticed the absurdly small, not-at-all-conveniently-placed sign: no parking Monday-Friday, 4-6pm. During those eight hours every week, that lane opens up for traffic. So even though we paid the meter, the meter accepted our money, and we were away from the car for less than an hour, the good city of Columbus towed Boyfriend's car.

What followed was a flurry of calls trying to figured out who towed the car and to where; a long and hot walk in the direction of our apartment, only to realize the key to the apartment was still in the car; several conversations with bicycle police cops to get directions to the impound lot; a heated argument with Google Maps over where, exactly, "Impound Lot Road" was located; a confusing drive with a cabby who barely spoke English and had only been driving in Columbus for a couple weeks; and, in the end, no less than $200 spent (cab ride included) to get the car out of impound. The highlight of the impound trip was my observation that the ridiculously large city impound lot included no less than two rental moving trucks, one bulldozer, and three school buses.

After seeing a good chunk of the paycheck he had just received that morning gobbled up by the good city of Columbus, Boyfriend was (understandably) thirsty again. This time we headed to Fleur, another downtown bar. Fleur has a great location in a weirdly shaped little building that seems to be made entirely of glass; the sunshine paired with the bright white interior of the bar means that people tend to wear their sunglasses inside. Fleur specializes in fancy and very expensive cocktails, primarily champagne-based drinks and martinis. They also label themselves a "dessert bar," but except for the free cotton candy, the dessert part is pretty sparse. The trick to enjoying yourself at Fleur is to go during their happy hour, Monday-Friday 4-7pm, because otherwise you'll need to sell a couple organs to pay for a few rounds of drinks. Even the happy hour is a bit pricier than I would normally accept for a happy hour, but it's a good discount from their usual prices and it's such a fun bar that it's worth the splurge. Not to mention the fact that the drinks are pretty great.

Our post-car-getting-towed trip to Fleur ended with me driving home, Boyfriend having drowned his car-getting-towed problems in cocktails, which is far less "Mad Men" than it sounds when you consider the fact that he was drinking champagne in place of scotch and was also eating cotton candy the entire time.

Of course, the really fun epilogue to this story is that exactly six days after getting his own car towed for parking in a No Parking M-F 4-6PM Zone on a Friday between 4 and 6pm, Boyfriend managed to get my car towed from the parking lot of our apartment, for the very simple reason that the apartment said they didn't recognize my car, and thus it deserved a good towing.

Short North Tavern

With the exception of Thurman Cafe (post about that coming soon!), pretty much every overly popular restaurant in Columbus is located along the little stretch of High Street known as the Short North (I don't understand the name, either, because it's not particularly short and "north" seems to be a pretty relative descriptor). Most of the bars and restaurants in the area can be decently priced...it's just that you're looking at vast overcrowding and two-hour waits if you want a seat on a Friday or Saturday night. Short North Tavern, however, has somehow missed the rabid popularity that plagues nearly every other establishment on High Street, and I think that's what I like most about the place.

Short North Tavern is a dive bar, and not the sort of trendy faux-dive bar (like Village Idiot) which is common amongst the Columbus college scene. It looks a bit run down from the outside, and is pretty easily overlooked surrounded as it is by the most fashionable of Columbus's dining establishments--in fact, the only reason I even noticed it in the first place is because it's about three buildings down from Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams, which means you're neck-and-neck with the Tavern for a good part of your thirty-minute-long wait to grab a dish at Jeni's. Inside, the Tavern is a no-nonsense, very straight-up bar with a few tables; they serve food, too, though Boyfriend and I just grabbed a few drinks. It's the sort of typical midwestern bar that I'd expect of my hometown in Indiana, and it's a refreshing change from the often pretentious popularity of most of Columbus's bars. The bartender ribbed me when I payed for the drinks (Boyfriend had payed for dinner earlier that night, so it was only fair), and I had to do so in cash--the Tavern is probably one of three places left in North America that still doesn't accept cards. The best part was the young child running around the bar; like I said, they serve food, too, so presumably the child was there for the mac n' cheese and not the beer. But, hey, who knows.

On a different note, I'm terrifically sorry if the posts have been somewhat colorless lately; Boyfriend and I went through a spell of relatively uneventful bar-going for a while there. But I've got some great ones coming up, I promise! In fact, Short North Tavern was our last drinking experience before we entered The Month From Hell (also known as June 2011), so there are some pretty wild stories to go along with that.

Marcella's Ristorante

Boyfriend has been trying to get me to go to Marcella's Ristorante for the last fifty-seven years (okay, more like two months) and about two weeks ago, I finally stopped struggling and just went with it. Once we got there, I wasn't quite sure why I'd been resisting for so long.

