Part 1: Why Dining Out has Become Boring

Plus, from our archive, a look back at some of our Thanksgiving traditions and ideas for using up those leftovers.

One stop during 2009’s “Night of 1,000 Tacos” (Credit: Bethia Woolf)

Essay: Why Dining Out has Become Boring

By Andy Dehus

Overcast days and anniversaries tend to prompt reflection, and Bethia and I have had our fair share of both lately. We’ve been running Columbus Food Adventures for 15 years now, we started blogging about food 17 years ago, and we’ve now been married for 13 years. What looms larger than anything else is the simple fact that we’ve eaten out a lot.

Thinking back to 2008, it wasn’t much more than a couple of years into food blogging and “bon vivanting on a budget” before we could reasonably feel as though we’d experienced every noteworthy food experience that Central Ohio could provide.

Though we still like to think we’re about as attuned to what’s going in the local food world as any Columbusites could be, that time of full comprehensive knowledge has long passed us by. There’s just too much out there. Now I couldn’t even tell you the most noteworthy item on any given bubble tea shop’s phonebook-sized menu, and I’ll gladly wave the white flag before trying to remedy that gap in my knowledge with firsthand experience.

In many ways, the city is better off for this extraordinary growth. It means that there are more new operators offering more variety than ever before. It means that more cuisines and cultures are represented than ever before. And, it means that we customers have more choice than ever before.

Yet there’s this nagging itch that I just can’t quite scratch, a sense that maybe this isn’t all quite as wonderful a thing as it would first appear. What follows is my attempt to begin to explain this.

Let’s head back to the aughts. Think: post-9/11, pre-widespread-iPhone-adoption. I think of this as the beginning of the extraordinary growth the region’s seen during my time in the area, and with that growth came an abundance of spaces needed to be filled. Spaces that, in hindsight, were astonishingly affordable at the time. It was a perfect storm of opportunity for the mom-and-pop restaurant operator, and there was a wellspring of support for them on an emerging web of online forums like Columbus Underground.

And, make no mistake, these forum-goers supported them passionately.

To give one example, a member of Columbus Underground shared a fondness for a then-sleepy, Albanian-run greasy spoon in the warehouse district called Warehouse Cafe. He posted that he’d be there on Saturday mornings, suggested they weren’t getting the business they deserved, and invited people to join him. I went, as did many others. Within a few weeks, the space went from empty to packed, and the owners (who now run Cafe Illyria) treated the group like family. This recurring event cultivated a true sense of community among a group of people who had little in common apart from having read the same dashed-off note, and it was a sense of community that very much included our hosts and was recognized as existing solely due to their presence.

This dynamic was repeated in so many different ways all throughout Central Ohio. There were 100-plus-person bike rides dedicated to hitting up as many taco trucks as possible—one was dubbed “Night of 1,000 Tacos.” Tremendous buzz about, and patronage of, restaurants serving new-to-Columbus cuisines from all around the world. Excitement over the possibilities of rumored new openings in the Short North, and eager mobs of the curious attending those that did manage to open.

It’s easy to recognize this as a “moment in time” phenomena, something that is worthy of nostalgia and little more. But as we’ve gone from past excitement over new choices to the present of being buried by them, it feels as though the qualities that once made the newcomers so welcome and desirable have gone by the wayside.

In Part 2, I’ll share my thoughts on why.

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Happy Thanksgiving from the Foodletter!

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