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.