Marcella's has two locations: one in Short North (where we went) and one in Polaris. The Short North location comes with the typical pain-in-the-butt of trying to park your car somewhere within walking distance, but the Polaris location is, well...in Polaris. So take your pick.

The Short North location is actually pretty cool, because instead of having outdoor seating, the entire front wall of the restaurant opens like a giant window so the whole front room is like an outdoor patio. We were there on a Thursday and it was fairly crowded, which has stopped surprising me when it comes to good Columbus restaurants. We started out sitting at the bar, ordered a few beers, then moved to a table; Boyfriend had something I don't remember because it had meat in it so I wasn't gonna eat it anyway, and I had a mushroom pizza that was easily the best mushroom pizza I've ever had. Seriously. It was fabulous.

We actually went back to Marcella's a few days later when my mom was in town for a visit, because she suffers from severe culinary xenophobia and breaks out in intense tremors when confronted with any food which did not originate in America, Italy, or a Mexican border town. Boyfriend had the mushroom pizza this time, and I had a great pasta Alfredo. My mom had spaghetti, but the marinara was excellent so it's less boring than it sounds. We split a bottle of white wine between the three of us, and I can say with confidence that I have never before seen my teetotaler mother drink that much alcohol in one sitting.

...She had about a glass and a half. I really don't know where I get it from.

Barrio

The first time Boyfriend and I went to Barrio was one of the times this past spring when I was in town for a job interview. On Tuesdays they have two-for-one tapas, and that plus a pitcher of their red sangria made for a pretty enjoyable dining experience. When we went back a couple weeks ago, however, the waitress gleefully informed us that they'd recently changed their menu. Things went downhill from there.

The sangria was the same, and not half bad at that--which is saying something, because Boyfriend and I are something of sangria connoisseurs.The two-for-one tapas Tuesday deal was the same, too. It was the tapas that had changed, and not in any kind of comprehensible way. Anyone who has spent any amount of time in Spain (as Boyfriend and I both have) is familiar with the traditional tapas dishes, and, as far as I'm concerned, it's those traditional dishes that draw Americans to tapas restaurants in the States; otherwise, you're just eating expensive appetizers. Yet, perplexingly, Barrio removed all the traditional dishes from the menu and replaced them with disappointing, not particularly tasty Americanized substitutes. The patatas bravas were replaced by patatas fritas...which is apparently fancy Barriospeak for "burnt French fries."  They also removed the delicious calamari dish from the menu and there was no good substitute for it. About the only addition to the menu that we enjoyed were stuffed tomatoes, but even those weren't much more than decent.

Well...not all change is for the better, I suppose. It's a nice little place to grab a seat outside and share a pitcher of sangria, though.

The Santa Maria

Technically, The Santa Maria isn't a bar. It's better. It's a freakin' pirate ship.

Well, actually, it's the world's most accurate recreation of Christopher Columbus's ship the Santa Maria, which is docked on the Scioto River in Columbus a couple blocks from our apartment. Why the Santa Maria and not the Nina or the Pinta, I couldn't tell you; but it's docked in Columbus and not somewhere else because, well...Columbus...Christopher Columbus...make sense now?

Anyway, our drinking adventure on The Santa Maria came about as a result of the really awesome website CouchSurfing. I've been a member of CouchSurfing for about a year now, and while I haven't yet had the chance to actually surf on a couch, when I moved to Columbus I realized that the website might be a good way to meet people in the area. The Columbus CouchSurfing group is pretty active, so Boyfriend and I have been able to meet a few people through weekly meet-ups. Two weeks ago, the Columbus chapter threw a huge event known as a Couch Crash, a weekend long party where Couch Surfers from all over the world travel to the host city to meet other Couch Surfers. The highlight party of the Columbus Couch Crash was the "I'm On A Boat" party, hosted on The Santa Maria.

The party was BYOB so Boyfriend and I brought a six-pack, but turns out we really underestimated the generosity of the Couch Surfing crowd. We'd brought enough for ourselves; turns out everyone else had brought enough for, well, everyone else, and there was a bartender handing out drinks. There was by far enough booze to go around.

