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.