The Drexel Theatre, the independent film house anchoring Bexley’s main drag, is the only place in Columbus that features a manual-lettering marquee. Driving along Main Street, your eye is caught by the theatre’s iconic 1930s art-deco neon sign, and fixed by the fat black letters that spell out, across the marquee, the titles of the compelling, acclaimed, and often quite quirky films that are on view or coming soon. If you’re lucky, you can sometimes see a Drexel employee on a ladder underneath the marquee, changing one film title out for another. It’s deliciously retro and ostentatiously charming: among the crowded multiplexes and scuffed-floor big-box theatres in the malls and outlying suburbs of Columbus, here is this little theatre which shows obscure films and advertises its features the old-fashioned way, which has somehow managed to survive.
Columbus Locals Love The Drexel Theatre
Columbus Locals Love The Sycamore
The Sycamore, the petite New American bistro nestled on the cozy corner of Sycamore and East Sixth deep in German Village, fashions itself something of a neighborhood tavern, but the reality of the restaurant is a little more sophisticated––and a lot more sumptuous––than the plastic pitchers of Bud Light and dented dartboards that that distinction usually brings to mind. Rather, The Sycamore is an enlivened, inviting, intimate space featuring unique cocktails, worldly epicurean offerings, and a ubiquitous crowd of young and good-looking patrons. A grubby pub this is not, but one of Columbus’s best––and best-preserved––dining and drinking hotspots.
Columbus Locals Love Little Palace: House of Love
You know that you’ve come upon something special––a little-city diamond in the rough––as soon as you walk into Little Palace under its iconic neon sign. The restaurant space and menu translates Mad Men into Columbus in 2019, minus the casual misogyny and cigarette smoke: it’s glamorous without being affected, retro without being outdated, stylized without being stupid. In a few words, it retains all of the most desirable visual and epicurean elements of a mid-century cocktail lounge while maintaining a cool and not-at-all showy ethos.
Columbus Locals Love Brown Bag Deli: Wax-Wrapped Heaven
Columbus is a one-of-a-kind city, and that means Columbus natives are a one-of-a-kind bunch. It should follow that a people and a place so characterized by singularity necessarily demand the same character in the businesses they frequent, from movie theaters to bars to restaurants. So where do one-of-a-kind people in a one-of-a-kind place eat lunch? Not to get gratingly redundant here, but if I had to identify the most one-of-a-kind lunch spot in the whole city, I’d easily name the Brown Bag Deli, an earnestly authentic sandwich emporium which is situated irresistibly at the corner of Whittier and Mohawk at the head of Schiller Park in German Village.
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