Couch Surfers are kind of the most interesting people on earth. The party, which was nautical themed, featured everything from pirates to a mermaid being eaten by a shark to Steve Zissou. The highlights of the friendships I made on The Santa Maria include:

• Lawyer, who had just finished law school and was studying for the bar exam. He was the one dressed as Steve Zissou, and was kind enough to let me wear his Steve Zissou hat. I asked him if he could offer me legal advice as to what fate would befall me if I killed Boyfriend by pushing him overboard. Lawyer said I should just claim it was an accident and that I couldn't rescue him because I couldn't swim. I thought this was a solid defense until Boyfriend pointed out that I'm scuba-certified and it would be hard to convince a jury that I actually can't swim.
• Russian, who claimed to be from Russia, and said he was motorcycling across the United States, and then he said lots of other things that I don't actually remember because they were pretty unbelievable and Boyfriend and I are fairly certain he was full of cow excrement.
• Boatman, who actually worked as a tour guide on The Santa Maria. I asked him if I could climb up to the crow's nest, but he said the only people who are allowed to do that are the people who work there. So then I told him I was going to come back the next day and apply for a job. I never did.
• Architect, to whom I gave a lesson in hubris by insisting that if you're going to tell people you're an architect, then you better be prepared to point out no less than three buildings in the skyline that you personally designed and built by hand. Architect said he had not built any of the buildings on the skyline. I told him he should learn to be a better liar and just go ahead and take credit for the whole damn city. I mean, your average citizen wouldn't know the difference, anyway.
• Assistant Prosecutor, who is married to Architect. I don't think she was actually an assistant prosecutor, but she was some sort of lawyer with the District Attorney's office. She was very baffled when I asked her if she was aware that Architect had personally designed the entire city of Columbus.

The boat party was probably one of the most fun nights Boyfriend and I have had in Columbus. I highly recommend renting out the place for your next birthday, graduation party, bar mitzvah, wedding, funeral, or any other occasion you can think of that calls for celebration.

Betty's Fine Food & Spirits

Honesty time: I don't understand the hype about Betty's.

According to my friends at Urbanspoon, Betty's is the fifteenth most popular restaurant in Columbus. Like, in all of Columbus. After our visit, I wondered if maybe its popularity stems more from its bar/nightlife side than the restaurant side, but, no, if you read the user reviews, everyone else really likes it. So either everyone else is really dumb, or Boyfriend and I really got cheated.

One of Boyfriend's friends had recommended Betty's to us, so we decided to head over to the Short North for dinner one evening. Betty's is a cramped little restaurant with an interesting bar-like atmosphere, if the bar were actually been run out of your alcoholic grandmother's living room. It has weird wallpaper and cheesy ceramic figurines everywhere and the whole place is arranged to highlight the bar, which allegedly has exactly umpteen billion beers on tap but I wasn't particularly impressed with the selection.

We ordered the spinach-artichoke dip for an appetizer, which was delicious; and our beers were perfectly beer-y, if nothing special in terms of selection or price. Dinner, however, was downright disappointing. Boyfriend had the fried chicken...which, when it arrived, was clearly baked, not fried. Not being much of a carnivore myself, I was excited to see that Betty's had a tofu steak on the menu. For the non-vegetarians amongst you, I should probably mention that tofu can be tough to cook really well, so when a restaurant has the balls to put straight-up tofu steak on the menu (as opposed to a dish that just happens to have a bit of tofu in it) it's generally pretty safe to assume they know what they're doing, and that the tofu is going to be really good.

Yeah, well, you know what happens when you ass-u-me things? You end up with a crappy piece of tofu that tastes like curry sauce without the spice. Also a side dish of completely dry, unseasoned broccoli.

I suspect that if you're drinking at Betty's and just happen to get hungry, their food is excellent when compared to your typical bar food. But if you're having dinner at Betty's and just happen to get a drink, that's when you're disappointed. Good bar food, not great food-food.

Bar L'Etranger

There's good news and there's bad news with Bar L'Etranger. The good news is that it's the best (and our far-and-away favorite) bar we've visited. The bad news is that Bar L'Etranger has already closed.

Boyfriend had been to this bar--which appears to be in the ghetto but is actually only a block or two from High Street--once before, so a couple weeks ago when we decided to grab drinks, he was eager to show it to me. We were there on a Thursday night to enjoy their half-price champagne bottle special (and this champagne was a far cry from Andre, believe you me), and while I didn't get to try the cocktails, Boyfriend all but swears by them.

The lounge-like bar was surprisingly empty, but despite the relative quiet, I was pretty much instantly sold. The lighting was low and the decor had a sort of antique-French-vintage-style-thing going on. There were two bars, one right when you walk into the door and the other in the second larger lounge room. The larger room had gorgeous vintage furniture arranged throughout--sofas, tables, chairs, even a loveseat swing hanging from the ceiling. There were also two perplexing palm tree-eqsue pillars in the middle of the room, and the ceiling was decorating with a weird fabric-and-robe sort of design that made me feel like I was on a pirate ship.

