Restaurants

For most of its adult life, Columbus has been a restaurant backwater. Some people may remember Spano's and the Black Angus but successful white table cloth restaurants have been few and far between. There's a line in David Rose's "The Big Eddy Club" that will give you an idea of what eating out was like in Columbus. Describing the jury's outings, Rose wrote "Each night they had been taken to eat at the best restaurants the city had to offer, among them, the Ledger reported, the Rankin Deli, Ryan's Steak House, and Prichett's Fish Camp". Prichett's, for late arrivals, was a catfish restaurant with individual rooms for each table. This is a photo of one of the locations. The best Columbus had to offer.

People around Columbus said that it was a "Club town", referring to the two golf clubs and one dinner club. The River Club came later. Since they were all private, it didn't very well explain where the majority of people were eating.

Then the north Columbus Park Crossing shopping arrived with some dozen national chain restaurants and everything changed. From their opening, places like Cheddars, TGIF Fridays, and Bones had a wait at all hours of the day and we were left with the question, where were these people eating before?

This recession has put a dent in both the clubs and the chains and it remains to be seen whether it will come back in the same way. There's rumors that the Green Island Country Club has lost so many members and dinner business that they will have to do something drastic. Valentine's Day, which is normally a sell out, was marked by half the tables filled at both Green Island and the River Club. The Country Club really doesn't try very much to capture this business-it's more of a golf and tennis club.

Columbus is changing fast-who knows what the restaurant business will look like in ten years.