Columbus for a Wedding

Someone you care about is getting married in Columbus, Ohio. You go to Columbus, Ohio. That's the whole calculus.

We flew in Friday and stayed at the Westin Great Southern Columbus downtown. The wedding was Saturday but we'd booked through Sunday night because G wanted to actually see Columbus instead of just attending a wedding and leaving. Good call.

The wedding was Saturday. Beautiful. The couple was happy. The venue was good. I won't say more than that because weddings are private and the details belong to the people who were there, not to a blog post. What I will say is that Ohio weddings hit different. There's a warmth to them that comes from the fact that most of the guests drove there instead of flew, which means the crowd knows each other, which means the dance floor fills up by the second song instead of the fifth.

We had Friday night free and walked through the Short North Arts District, which is Columbus's version of a walkable, gallery-filled main drag. It runs along High Street from the convention center north to the Ohio State campus, and it's lined with restaurants, bars, galleries, and shops. The galleries do a monthly Gallery Hop on the first Saturday of every month, which we missed by a day. But the neighborhood is worth walking even without the event. The murals on the side streets are some of the best public art I've seen in any mid-size American city.

Friday dinner was at The Pearl in the Short North. Oyster bar, cocktails, small plates. We sat at the bar and the bartender recommended the grilled octopus, which arrived charred and tender with a chimichurri that G ate directly off the plate with a piece of bread. The cocktail list was creative without being annoying about it (no liquid nitrogen, no smoke bubbles, no ten-ingredient drinks that taste like a chemistry set). We also had the tuna crudo and a dozen oysters. G had never been to Columbus and kept saying "why is this so good?" which is basically the city's unofficial slogan. It's so good because nobody expects it to be, which means the restaurants are trying harder than places where the reputation does the work for them. Walk-in friendly on weeknights, reservations recommended on weekends.

Saturday morning before the wedding we walked through the German Village neighborhood, about a mile south of downtown. It's a 233-acre historic district of brick cottages, cobblestone streets, and gardens that was settled by German immigrants in the 1800s. The whole neighborhood is on the National Register of Historic Places and walking through it feels like being in a small European town that somehow ended up in central Ohio. The houses are tiny and immaculate, with window boxes and iron gates and yards the size of a parking spot that somehow contain entire gardens. Schiller Park in the middle of the village has a pond, a gazebo, and a statue of Friedrich Schiller that looks like it belongs in Weimar. We sat on a bench and drank coffee from a bakery on Third Street whose name I've already forgotten but whose croissant I haven't.

The Book Loft is a bookstore that takes up 32 rooms of a pre-Civil War building. Thirty-two rooms. You enter thinking you'll browse for ten minutes and emerge an hour later holding four books and having forgotten what day it is. G bought three cookbooks and a novel. I bought something about architecture and a coffee from the cafe downstairs. We spent an embarrassing amount of time there for two people who had a wedding to get ready for.

Schmidt's Sausage Haus in German Village has been serving bratwurst and cream puffs since 1886. The Bahama Mama sausage is the one the regulars get and it's smoked and slightly spicy and arrives with sauerkraut and German potato salad. The cream puffs are the size of a softball and filled with fresh whipped cream. We split one after the wedding rehearsal dinner as a late-night snack and it was possibly the best thing I ate all weekend, which is saying something for a trip that included a wedding dinner.

After the wedding on Saturday night, a group of us ended up at a bar somewhere near campus. I couldn't tell you the name or the street. What I can tell you is that the drinks were cheap, the music was loud, and someone's uncle did karaoke to "Don't Stop Believin'" with a sincerity that made the whole room cheer. Ohio.

Sunday morning we checked out, had breakfast at a diner near the hotel that was already packed at 9 AM, which is how you know it's good. Eggs, bacon, bottomless coffee, a waitress who called us "honey" without it feeling performative. Breakfast that exists in every American city and is always exactly right the morning after a wedding when your head is fuzzy and your feet hurt from the dance floor. We ate slowly. Nobody was in a rush. The flight home wasn't until 3.

Columbus surprised me. I'd never been and had no expectations, which is maybe why it landed the way it did. It's a young city (Ohio State pumps in 60,000 students), the food scene is legitimately good for a city its size, the German Village is one of the most charming neighborhoods I've walked through in the Midwest, and the people are warm in a way that doesn't feel performed. G said on the flight home that it reminded her of certain parts of London, which is a comparison she does not give out freely. I'd go back.