Boyfriend, having spent some time in France, went to order us a bottle of champagne while I staked us out a spot on a couch in the corner. The only other people in the room were a rambunctious group of older ladies and one very gay gentleman. The entire group was hilariously drunk in a very classy way, and one of the women turned to apologize to me if they were being too loud, and said it was her sixtieth birthday. She was easily the drunkest of the bunch (as the birthday girl, she really had the right to be) and explained that they'd spent the evening at a winery or something like that, and were now guzzling champagne at their favorite bar. She also gave me a glass of champagne to make up for how loud they were being (Friend: Made!), though in all honesty I didn't view them with any annoyance at all, but rather with a combination of amusement and genuine admiration. When I turn sixty, I hope my birthday party is that much of an episode of Sex and the City.

The best part was when the Sixty-Somethings ordered a pizza. To be delivered. From Domino's. To the bar. Wish I'd thought of that...

Bar L'Etranger also had an outdoor deck, which was absolutely gorgeous: all wood, enclosed by brick buildings on three sides. I was completely in love with this place, so both Boyfriend and I were mildly brokenhearted when one of the Sixty-Somethings told us the entire establishment was closing in two days. Boyfriend confirmed this with a bartender, and there was an additional heartbreak when we found out none of the furniture was even for sale.

There's a tiny glimmer of hope in the fact that Bar L'Etranger is apparently being re-vamped and re-opened as a gay and lesbian bar. If they keep the cocktail menu and the gorgeous atmosphere, I'll be more than happy to frequent L'Etranger's reincarnation, even if it means getting hit on by some girls and sharing Boyfriend with the occasional flirty gay man or two.

Ugly Tuna Saloona

Oof, I'm way behind in updating...it's not my fault, I swear! I've been super busy...sitting around the house doing absolutely nothing. Yeah, okay, I lied, I haven't been busy at all, just lazy.

Boyfriend and I decided to spend a Wednesday evening a week or two back at Ugly Tuna Saloona (say it out loud and you'll get it. See? It rhymes!).The Ugly Tuna has a great location on the second floor of a complex right off High Street, which it shares with a movie theater, meaning that the whole place smells like delicious, delicious popcorn pretty much all the time. It's more or less the ideal college bar, and even on a Wednesday night it was busy enough that we had to fight a bit for seats--that's actually one of my big complaints about this bar: it has a lot of space, but most of it is just open space. More tables would be nice, please.

Anyway. My Colgate peers will appreciate that the Ugly Tuna reminded me a bit of the Jug, if the Jug were a lot bigger and with an outdoor balcony, had cheap drinks and stalls on the bathroom doors, was much classier, and wasn't in someone's living room. So basically its resemblance to the Jug ended at the part where they both end up serving a lot of college kids with fake IDs.

I'm discovering the great thing about Columbus college bars is that the drinks are often so cheap that it's almost unbelievable. The Ugly Tuna has an every day happy hour special that includes various drinks in various low dollar amounts; forgive me for not remembering the exact specials, but like I said, this was almost two weeks ago. Specials along the lines of $1 wells and $1 drafts almost made up for the fact that there was a Spongebob Squarepants mural painted on the wall.

Boyfriend and I grabbed some cheap wells, and in the course of enjoying them we noticed a pretty spectacular drink a couple tables over--a giant fishbowl of punch that looked like it was being split by about half a dozen people. Boyfriend suggested we come back some other day with reinforcements and take on a fishbowl of our own, but I'm far too impatient for that nonsense and made the extremely mature choice to order one just for the two of us. It came with six giant straws.

Yeah. So. The thing about the fishbowl. I drank about two-thirds to three-fourths of it, with Boyfriend, who was driving, consuming only a modest amount. I would not recommend the fishbowl. I drank nearly that entire freakin' fishbowl and while I'm pretty sure the shit-ton of sugar gave me diabetes, I was not even remotely drunk. Nauseous from consuming about a gallon of HI-C punch, yes; intoxicated in any way, not at all. I imagine the fishbowl would be immensely popular with a birthday party of nine-year-olds, but please don't actually purchase it for your nine-year-old because if I'm wrong and there is alcohol in it, a birthday party of drunk nine-year-olds would not really be the best thing ever.

In any case, my only symptom after drinking enough sugar water to put a hive of honey bees into a coma was that I was enormously hungry for the popcorn I could smell from the movie theater next door. It was around midnight, and as we were leaving, I insisted Boyfriend buy me popcorn. When we ordered, the woman at the concession stand asked if we'd already bought our tickets, at which point I had to explain that we weren't actually seeing a movie, I'm just a fat-ass who eats movie theater popcorn at midnight on a Wednesday. I expressed my surprise that I was the first person to have done such a thing; No, she said, people do it all the time, just that "You might be the first sober person."

Like I said. Don't buy the fishbowl.



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La Fogata Grill

After we spent Saturday playing with puppies at a local animal shelter--I was thisclose to convincing Boyfriend to let me bring a beagle home--and bemoaning the never-ending rain that has plagued Columbus recently, it was decided (not by me) that we should do something more cultured on Sunday. Boyfriend has spent entirely too much time in Europe, so he figured we should go to an art museum. Despite the fact that I've actually spent more time in Europe than he has, I did not figure we should go to an art museum.

We went to an art museum anyway.

Evidently, the Columbus Art Museum...or Columbus Museum of Art? or Art Museum in Columbus? or Museum of Art of Columbus?..whatever, it's some combination of the words "Art," "Columbus," and "Museum," with a few prepositions thrown in...has free admission on Sundays, which is almost like a Happy Hour but without the alcohol, and thus without the happy. As a recovering English major who actually took an art history class once, you'd think I'd have a half-way decent appreciation of art, which in any case is really just a picture book without the book part that's been framed and stapled to the wall. Right?

Yeah, I have no appreciation of art. So luckily for me, the Art Columbus Museum is very kid-friendly in that there are lots of fun activities in each of the galleries to amuse children while their parents ooh and aah over art that, let's face it, the parents probably don't appreciate either and are just putting on a show so that the other grown-ups, who also don't appreciate art and are also putting on a show, won't judge them; when deep down, everyone would really rather stop looking at the paintings and just play with the puzzles like the kids, anyway.

I, being the cultured no-nonsense grown-up that I am, forwent the show and bee-lined for the puzzles. Actually, my favorite part of the museum was an exhibit (clearly intended for children) where you got to make your own art. They had twist-ties that you could make sculptures with and then leave on little stands to display. I made a chicken (which I put on display) and also a penis (which I did not). They also had a chalkboard shaped like an apple with the question "What can you do with an apple besides eat it?" written above it, and you were supposed to write your answer on the chalkboard. I wrote "use it as a bong." Which promptly got erased. Probably by a real grown-up.

Boyfriend at least made an effort to enjoy the art. He made me go on a tour with him. We lasted about ten minutes and then I started getting horrible college flashbacks because the tour guide kept asking the group ridiculous questions like "What stylistic differences do you notice between these two paintings?" which Boyfriend actually answered once or twice, and then he got bored and we left.

To counteract that futile foray into the world of art, we decided to get drinks. La Fogata Grill is yet another faux-Mexican establishment in the Short North with a nice outdoor patio and a long list of drinks that come in really big containers. We missed their Sunday brunch mimosa special by about half an hour, so went with margaritas instead; Boyfriend with classic, me with strawberry. I happily om-nom-nommed the free chips and salsa while appreciating the view, by which I mean I people-watched the gay bar next door.

I speak enough Spanish to get by, but "fogata" was not in my repertoire of vocab; my Authentic Mexican Boyfriend told me it literally means "faggot." I, aghast, told him there was absolutely no way these people named their restaurant/bar--which, did I mention, is RIGHT NEXT DOOR TO A GAY BAR--"The Faggot Grill." Because that is both appallingly homophobic, and also potentially confusing to any thirsty homosexuals who are new to the area.

No, apparently, "fogata" is, actually, "faggot" in the very literal sense of being a pile of wood. At which point I wanted to smack Boyfriend upside the head, because why couldn't he just have told me "fogata" means "a pile of wood" to begin with?

I actually have nothing else whatsoever to say about our La Fogata experience, which is why I spent so long talking about the Art Columbus Museum instead.

Haiku and Lucky's Stout House

Friday night was date night, which makes it sound like Boyfriend and I planned some sort of romantic evening of romance; in reality, I'd been craving sushi and was a bit tired of cooking (yeah, I'm the one who does all the cooking. To compensate, I make him do the dishes), plus the new Morgan Spurlock documentary was finally in Columbus, so we decided to kill two birds with one stone (not a practice I would advocate in the literal sense) by grabbing sushi for dinner and heading to a movie, with some drinks in between.

Boyfriend recommended Haiku for dinner, which despite the poor review my beloved Urbanspoon gives the place, he said he had been to and enjoyed. Even though we called ahead, by the time we reached the Short North restaurant, they had somehow lost our reservation (and that of the group that walked in after us). After more confusion that I deemed particularly professional, the hostess finally gave us a table...indoors, because that had immediate seating, whereas the patio was a half-hour wait.

Haiku has a pretty extensive menu, and to be honest definitely leans more to the restaurant side than the bar side, but their interesting cocktail list made me decide to count it as a bar anyway. Boyfriend had some sort of drink whose name I don't remember, but it was basically a really fancy mojito. I had a kiwi-lychee martini, which was absolutely fabulous. It had a lychee in it, to start with, and I could definitely taste the fruit flavor, but it wasn't overpowering to the extent that it was just any old fruit cocktail in a martini glass--it definitely had that martini bite to it. Needless to say, I really enjoyed it.

Our dinner of three different sushi rolls (one vegetarian, the other two with fish) was also delicious, though I think they went a little heavy on the spicy mayo.

After dinner, we decided to grab drinks to kill time before the movie. At this point, I should mention that Boyfriend is really awful at parking his car.* Not that he can't get between the lines or he crashes into cars/objects/people, but rather that he is the most indecisive parker I have ever encountered. The night we went to Level, he spent at least ten minutes trying to parallel park in a really tight curbside spot, only to abandon the venture, drive around the block no fewer than four times, and eventually return to the same really tight curbside spot. On this particular night, he planned to park in a lot a bit down the road from the theater, but couldn't decide whether or not he was actually allowed to park there, since there were signs haphazardly strewn about claiming you had to have a permit or some nonsense like that. Originally he was going to park on the front left side, then opted for a middle right spot near the back door to a restaurant, then changed his mind and tried to back up to the first spot, at which point an employee came out of the door near the second spot and started staring at us. After a few minutes, Boyfriend finally decided to park, at which point Employee went back to doing his/her (I couldn't really tell) job at his/her place of employment. We got out of the car and started walking down the street.

We made it about half a block before Boyfriend started freaking out and wondering if he should move the car. We were standing on a street corner in front of a tattoo shop debating how likely the Columbus Po-Po were to actually give us a parking ticket when a tattooed young gentleman walked out of the tattoo shop to smoke a cigarette and struck up a casual conversation with us. Turns out he was also new in town, was a tattoo artist, had a habit of tattooing monkeys on himself when he gets bored, and he gave us his business card (which I think I might have lost already) and tried to sell us tattoos. BOGO free for that night only! $175 minimum! If Boyfriend wanted a tattoo, I might have gone for it, but the tattoo idea I vaguely have in mind for myself wouldn't cost nearly $175. Also, I'm afraid of needles.

We ended up at Lucky's Stout House to kill time before the movie started, where the special for the next three minutes was...something about cheap beer. Boyfriend asked if we could buy in bulk; of course we could! This smelled like a college bar, after all. We each got a Rogue's on tap and a Bud Light.

You know something's up when I'm drinking a bottle of Bud Light, and in this case it happened to be that while Boyfriend was doing the ordering, I was distracted by an old guy in an OSU cap who struck up a conversation with me when I joked that "I can't wait til I'm so old and wrinkly that I don't get carded anymore" to the bartender. Old Guy was clearly drunk, which I knew not only because he was acting drunk, but also because he had both a beer and a shot of something in front of him. Like one in each hand, double fisting a beer and a shot. Talking to Old Guy was actually funny for a couple minutes cause, I mean, he was an old drunk guy. He asked me where I went to school and how I ended up in Columbus, and it is true that I enjoy talking about myself (otherwise I wouldn't keep a blog, amiright?). Then he started talking about how banks are evil and soon there will be only three banks controlling all of America. Then he mentioned how he only ever buys from American companies who don't outsource, because he "[doesn't] speak Spanish. I don't wanna deal with that shit," which was kind of awkward since, ya know, I was there with my Mexican boyfriend and all. I sort of smiled and nodded and didn't really contribute much to the conversation, but I think he was drunk enough that he didn't really notice one way or another.

Friend...?: made? I definitely made something, but I'm not quite sure it was a friend.

In any case, we downed our Rogue'ses and a bit of our Bud Lights before it was time to head off to the theater, which happened to be right across the street from McFadden's, the "Irish" bar we patronized in my last post, and shared a building with the Ugly Tuna Saloona, a fun-looking place that we're probably gonna have to hit up this weekend.

In other news, the movie was enjoyable and I definitely recommend it for anyone who enjoyed "Supersize Me."

PS I think all the movie theaters in Columbus serve alcohol.

*Okay, yes, often during our adventures, we are driving. But true to our Colgate educations, Boyfriend and I are very careful to remain under the legal limit, and any night we plan to go for more than a drink or two, we take a cab. Please drink responsibly.

Village Idiot, McFadden's, and Park Street Cantina (and Taco Bell)

Since graduation, I've been slaving away with the traditional post-collegiate job hunt, and it is just as horribly exhausting as it sounds. So yesterday when Boyfriend (his name is John Paul, but you can call him Boyfriend) got off work, we decided to take a break by checking off a few more Columbus-area bars.

We started out in the Short North at Village Idiot, a dive-y sort of bar with TVs, a pool table, and graffiti art decorating the concrete floor. Despite the spectacular happy hour specials--on Wednesday, it's "$3 everything" for all the liquor on the shelf, plus $2 and $3 beers til 9pm--the place was remarkably empty, with a couple guys playing pool and some older folks wandering in and out periodically. Boyfriend and I weren't quite sure what to make of the place. It looked like a dive bar, but as Boyfriend pointed out, it was entirely too clean to be a real dive bar. The cleanliness was just fine with me, but Boyfriend said, and I quote, "I like it when my feet stick to the floor when I walk in." Village Idiot is also right in the heart of what we're coming to know as Columbus's Hipsterville, a very dangerous area for two people from a preppy liberal arts college in New York who occasionally pop their collars in a non-ironic manner.

Despite the location, the bar was gloriously hipster-free and we enjoyed a couple Bell's Oberons, which Boyfriend claims are similar (but undoubtedly inferior) to his beloved Sam Adams Summer Ale. After that, we took advantage of the $3 everything deal and I asked the bartender to make me something unusual and girly, to counteract the testosterone that was radiating from Boyfriend's whiskey and coke. I ended up with some sort of vodka drink that tasted like a watermelon Jolly Rancher, which Bartender named "Something Special."

Friend: made!

Next, we headed down the road to McFadden's, a two-story Irish (or "Irish," I''m not quite sure which) bar whose happy hour we were about half an hour too late to take advantage of.  Instead we took them up on their drink offer of the day: $1 bombs. We sat on the second floor outdoor balcony, which gives you a nice view of the very uninteresting road and the other bar on the other side of the sidewalk. As for the bombs, well...turns out I had no idea what a bomb was. I thought it was like a sake bomb or a Jager bomb, where you drop a shot of something into a beer or whatever. Turns out I was wrong, and the bomb is just the thing you drop in and not the whole drink itself. So I got a weird little strawberry-flavored shot, and Boyfriend got a watermelon-flavored shot, and the waitress seemed very confused when we declined to order anything else to go with them. We did our sickeningly sweet shots and hurried on to the next location, the drink deals at McFadden's being not quite good enough to keep us around for long...maybe we'll be back for St. Patrick's Day.

I wanted to stop at Gooeyz, which was right next to McFadden's, because I'd seen them on the list of Wednesday happy hours. When we walked in, however, we discovered that Gooeyz wasn't so much a bar as it was a gourmet grilled cheese restaurant (really) that happened to serve like two kinds of beer and some sort of cheap wine. Pass.

So then we went to Taco Bell, about which I have nothing further to say due to the fact that if you've ever been to any Taco Bell ever, then you already know what it was like: a public restroom where also there is food.

Taco Bell must have put us in a faux Mexican mood, because from there we hopped over to Park Street Cantina in the Arena District. I was actually pretty impressed with the Cantina; we saw it and decided to stop on a whim, and it had a nice Tex-Mex feel with a huge bar and a lot of outdoor seating. We were about 45 minutes too early for the $5 pitcher drink special, but we ordered some Dos Equis and got the free chips and salsa that came with it. While we were enjoying our authentic Mexican beverages (Dos Equis is a personal favorite of mine; Boyfriend is from Texas so it always reminds me of visiting him there last summer), I happened to notice a man sitting at the other end of the large horseshoe-shaped bar who was wearing a fabulous half-cowboy, half-sunhat hat.

Now, probably everyone who has ever encountered me after about one-beer-and-a-half knows that sometimes I get into a mood where I like to collect things...by which I mean go up to people and ask if I can have some specific item that belongs to them. It's a very specialized skill I picked up in my youth (read: college) at frat parties, where the fraternity brothers often have really fun themed hats or whatever that I decide I want to wear, too. This is precisely what happened with poor Hat. To be fair, Hat's hat was pretty cool. It had a big blue bow-thing on it. And I'm pretty sure Hat's hat was a girl's hat, even though Hat was an old lonely man sitting there drinking a beer by himself.

So I did what any sane, compassionate individual would do: I told the bartender that I had a mission for him, and asked if he'd go tell Hat that I'd buy him a second of whatever he was drinking if he would let me wear his hat. Bartender replied with something along the lines of "No way, Jose."

Friend: not made.

Bartender Two, however, was a bit more accommodating; he waffled for a bit, and explained that he didn't think Hat spoke any English. I asked what language Hat spoke, and Bartender Two said Russian.  So I told him that a common language wasn't really necessary to trade a free drink for a hat, and all he had to do was point at a beer, then point at Hat's hat, then make a little back-and-forth motion to indicate a trade. Bartender Two countered my offer and said that he wouldn't ask for Hat's hat, but he'd buy me a drink if I went and did it myself.

Friend: made!

...So I did. Hat was a very nice old man who handed over his hat and let me wear it without even questioning why on earth some little white chick in a Mexican bar was accosting him for his personal property. Turns out Hat was Nicaraguan, not Russian, and he got his hat in Cancun, and also he teaches biology at Ohio State.

Friend: made!

The rest of the evening was relatively uneventful. I enjoyed my free Dos Equis, courtesy of Bartender Two, and Boyfriend kinda-sorta made a friend with the manager, who he thought had a Texan accent, but turns out Manager is actually from Ohio. Friend fail.

This weekend there's a beer festival in Columbus, and we're also planning a pub crawl for Friday and/or Saturday night, hopefully with guests who will join us on our Drink Columbus adventure for a bar or two. So...stay tuned?

Level

Last week, Boyfriend and I ran out to grab a drink after dinner at a bar we'd admired the few times we'd stopped by the Jimmy John's next door. He's been in Columbus about three months now and I'm only pushing a week, so there's still a lot of drinking ground left for us to cover. This particular bar had an outdoor fire pit and a wonderful spilled-beer frat smell that had me nostalgic for my college days (a phrase I can use now that I've been an alumna for a grand total of four days) and some truly collegiate drink specials to match. To make a long story short, when we were a few $2 Bacardis and $1 PBRs in, I had the sort of brilliant idea that only slightly buzzed individuals can have: to patronize every single bar in Columbus...and to blog about the adventure, of course.

A challenge of this sort requires some ground rules. There are, according to GoTime.com, exactly eight hundred twenty-six drinking establishments in Columbus; we'll attempt to get to all of them within the city limits--my apologies, suburbs--and we'll give preference to bars with happy hours or other drink specials (the better to save money with, my dear). In the course of our adventure, we can't return to a bar until we've checked all the others off our list. All that's required to check a bar off the list is a single drink, but we'll at least try to make it something interesting. And finally, being new to the area and unable to turn down a challenge, we'll try to make a new friend at every place we stop, with "friend" being defined in the drunk sense of "we had a conversation and now we're BFFLs even though I don't know your name."

Monday night we formally kicked off the Drink Columbus challenge at Level, a lovely drinking lounge in the Short North. We chose Level for the all-day happy hour they have on Mondays, which included $1 domestics, $2 drafts and imports, and I think there was also a wells special. We grabbed some seats at the bar and some Sam Adams Summer Ales, Boyfriend's favorite part of summertime. We were seated directly across from the liquor selection and I couldn't help but notice the bottom shelf Three Olives Vodka, which came in what I can only describe as an alarming variety of flavors. Most perplexing amongst these was the "Purple" flavor, which evidently is not the same as the "Grape" flavor. A very charming and somewhat ambiguously gay bartender explained that the Purple is of Purple Drank fame, with the Grape being more traditionally grape-flavored. I couldn't turn down Purple Drank Vodka, so Bartender made me a cocktail with soda water, blueberry juice, and, of course, Purple.

Friend: made!

While I was enjoying my Purple, three twenty-something men bee-lined straight for the bar and ordered up a storm of shots. Or rather, two of them ordered up a storm of shots, with the third waffling for a while before placing an order of "chilled Patron with a pineapple juice chaser." Both his friends and the bartender (not my Bartender friend, a different one) suitably mocked Chilled Patron for his girlish drink order--I think the bartender mentioned something about his vagina?--before his friend snagged the pineapple juice chaser and downed it, leaving Chilled Patron without a tasty pineapple aftertaste.

At this point, I felt it was necessary to recommend to Chilled Patron, Shots One, and Shots Two that they try a shot of Purple. Chilled Patron countered my offer and asked if Boyfriend and I had tried the Three Olives Vodka that was flavored like Mountain Dew, which is rather questionably called "Dude." Shots One--or was it Shots Two?--ordered us all a round of Dude shots, which I thought very generous of him.

Friends: made!

Shots One, Shots Two, and Chilled Patron, who were apparently only quickly pre-gaming a company function, took off after we all made the appropriate number of jokes about tasting Dude.

So I'll call Drink Columbus venture #1 a success!